Born: 27 November 1820, United States
Died: 13 March 1905
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Rachel Ingall Brooks, R. B. Gleason
The following is excerpted from A Woman of the Century, edited by Frances E. Willard and Mary A Livermore, published in 1893 by Charles Wells Moulton.
GLEASON. Mrs. Rachel Brooks, physician, born in the village of Win hall, Vt., 27th November,
RACHEL BROOKS GLEASON.
1820. She was a teacher from choice, not from necessity, much of the time up to her marriage on 3rd July 1844. No colleges were open for women during her girlhood, but she gave herself a fair collegiate education from college text-books studied at home. Her husband, Dr. Silas O. Gleason, when he became professor of hygiene in the Central Medical College in Rochester, succeeded in persuading the faculty and trustees to open the college doors to women. Mrs. Gleason studied with her husband and was graduated in medicine in 1851. She then practiced three years in a sanitarium in Glen Haven, N. Y., and one year in Ithaca, N. Y. She has been at the head of the Gleason Sanitarium in Elmira, N. Y., for forty years, and still is at its head. She has had a large consulting practice, extending to most of the towns in the State. Her book on home treatment for invalids, “Talks to my Patients” (New York. 1870) has run into its eighth edition. After her graduation in medicine she gave lectures on physiology and hygiene to women, assisted by the best models and charts to be had at the time She continues to give these lectures in schools for women and as parlor talks. She held Kible and prayer classes every Saturday for twenty-five years. She was an advocate of dress reform and women’s freedom from early girlhood. She has assisted eighteen women students through medical colleges, all of whom were dependent upon her for financial support, and most of them rescued from invalidism. Many of these students have become prominent, and all are competent physicians. Mrs. Gleason was a strong anti-slavery worker before the Civil War, and has rendered constant assistance to Freedmen’s schools ever since.