By Richard O. Jones
When Dr. Julia Goodman died in 1902, the local newspaper obituaries said that Hamilton lost “one of her best, most foremost, most charitable, and most brilliant women. One who had done an immense amount of good and who, during her professional career, did more charitable work than the public ever knew.”
Dr. Goodman became the first female professional in Hamilton when she began her medical practice in 1888.
She was born June 20, 1848, Julia Morganthaler to German immigrants Henry Morganthaler and the former Caroline Huston on the family farm in Milford Township. She was the oldest of five children.
When quite young, she was married to Charles B. Goodman, a widower twenty years her senior with four children. At the time, Goodman was deputy county auditor and a member of the Hamilton Board of Education.
Goodman died in 1873, and the 25-year-old widow was compelled to fend for herself and her step-children. She was ambitious and thirsty for knowledge, and began teaching classes in penmanship to raise funds for her education.
She soon landed a position at the Lebanon Normal School, one of the first higher learning institutions dedicated to teacher training. She taught penmanship in exchange for tuition in the regular normal course.
In due time, she took a job as a matron of the college, and her duties included nursing the sick among the five hundred students, and, according to her obituary, “at that time there was considerable sickness.”
The experience revealed a proclivity toward science and medicine, so when she received her B.S. degree with high honors in 1884, she straightaway enrolled in the New York Medical College for Women. During her summers, she worked as a nurse in New York Hospitals, including the Deaconess and the renowned St. Luke’s.
It was at St. Luke’s that she began developing her specialties. Working in a ward with over fifty children, she began to concentrate on the diseases of children.
After graduating the four-year course in 1888, Dr. Goodman entered into a competitive examination held by the college for the position of house physician, which she held for two years. During this time, she took postgraduate courses in the diseases of women, so when she returned to Hamilton in 1889 to open her practice at 401 Ross Avenue, she specialized in the care of women and children.
Her obituary noted that her practice was not immediately successful. “She was the first woman in Hamilton to take a place in the professional ranks, and, being the first, she had a struggle against prejudice, but she overcame all this by sheer force of character and ability.”
She was quoted as saying that her “working motto” came from Proverbs 31:20, to wit: “She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.”
Following this “motto,” she won the community over not just by caring for her patients, but for educating the working women of Hamilton. She gave lectures to social organizations regarding women’s health issues. One of her more popular lectures regarded “the injurious effect certain styles of dress had upon the body.” One of her props included a pair of shoes given to her by a local missionary to China, showing how the women there had to endure the painful process of foot binding, as small feet were considered a feature of beauty. Dr. Goodman maintained that “the compression of the feet did not do half the injury that corsets did.”
Dr. Goodman became active with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, for a time serving as the local president, and on its behalf began teaching women’s health classes. According to an 1893 feature in the Hamilton Daily Democrat, “On one night of each week, she has gathered about her a large class of girls who, through the day, work in factories and stores, and has taught them much that will be of great benefit to them in the future.”
Through the WCTU, Dr. Goodman introduced Hamilton to the “Tyson cure” for alcoholism that was prominent at the time, one of the first treatments that treated alcoholism as a disease and not a moral failing. Dr. Goodman also successfully used the Tyson method to treat opium addicts.
“Dr. Julia Goodman was entirely a self-made woman. By her own grit, ability, and privations, she rose to the proud place she held in the community, loved and respected by all who knew her,” the Daily Democrat eulogized, “and, when she was ready to do her greatest and best work in life, was stricken down.”
Dr. Goodman had also been credited for starting a “fitness fad” among the women of Hamilton. “The ladies, old and young, are swinging clubs and dumb bells as if in training.”
It was this experience that compelled Dr. Goodman to call a meeting at the parsonage of the Westminster Presbyterian Church, of which she was a lifelong member.
Her own notes said the purpose of the meeting was to form an organization “to advance the spiritual, mental, physical, social, industrial, and domestic welfare of the women and children of Hamilton and vicinity...” This meeting resulted in the formation of the local Young Women’s Christian Association.
Not only an organizer, Dr. Goodman was a hands-on mentor and instructor. She and Martha Stewart organized the “Kitchen Garden,” a group of “nearly a hundred poor children who met every Saturday morning.”
Dr. Goodman soon took ill, and sadly was not able to see the YWCA officially receive its charter.
At some point in her career, Dr. Goodman spent three months in Europe visiting the hospitals of Edinburgh, London, and Liverpool in England, and Paris in France.
In the early months of 1902, Dr. Goodman fell ill herself, and was confined to her home for several months. On June 6, she succumbed to complications from some unspecified cancer. She was, the newspaper duly noted, “aged 53 years, 11 months, and 16 days.”