Source: Find-A-Grave
In 1836 Dr. Philip Madison Shepard, a Georgia native and graduate of the Georgia Medical College in Augusta, moved his wife and infant son John to Lafayette, Alabama. Over the next eight years Dr. Shepard established a medical practice and founded a "Students Institute" that helped prepare young men for medical school. In 1845 he and his family moved to Wetumpka, where he also lectured, organized medical debates, and performed anatomical dissection on cadavers.
Late the following year the Shepards moved yet again and settled
in Dadeville, a newly-incorporated town of about 700 in Tallapoosa County. Here
Dr. Shepard bought some land, built a house and began to established a medical
practice in his new home. Like many rural physicians of his time, Shepard also
farmed to supplement his medical income. [Turner Roy H. Graefenberg, the
Shepard family's medical school. Ann Med Hist series 2. 5:548-560-, 1933; and Holley, Howard L.
The History of Medicine in Alabama. Birmingham: University of Alabama School of
Medicine, 1982, pp 77-81]
By the summer of 1851 Dr. Shepard began his most ambitious efforts in
medical education. He advertised the opening in Dadeville of the
"Graefenberg Infirmary and Hydropathic Establishment" in a Montgomery
newspaper. In February of the following year the Alabama legislature chartered
his "Graefenberg Medical Institute of the State of Alabama, " whose
graduates "were entitled to all the privileges accorded graduates of
leading Medical Colleges." [Acts of Alabama, 7 February 1852, p260]
Although other schools had been chartered by the legislature, the Graefenberg
Medical Institute became the first medical school to actually open in Alabama.
The board of trustees included several relatives of Shepard and his wife. Also
connected to this enterprise was the Winston Male College, which had a military
department with state-supplied arms; and the Octavia Walton Lee Vert Normal
College for Young Ladies that trained school teachers.
In the early national and antebellum periods, medical education became more widely available in America. In the first three and a half decades after the founding of the country's first medical school, Medical College of Philadelphia, in 1765, the few small medical schools graduated less that 250 doctors. By the 1850s almost 18,000 physicians graduated in that decade alone; the 1830s had produced some 6800 doctors. [Cassedy, James H. Medicine in America: A Short History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, p 27]
These huge numbers were not simply a function of growing population. After
about 1815 new medical schools were often independent of colleges and medical
societies. Faculty operated the schools for profit, and almost anyone who paid
the fees could graduate. Critics of the day accused the schools of
"business hucksterism" little connected with scientific education.
Facilities of most schools were quite poor, and students were trained by
lectures with little or no clinical exposure to sick people. Despite the
explosion in number of these schools after 1830, only seven medical schools had opened in the South before that year. Yet this constituted over half the
thirteen founded in the entire U.S. prior to 1830. [Yeager, George H. Medical
schools of Southern United States, 1779-1830. Ann Surg 171(5):623-640, May
1970]. Of course, many "doctors" of this period did not attend medical
school at all, but merely served a brief apprenticeship with a local physician.
Given this situation, Dr. Shepard's Graefenberg Medical Institute was a
remarkable medical school both for the time and its location in a small town in
a very rural state. The medical and other schools occupied a large, three-story
building that contained numerous anatomical specimens, a decent library, around
1,000 photographic plates, laboratory and medical equipment, a mineral cabinet,
and classrooms and auditorium. Students saw patients in the infirmary or
followed Dr. Shepard as he visited the sick in their homes. Students boarded
with Dr. Shepard and his family. Two sessions were offered May to October and
November to March at the rate of sixty dollars; cheaper rates were available
for summer students. Only one session was required to graduate; however, the
student had to pass a final examination open to the public that the Board of
Trustees administered over three days and nights and which included over 5,000
questions.
