We’ve all seen her. Hunched over the grave of an important poet. Standing meekly atop deceased philosophers, businessmen, and writers alike – head in hands and despairing. The Mourning Woman is a motif found throughout nineteenth-century Western cemeteries. She emerged during a revival of classical symbolism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gravestone iconography. She draws inspiration from “the mourning women” of ancient Greece and Rome, who prepared the body for burial and mourned the dead loudly and publicly. Despite her ties to these ancient cultures, she serves first and foremost as an archetype of the Christian Madonna – a matriarch dedicated to “upholding the virtue” of the household and carrying the albatross of grief at its loss.
But there was one “mourning” woman I encountered in the cemetery landscape who struck me as unique. She sat determined and poised, one foot stretched in front of her confidently stepping forward. This woman is Hygeia, an artistic representation of the Greek goddess of health and hygiene by the Black and Indigenous woman sculptor Edmonia Lewis. She stands atop the grave of woman physician Harriot Kezia Hunt in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hygeia in Mount Auburn’s landscape is the fulcrum between these two vastly different and fiercely independent female trailblazers of the nineteenth century. The sculpture can be easily overlooked, but it is a deeply rich source of history and symbolism that not only stands out as an icon of female authority in antiquity, but also of female resilience in Victorian America.
Harriot Kezia Hunt made her mark on nineteenth-century Boston in many ways, but most notably she was the first woman to apply to Harvard Medical School in 1847 and again in 1850. It was a long and painful affair for her, as she was denied entry to the school twice by the board of trustees and publicly humiliated by her male colleagues. Writing to them after her second denial, Hunt said:
When civilization is further advanced, and the great doctrine of human rights is acknowledged, this act will be recalled and wondering eyes will stare, and wondering ears will be opened, at the semi-barbarism of the middle of the nineteenth century.
And history proved her right: it took Harvard Medical School a century after Hunt’s application to admit the first class of women physicians to their ranks in 1945. Despite her exclusion from Harvard Medical School, Harriot Hunt continued to pursue practicing medicine.
