Kate Campbell (Hurd) Mead, 1867-1941

Kate Campbell (Hurd) Mead, physician and historian of women in medicine, was born in Danville, Quebec, Canada, on April 6, 1867. She was the oldest of three children born to Edward Payson Hurd, a practicing physician, and Sarah Elizabeth (Campbell) Hurd. In 1870, the family moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where she attended public schools. She entered the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1885, earned her M.D. in 1888, and interned at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston. She then did post-doctoral work in Paris, Stockholm, and London.

She returned to America in 1890 and became the medical director for the new Bryn Mawr School for Girls. At about this time, she and Dr. Alice Hall founded the Evening Dispensary for Working Women and Girls of Baltimore City. In 1893, Dr. Hurd married William Edward Mead, Ph.D., professor of early English at Wesleyan University. She moved to Middletown, Connecticut, and became involved in many activities: she was one of the original incorporators of the Middlesex County Hospital and consulting gynecologist there (1907-1925); she helped to organize the Middletown District Nurses Association (1900); and was vice president of the State Medical Society of Connecticut (1913-1914), president of the American Medical Women's Association, and organizer of the Medical Women's International Association (1919).

In 1890, at a meeting of the Johns Hopkins Historical Club, she had become interested in the history of women physicians. After retiring in 1925, she traveled extensively, collecting data for her two published books: Medical Women of America (1933), and A History of Women in Medicine (1938).

Dr. Mead died at the age of 73 as she was trying to help her caretaker, who had lost control of a brush fire near her home. Rushing down a hill to help him, she suffered a heart attack. They both died in the catastrophe.

From the guide to the Papers, 1939, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)