Emily Barringer

Who was Emily Barringer?

Emily Dunning Barringer was the world's first female ambulance surgeon and the first woman to secure a surgical residency.

Emily Dunning was born in Scarsdale, New York to Edwin James Dunning and Frances Gore Lang. The well-to-do New York family fell on hard times when she was 8 years old, and her father left for Europe to seek his fortune. When a well-meaning friend of Dunning's mother suggested that the girl might become a milliner's apprentice, her mother said "That settles the question. You are going to go to college." Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, a friend of the family, recommended Cornell University's medical preparatory course, and her uncle, Henry W. Sage, a founder of Cornell, agreed to pay her tuition. Other family friends also helped with expenses. Emily Dunning graduated in 1897 and decided to attend the College of Medicine of the New York Infirmary. During her sophomore year there, the college merged with the new Cornell University School of Medicine.

She earned her medical degree in 1901, then received the second highest grade in the qualifying exam for an internship at Gouverneur Hospital in New York City. The hospital denied her application. The next year she applied again, this time with the support from political and religious figures, and the hospital accepted her—the first woman ever accepted for post-graduate surgical training in service to a hospital.