University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

UB enrolls first female student

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  Mary Blair Moody

Published: September 23, 2009

Mary Blair Moody, then the mother of five young boys and a baby daughter, was accepted and enrolled in UB’s medical department in the autumn of 1874. Chronicling her experience 20 years later in the “Buffalo Medical Journal” (June 1896), Blair Moody notes she was pursuing the study of medicine “on the same footing as the male students.” The dean of the university considered her admission to be rather experimental: “If we do not like it when she gets through, we can close the doors.” Those doors remained forever open at UB.

As a medical student, Blair Moody quickly recognized that “capacity, desire and opportunity were the only recognized limits, and we were each and all encouraged to do and dare our very best.” The majority of her classmates would “intelligently sustain fair play,” going so far as to punish their peers who excessively harassed her and exhibited “ill-breeding.” One young fellow who taunted her was ceremoniously lifted from his seat by a chivalrous group of students, “handed over the tops of the iron seats from one man to another, from the back row right down to the desk and rolled over that in no gentle manner,” and deposited at the lectern “doubled up like a jackknife.”

Blair Moody measured her studies “not by what was required, but what was possible to be done.” She won the class prize in minor operative surgery. At her graduation as a physician in 1876, cheers were very audible from her six children seated in the gallery. Blair Moody developed a professional motto that she felt was inculcated by her university training and studies: “the greatest good to the greatest number at the smallest cost to them.”

Blair Moody became the first woman member of the Erie County Medical Society, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a founder of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Buffalo. This organization provided a significant endowment for the university. Asked her opinion on the use of the endowment, Blair Moody recommended establishing a department of preventive medicine.

—Judith Adams-Volpe, University Libraries