Lord-Heinstein, Lucile, 1903-

Lucile Lord-Heinstein, gynecologist and advocate of birth control, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 22, 1903, to Augusta Lord-Heinstein and Henry Heinstein. Henry Heinstein had emigrated from Russia to the United States in about 1886 and joined the United States Army. In 1895, when he was about twenty-four, he married Augusta Lord, who was then probably nineteen years old. Augusta Lord-Heinstein was a suffragist and a pioneer physiotherapist. Though most of her work was volunteer work, she did run a clinic at home during a polio epidemic sometime in the 1930s or 1940s.

She graduated from Boston Girls' Latin School in 1921 and spent two additional years in pre-medical study at Tufts College. With the encouragement of her mother, she entered Tufts College Medical School and earned her M.D. in 1927. During her last year of medical school, she lived at the Reformatory for Women at Framingham, Massachusetts. In 1930, following her internship at New England Hospital for Women in Roxbury (1927-1928) and residency at Memorial Hospital in Worcester (1928-1929), she set up a private practice in gynecology in Boston. However, because of overwork and exposure to tubercular colleagues, she contracted tuberculosis and was forced to close her practice after only four months.

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