Eliza Maria Mosher

Eliza Maria Mosher (born Oct. 2, 1846, Cayuga county, N.Y., U.S.—died Oct. 16, 1928, New York, N.Y.) was an American physician and educator whose wide-ranging medical career included an educational focus on physical fitness and health maintenance.

In 1869, over the objections of friends and family, Mosher entered the New England Hospital for Women and Children as an intern apprentice. After a year she was forced to suspend her education to nurse her mother, and during that time she also assisted a woman doctor in Boston. In 1871 she entered the University of Michigan, where she completed the medical course and received her M.D. in 1875. From 1875 to 1877 she was in private practice with a classmate in Poughkeepsie, New York, after which she was appointed resident physician at the Massachusetts Reformatory Prison for Women, newly opened at the instigation of Ellen C. Johnson. After establishing hospital facilities in the prison, Mosher was responsible for virtually all medical, surgical, and dental care. In 1880 she was made superintendent of the prison, but an accidental injury three years later forced her to resign. She then returned to private practice in Brooklyn, New York, in partnership with Lucy M. Hall, a Michigan classmate and colleague at the reformatory. Mosher and Hall also alternated semesters as resident physician and associate professor of physiology and hygiene at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie (1883–87).

In 1888 Mosher organized a medical training course at the Union Missionary Training Institute in Brooklyn, and the next year she became lecturer on anatomy and hygiene at the Chautauqua, New York, summer school; her association with both institutions lasted for several years. In 1896 she became dean of women and professor of hygiene at the University of Michigan. Mosher was the first woman on the university’s faculty, and she retained her posts, as well as those of director of physical education and resident physician to women students, until ill health forced her resignation in 1902. For the rest of her life she practiced medicine privately in Brooklyn and lectured at various institutions.

In her educational work Mosher had always been interested in the fields of health maintenance and physical education and fitness, and in private research she investigated medical aspects of posture. She devised an orthopedically sound school desk and chair for children and was a founder of the American Posture League. From 1905 to 1928 she was senior editor of the Medical Women’s Journal. In 1912 she published Health and Happiness: A Message to Girls.