Hundreds of people walk down the streets of Middletown without any inclination of the medical history that was made in the very buildings they pass.
Trying to remedy that fact, the Middlesex County Historical Society, located on 151 Main St., gave a walking tour of medical history in Middletown Monday night.
The Historical Society, a nonprofit organization that promotes the preservation of history in Middletown, held the walking tour in celebration of the centennial anniversary of the Middlesex Hospital.
Dione Longley ’82, executive director of the Middlesex County Historical Society since 1983, led a group of approximately 100 people.
The hour-long tour followed a circular route, beginning at the steps of the Historical Society’s building, down Main Street to the Middlesex Hospital, then across Broad Street to Russell Library, down to the intersection of College and Main Streets, and concluded at the garden behind the Mansfield House.
Middlesex Hospital was one of the first stops on the tour. Founded in 1904, the hospital’s first patient was Stephan Siecienski, a Polish immigrant whose leg was crushed by a locomotive and eventually amputated.
The tour emphasized the major role of women in the early medical community in Middletown.
“There were plenty of female doctors practicing medicine [in Middletown] in the Victorian era,” Longley said.
The tour stopped at a house on Broad Street adjacent to St. Sebastian’s Church which belonged to Kate Mead, a female doctor who began practicing medicine in 1893. Mead was the daughter of a physician and married a Wesleyan professor.
“She practiced medicine for three decades before she was allowed to vote in an election,” Longley said.
According to Longley, Mead was also instrumental in addressing the problem of malnutrition among Middletown’s youth at the turn of the twentieth century.
To emphasize how Middletown has continued to be progressive throughout the years, Longley said that 13 of the current 24 practicing doctors at Middlesex Hospital are women.
Across the street from Mead’s house is the former residence of Dr. Calef, who died in 1927. Calef helped to get the cure for diphtheria—the world’s first cure to a disease—to Middletown.
The tour ended at the steps of the Historical Society with a reception sponsored by the Middlesex Hospital.
“It was my first time going on a tour [with the Historical Society] and it was delightful,” said Dinenne Rivera, who learned of the tour from an advertisement in the Hartford Courant.
Marie Morian, another participant in the tour, called the tour remarkable and said that it had exceeded her expectations.
“It is a sacred experience to uncover the stories of ordinary people who lived lives as full as any of us, whose lives have been forgotten over time,” said Jesse Nasta ’07, a work-study intern at the Middlesex County Historical Society. “At any moment you can stumble across something extraordinary. Researching these lives is like discovering a novel that has already been written. These lives unfold in these documents. There is a lot of research here and students shouldn’t rule out localizing history.”
Some Wesleyan students are also taking advantage of the primary documents at the Historical Society’s archives.
According to Longley, she is working with two University students on their senior theses. One student is reviewing surviving letters from the Civil War, and the other is researching the Underground Railroad in Middletown.
According to Longley, several Wesleyan students who have interned with her have gone on to do work in Ireland, Italy, and California.
“[The Historical Society] has a vast amount of research and it is not doing anybody any good unless students use it,” Nasta said.
The museum is open on Sundays from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Mondays from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. General admission for adults is $5.
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