Care and Kindness, Along with Spunk: Isabella Guthrie McCosh

Illustration: Daniel Hertzberg

One hundred and fifty years ago, the College of New Jersey took on its first physician: Isabella Guthrie McCosh. She arrived in Princeton with her husband, James McCosh, a Presbyterian minister who had journeyed from Scotland to assume the school’s presidency. When Isabella, the daughter of a surgeon, found that the town of Princeton had no hospital and the College no infirmary, she took on the task of treating ill students herself. “No student went through four years of Princeton, it seemed, without the benefit of her kindness and professional care,” a historian later wrote. Statements from alumni praise her for rescuing students from plights as severe as typhoid fever, pneumonia, lost limbs, and near-death. When the College finally built an infirmary in 1892, it named the building for her. 

McCosh — who presumably learned about medicine from her father — began each day by picking up from the proctor’s office a list of students with illnesses or injuries. Then she started her daily rounds, knocking at each student’s door bearing medicine, food, and broth. An alumnus remarked that bedridden students heard her voice at the door — “May I come in?” — with relief, since a knock might also signal that President McCosh had come to pray with them, an awkward experience, perhaps, for even the most devout students. For serious ailments, she sometimes called on friends in the medical field; Philip Ashton Rollins 1889 testified that she saved his foot from amputation after a grievous injury by taking him for a second opinion to her friend, a surgeon in Philadelphia.

She was one of those wits whose sayings become collected in print. These records make clear that she was a sly counterpoint to her stern husband. In stubborn moments, President McCosh would say of a decision, “It’s the will of God”; she would reply, “Indeed, I’ll be thinking it’s the will of James McCosh.” Rollins recalled bumping into the president and his wife when he went to check in as a freshman. The president “shook my hand in kindliest fashion and remarked, ‘Young man, I’m glad you’re admitted to me college and I expect you’ll study very hard.’ At the last of these words Mrs. McCosh patted me lightly on the shoulder and, with a fugitive twinkle of amused and friendly skepticism, cocked her head in an almost imperceptible degree. She said nothing, but I had been fully introduced to her. Thirty-three years later she again cocked her head and, impelled by her marvelous memory, bantered me with: ‘Nae doubt you are still obeying the Doctor’s injunction and keeping close to your books, eh?’” 

She made her most celebrated remark when President McCosh finally coaxed the deep-pocketed philanthropist Andrew Carnegie down to Princeton. President and Mrs. McCosh met Carnegie at the train; Carnegie greeted them by saying, “Dr. McCosh, for a long time I’ve been much interested in Princeton.” Isabella replied, “Indeed, Mr. Carnegie, thus far we have seen no financial evidences of it.” Carnegie was delighted by the exchange and went around repeating it; her reply was just, he said, for “it was Scot against Scot.”