The Female (Woman's) Medical College of Pennsylvania conferred an honorary M.D. on Hunt in recognition of her decades of medical practice.
In 1853, the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania (also known as the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania), one of the first institutions in the world dedicated to training women physicians, awarded Harriot Hunt an honorary Doctor of Medicine degree. This recognition formally acknowledged nearly two decades of her clinical practice and advocacy, despite her lack of a traditional medical school education.
The honorary degree carried significant symbolic weight: it represented one of the first formal institutional validations of a woman's medical career in the United States, arriving at a time when Harvard and other elite medical schools continued to bar women outright. The Female Medical College, founded in 1850, was itself a radical experiment, and its decision to honor Hunt tied her personal struggle to the broader emerging network of women's medical education.
For Hunt, who had been repeatedly rejected by Harvard, this degree offered a measure of professional legitimacy and public recognition that had eluded her for years. It cemented her reputation as one of the leading women physicians of her generation and provided a credential she could cite in her ongoing advocacy for women's admission to formal medical training across the country.