About fifty students graduated from this school before Dr. Shepard's death closed it in 1861. Near the end of the century several of these graduates were still practicing medicine in Alabama: John F. Wise (1856) in Chilton County; S.H. Dennis (1858) in Pike County; Anderson Welcome Duke (1849 [sic]) and Erastus Hood McLendon in Randolph County; and Orlando Tyler Shepard (1854), Watt Francis Smith (1854), and Philip M. Shepard (1854) in Tallapoosa County. [Transactions of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama (abbreviated Trans MASA hereafter) 1898, pp. 162, 213, 214, 221] John Calhoun Aikens (1846 [sic]) was listed as practicing in Macon County as late as 1904. [Trans MASA 1904, p. 546]
In all likelihood the school would have closed during the Civil War anyway. In 1873 the building burned and the library, equipment, specimens and records were all destroyed. Yet among the school's graduates were three sons--John, Philip Madison, Jr., and Orlando Tyler--who joined their father on the school's faculty, and a daughter, Louisa, who was "[t]he first Southern woman to receive a degree as Doctor of Medicine from a southern school." [Bass, Elizabeth H. Pioneer women doctors in the South. J Am Med Women's Assoc 2(12): 556-560, December 1947] The female Dr. Shepard was prevented from joining her father and brothers on the faculty by opposition of the day to both female doctors and professors.
Apparently Louisa could not establish a practice in the area, either. After the Civil War she married and left for Texas with her husband, William Henry Presley, Sr., a Confederate veteran born in Dadeville on April 1, 1843. They had eight children together. She died in Beaumont in 1901; husband William lived until March 20, 1920.
Dr. Louisa Shepard was not the first
female physician in the South. Mary Lavinder specialized in obstetrics and
diseases of children in Savannah, Georgia, from about 1814 until her death in
1845. Sarah E. Adams practiced in Augusta, Georgia, for some years prior to her
death in 1846. Elizabeth Cohen, an 1857 graduate of the Woman's Medical College
of Philadelphia, began practice in New Orleans about the same time that Louisa
was studying medicine in Dadeville, Alabama. [Bass, Elizabeth H. Pioneer women
doctors in the South. J Am Med Women's Assoc 2(12): 556-560, December 1947] Yet
female physicians remained a rarity all over the United States until late in
the 19th century.
You can read more about early women physicians in Alabama here.
Graefenburg/Shepard Family Cemetery
Medical school's founder and family are buried in graves near school's site off Dudleyville Road (Lafayette Street).
Graefenberg Medical Institute articles, etc.
[in order of
publication]
*Grafenberg Medical Institute. In: Owens, Thomas. History
of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography, Chicago,, 1921, volume 1:
665-666
*Turner RH. Graefenberg, the Shepard Family’s Medical
School. Annals of Medical History series 2, volume 5: 548-560, 1933. PDF available here
Bass, Elizabeth H. Pioneer women doctors in the South. J Am Med Women's Assoc 2(12): 556-560, December 1947
*Ingram, William P. Grafenberg, the first medical school in
Alabama. In: Ingram WP. A History of Tallapoosa County, 1951, pp 44-51
*Shepard, Ina. Alabama’s First Medical School; Marker
Placed at Dadeville, Alabama, by the Alabama Historical Association, August 26,
1953 [She was Philip M. Shepard’s granddaughter]
*Holley HL. Dr. Philip Madison Shepard and his Medical
School. De Historia Medicinae 2(3): 1-5, February 1958
*Altes T. Philip Madison Shepard, 1812-1861. Southern
Medical Bulletin 57: 64-69, June 1969
*Thompson JA, Kronenfeld MR. Graefenberg Medical Institute.
Ala J Med Sci 16(4): 350-352, 1979
*Schafer, Elizabeth D. Lake Martin: Alabama’s Crown Jewel.
Arcadia, 2003, pp 40-41 [no footnotes, but her source seems to be Ingram; his
book is listed in her bibliography]
*Wright AJ. Graefenberg Medical Institute. Encyclopedia of Alabama 20 February 2014
