First woman to apply to Harvard Medical School

In 1847, Harriot Hunt formally applied for admission to Harvard Medical School, making her the first woman in the institution's history to seek entry to any Harvard school. Her application was a direct challenge to the near-total exclusion of women from formal higher medical education in the United States.

Hunt's request was denied outright by the medical faculty, reflecting deeply entrenched beliefs of the era that women lacked the intellectual and physical constitution for rigorous scientific study, and fears that mixed-sex classrooms would be socially inappropriate. She would renew her request in 1850, when the faculty briefly and controversially voted to allow her to attend lectures — only for the male students to draft resolutions of protest, forcing the school to rescind the invitation and bar her from attending.

Though Hunt was never permitted to matriculate, her 1847 application is remembered as a landmark act of defiance that publicized the exclusion of women from American medical education and helped galvanize the movement that would eventually lead institutions like the New England Female Medical College and Boston University School of Medicine to admit women. Her persistence, documented extensively in her memoir Glances and Glimpses, made her a touchstone figure in the history of women's medical education in the United States.