Rachel Bodley

Who was Rachel Bodley?

Rachel Littler Bodley was an American professor and university leader. She was best known for her term as Dean of the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania.

Bodley was the eldest daughter of a Presbyterian carpenter and a teacher. She attended the primary school which her mother ran. In 1848 she entered the Wesleyan Female College in Cincinnati and graduated at age 17 in 1849. She served as an assistant teacher at Wesleyan until 1860, when she entered the Polytechnic College of Pennsylvania to study chemistry and physics. She also studied anatomy and physiology at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania.

In 1862, Bodley became a professor of natural sciences at the Cincinnati Female Seminary. She took on the organization of the herbarium which had been donated to the Seminary by the heirs of Joseph Clark. It was an extensive collection of local flora, and the guide to the collection which Bodley compiled, printed in 1865, also served as a guide to plants in the Cincinnati area.

In 1865 she left the Cincinnati Female Seminary, to become the Chair of Chemistry and Toxicology at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, where she would spend the rest of her career. She was the first woman to become a professor of chemistry at a medical school. In 1874 she was elected Dean of the Faculty, and retained that position until her death. She presided over construction of the school's first new building, and conducted a statistical study of the school's graduates, said to be the first such factual study of women in the medical profession. She presided over the graduation of the first Hindu woman to obtain a degree in Western medicine, Anandi Gopal Joshi. The event was witnessed by Pandita Ramabai and she was congratulated by Queen Victoria. Bodley would later write an introduction to Pandita Ramabai's book The High-Caste Hindu Woman.