How Women Launched the Nation's First Female-Operated Hospital

The Spring/Summer 2022 issue of Neshaminy, The Bucks County Historical and Literary Journal, details how nineteenth-century women in the community of Doylestown, PA, disgusted by the street filth that led to lung disease, took matters into their own hands after being rebuffed by the all-male borough council. In 1895, the women, unable to vote, lacking political power, or even direct access to funds, established the Village Improvement Association, eventually leading to the creation of Doylestown Hospital, the first in the nation to be owned and operated by a women’s organization, and which remains governed by women to this day. The article by Constance Wrzesniewski says the women, spearheaded by Sarah James, a doctor’s daughter, initiated a series of successful health reforms including the establishment of an eight-bed hospital in a private home, the Livezey House, on Oakland Avenue. The hospital has since grown into a major regional facility on West State Street.

Early Village Improvement Association ambulance

Wrzesniewski’s article, “The Influence of Women,” is just one of a varied and rich assortment of material in the current issue of Neshaminy, which also features fiction, poetry, and literary interviews by Melissa D. Sullivan, William J. Donahue, Jill Lupine, Darlene Versak, Jim Brennan, and Philip William Stover.

In “George Washington Slept Near,” J. Kurt Spence resurrects a debate over where George Washington stayed as he quartered his troops in Bucks County en route to fight the British at the Battle of Monmouth in June 1778. As an amusing aside, one of Washington’s aides, James McHenry, for whom the famous fort (“and the rockets’ red glare”) in Baltimore is named, describes the comely daughter of the Quaker family of John Fell, vowing that his friend and romantic rival Alexander Hamilton “…shalt not tread on this ground—I mark it for my own.” Although the girl apparently was left with her honor intact. The article also describes how the places at which Washington stayed before, during, and after the American Revolution, have almost turned into a cottage industry.

Don Swaim’s short story, “Dearest Friend, Annie,” based on true events, describes an English woman, Anne Gilchrist, smitten by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, who packs up her children and all of their belongings to sail to America intending to wed the famous poet. What she finds proves to be a bitter disappointment.

Walt Whitman sketched by Pat Achilles

Other stories depict the nation’s first steamboat, which was launched on the Delaware River; Bucks County’s most unlucky poet, the eighteenth-century William Satterthwaite, who was bitten by a venomous snake and poisoned by an unfaithful wife; and of the Pennsylvania Quakers who encouraged Abolitionist John Brown,

The current issue is illustrated by Pat Achilles, whose work appears in The New Yorker.

Neshaminy, which is published twice annually by the Bucks County Writers Workshop and the Doylestown Historical Society, celebrates history, biography, fiction, poetry, memoir, and interviews with a focus on Pennsylvania’s ample literary and historical traditions. It can be purchased worldwide in print and ebook via Amazon.com and at select Bucks County locations, and is open year round for submissions. The journal’s website has more details about the publication and its submissions guidelines: http://neshaminyjournal.org