Rebecca Lee Dorsey | |
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Born | August 30, 1859 Port Deposit, Maryland |
Died | March 29, 1954 Los Angeles, California |
Occupation(s) | Physician, obstetrician, endocrinologist |
Relatives | Robert Kellard (grand-nephew) |
Rebecca Lee Dorsey (August 30, 1859 – March 29, 1954) was an American physician and endocrinologist. She is known as the world's first female endocrinologist and the first woman physician to practice in Los Angeles. [1]
Dorsey was born in Port Deposit, Maryland, the daughter of William Hammond Dorsey and Ellen Martha Gillespie Dorsey. [2] She was a sickly child, who cared for her mother and siblings as they died from tuberculosis. [1] She attended Wellesley College and later became the first Wellesley graduate to earn a medical degree. [3] Dorsey attended Boston University School of Medicine, graduating in June 1883. She then traveled to Europe to study under Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Joseph Lister. [4] Shortly before her death in 1954, a Los Angeles Times profile called her "possibly the only living link in the medical world with the men who laid the foundations of modern medicine." [5]
Dorsey moved to Los Angeles in 1886, and established her own medical practice, specializing in obstetrics, pediatrics, and later, endocrinology. [5] She was said to have been the attending physician at over 4,000 births during her lifetime (including the birth of Chief Justice Earl Warren), to have founded a nursing school and organized the city's first maternity ward, and to have administered the first diphtheria inoculation in Los Angeles in about 1893. [1] Dorsey retired from a full-time medical practice around 1913, [6] and established a date farm near Indio, California, with a variety of date palms imported from Egypt. [7]
Dorsey was involved in a number of legal disputes. In the 1890s, she was arrested for failing to report a case of typhoid, as required by law; [8] she was also sued by a widow who claimed that Dorsey failed to uphold a contract to make life insurance payments for a business partner. [9] In the 1910s, her finances came under the scrutiny again; she owed money to several creditors, but claimed that as a farmer she could not be legally forced into involuntary bankruptcy. Her creditors said she was not a full-time farmer, and was therefor not protected from bankruptcy. [10] [11] The controversy lasted for several years. [12] She was still facing bankruptcy proceedings in 1922. [13]
Dorsey never married. She adopted and raised her niece, who was named Rebecca Lee Dorsey Jr. [14] Dorsey Jr. married an actor, Ralph Kellard. They had a son, Robert Dorsey Kellard, who was also an actor. The physician Rebecca Dorsey died at her home in Los Angeles in 1954, at the age of 94, from lingering complications of a broken hip. Her grave is in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. [15]