Zakrzewska, Marie E. (Marie Elizabeth), 1829-1902

Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska was born in Berlin, Germany on September 6, 1829, to Ludwig Martin Zakrzewski and Caroline Fredericke Wilhelmina Urban. Her father was a civil servant from a noble Polish family, her grandmother was a veterinary surgeon, and her mother worked as a midwife. From age thirteen, Zakrzewska accompanied her mother on her rounds, and at age twenty, she enrolled in midwifery studies at the Royal Charité hospital in Berlin. With the support of Joseph Hermann Schmidt, professor of obstetrics and the director of the school of midwifery, Zakrzewska was promoted to head midwife in 1852, despite the disapproval of other faculty. After six months as head of midwifery, she moved to the United States to study medicine.

Zakrzewska emigrated to New York in March 1853. During her first year, she found little support for a career in medicine among the male practitioners she met. Encouraged by physician Elizabeth Blackwell, she enrolled at a traditionally all-male medical school, Cleveland's Western Reserve College, in 1854. She was one of only six women admitted to the school during the 1850s, and she graduated with a doctor of medicine degree in 1856. Blackwell and her sister Emily, who was also a doctor, were planning to open a small hospital to care for women and children that would also provide opportunities for work and training for women physicians. Zakrzewska joined their fundraising effort and on May 12, 1857, they opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children.

In March of 1859, Zakrzewska moved to Boston to become a professor of obstetrics at the New England Female Medical College. However, she and her students experienced the same difficulties that had prompted the founding of the New York Infirmary, and in 1862, Zakrzewska resigned from the college and started her own hospital, the New England Hospital for Women and Children. It was the first in Boston, and the second hospital in America, to be run by women physicians and surgeons. The hospital prospered under her direction, providing clinical experience for women physicians, and became a primary training hospital for several generations of women physicians and trained nurses.

Zakrzewska retired in 1890 and spent the rest of her life consulting on projects and arranging her affairs. In 1899, the main building of the hospital would be renamed the "Zakrzewska Building." Zakrzewska died a few years later on May 12, 1902, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. The New England Hospital for Women and Children grew to occupy a large campus in South Boston, continuing to serve poorer populations and to train physicians and nurses.