Mary Elizabeth Bennett Ritter

Mary Elizabeth Bennett Ritter (June 7, 1860 – March 17, 1949) was an American physician and an advocate for women's rights and public health issues in Berkeley, California. She was known as a pioneer in her time because women were largely excluded from medical training and employment. Despite restricted access, Ritter built a successful private practice. She also advocated for women in medical professions, training for nurses, and sanitation standards in hospitals and doctor's offices. She helped start the Pacific Dispensary for Women and Children, free clinics for poor women and children. In 1933, she published her autobiography, More Than Gold in California.

Biography Ritter was born Mary Elizabeth Bennett in Salinas, California. She was the daughter of farmers, William Bennett and Abigail Noble Bennett, who did not support her ambition to become a doctor. Before entering medical school, Ritter earned an independent income, which she saved to pay for educational expenses. In 1886, she earned her medical degree from Cooper Medical College in San Francisco, which is now Stanford School of Medicine.

For a time, Bennett lived with and trained under Dr. Euthanasia Sherman Meade.

She married zoologist William Emerson Ritter on June 23, 1891. In 1909, Mary Ritter retired from her medical practice and moved to La Jolla, California, where her husband was employed. Together, with funding from Ellen Browning Scripps, Mary Ritter and her husband founded the Marine Biological Association, which would become the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Separately, she continued her advocacy work and gave many lectures about public health issues as well as woman and infant care.

Ritter wrote an autobiography called More than Gold in California, detailing her work as a physician, her work as a women's advocate, and her role as a partner in her husband's biological projects.

Ritter died in Mountain View, California.

Works More than Gold in California. Berkeley: Professional Press, 1933. Medical Student and Intern, in: Recollections of Cooper Medical College (1883-1905), by Mary B. Ritter, George Blumer, Louis F. Alvarez, and Walter C. Alvarez. Palo Alto: Stanford Medical School, 1964.