Cecilia Grierson not only became Argentina’s first woman physician at a time when only men were medical doctors.
In the late 19th century, she was also an early champion of feminism and a tireless healthcare advocate, helping to usher in nursing as a profession in Latin America and incorporating Braille into the Argentine education system.
Now, a new book and an exhibition at the Buenos Aires’ British Arts Center are focusing on a more intimate side of her life: the journeys she made through Europe, where she traveled to attend the International Women’s Congress in London in 1899.
El viaje de Cecilia Grierson (Spanish for ‘Cecilia Grierson’s Journey’) written by Maria Angelica Labiano — co-founder of the Cecilia Grierson Foundation — sheds light on the letters the pioneering doctor and feminist sent back home during her travels. It also features unearthed photographs taken by one of Argentina’s most relevant figures of the late 19th and early 20th century
The book offers a rare look into Grierson away from the medical world, as she writes about what she encounters and what she sees in places she has only read about, like Paris or London. It also provides insights into her impressions upon coming into contact with customs that were only very germinal in Argentina at the time.
(Credits: Buenos Aires Herald)
Grierson was born in 1859 in a family of Scottish settlers in Buenos Aires. She was only 14 when she started working along with her mother as a rural teacher in Entre Ríos, where her family had settled. Once she graduated as a teacher in Buenos Aires in 1879, Director of Schools — and future Argentine president — Domingo Faustino Sarmiento assigned her a position at a public school, despite her young age.
She enrolled in medical school in 1882, partly driven by a desire to help her best friend Amalia Kenig, who suffered from a chronic illness. Her studies were interrupted by a cholera epidemic in 1886, during which she committed herself into the Isolation House (now the Muñiz Hospital) to provide care for the ill. It was that experience that prompted her to create and lead the first nursing school in Latin America, which operated at the Medical Circle, an institution that provided practical training to medical students.
“The exhausting days at the Isolation House instilled in me the idea of training nurses, since there was no one to respond to the needs of the sick. The best way to provide relief to those who suffer is to place understanding, kind, and skilled people at their side, people who can collaborate with physicians in the struggle to regain health,” she once wrote.
While a student, Grierson faced resistance from a male-dominated medical academia whenever she tried to obtain faculty positions. Nevertheless, she went on to become the first Argentine woman to ever graduate from the University of Buenos Aires’ Medical School.
