Ella Clay Wakeman: Yale School of Medicine, 1921.

Ella Clay Wakeman Calhoun has the distinction of being the only woman in the class of 1921, the second class to admit women, at the Yale School of Medicine. Her decision to enter medical school was an unusual career choice for a woman in the early part of this century. Of the few women who graduated from college, most chose fields where there were already women as mentors and colleagues: as librarians, teachers, nurses or social workers [1]. Thus the plan she reached at the end of her senior year in college, to enter medical school and practice medicine, was an unconventional one. As will be shown, she was supported in pursuing her goal by a close-knit and forward-thinking family: parents both educated and well-travelled, her father a Ph.D. chemist trained in Germany, and her twin brothers, three years younger than she, both destined to follow her to medical school at Yale. She faced some of the same choices that young women face today beginning with, "Is medicine a good career for a woman who wants to serve her community?" Having made the decision to enter medical school and having chosen a specialty, many young women in medicine are faced with finding a way to combine careers and family life. As Dr. Calhoun made her wedding plans in 1923, she also thought about how to combine medicine and family life. In the end, she emphasized marriage, family and community service over medical practice. She told one of us (SJB) in 1977 that she had always felt that she should have had a more traditional medical career, writing, "I have always felt a bit shaky about the modest use I have made ofmy early privilege in medical training." What she had expected when she entered medical school was to practice medicine, and she had had to come to terms with having taken the place of someone else with an opportunity that she did not seem to be using. Perhaps the convictions of Dean Winternitz still echoed in her head, that educating women in medical school was a "waste of effort and funds." Yet it is clear that many of the different avenues of self-realization and service that she visualized in college, including medicine and public health, did become used, often in ways that could not have been foreseen. By 1950, for example, she became be the Health Officer for the Town of Bethany, a position she held for twenty-three years. The circumstances leading up to the admission of women to the Yale School of Medicine in 1916, a year before Dr. Calhoun entered, are very amusing. Women would not have been admitted to the Yale School of Medicine had not Henry W. Farnam, Professor of Economics, agreed to provide the necessary funds for renovations to install women's bathrooms. His daughter Louise Farnam (Vassar, 1912) had just completed a Ph.D. at Yale in Physiological Chemistry but felt that she could better serve God and man as a medical missionary to China. Professor Farnam heard that women would be admitted