Achsa Bean when she was a member of the Alpha Omicron Pi chapter.
The November 1925 To Dragma of Alpha Omicron Pi reported that she was doing graduate work and the chapter was “fortunate indeed” to have her at the university. The September 1926 issue carried the news that she was awarded the fellowship in memory of Ruth Craven Farmer for graduate study in 1926-27, and that she had not “completed her arrangements for her year’s work, but will study medicine, probably either at the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia, or at Tufts Medical School, with the idea of doing children’s preventive work.”
A later issue noted that “because of circumstances outside of her control,” she found it “impossible to make use of the award in graduate study.” It is likely she did not have the additional funds needed to fund medical school. There were precious few ways to finance education in the 1920s. She taught at Kennebunkport High school and ran a town library in order to earn and save money. After she was awarded her Master’s degree, she spent six years working for the University of Maine, serving as the Dean of Woman and Assistant Professor of Zoology. She was a chaperone at the chapter’s dinner and dance formal at the Penobscot Valley Country Club on March 15, 1929. The Alpha Omicron Pi page in the 1934 yearbook lists “Dean Achsa M. Bean” with “Sorores in Facultate.”
She likely entered the University of Rochester Medical School in the fall of 1934. When she graduated in 1936, she was one of three women in her medical school class. She was hired by Vassar College as Assistant Chairman of the Department of Health.
Dr. Achsa Bean upon her graduation from medical school
In August 1941, she volunteered in the Red Cross in England. She was sworn into the British Royal Army Medical Corps in February 1942, as a lieutenant. She was one of the first two American female doctors to serve in the corps; the other was Major Barbara Stimpson. As reported in a 1942 wire service article, they volunteered, “for the very good reason that we thought we had something to learn from the British. We wanted to see for ourselves how long they had organized their women’s services, and how they met the unparalleled conditions which reigned since the blitz started.”
Dr. Barbara Stimpson (l) and Dr. Achsa Bean (r)
Bean was a major when she returned to Vassar from England in the fall of 1942. In February 1943, she entered the U.S. Navy medical corps as a lieutenant commander. A May 1943 article in the Poughkeepsie Journal reported she joined because she wanted to “play on the home team.” She was one of the first WAVES ordered overseas and she served in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; Bethesda, Maryland; and New York City. She became a Lieutenant Commander.
When she returned to Vassar in January 1946, she became professor of hygiene. In June 1946, she was named the college physician. Bean spent that spring talking to local organizations. She “contrasted our complacent joy at the end of the rationing with conditions of hunger elsewhere in the world. In conclusion, she said that the world is truly looking to the United States for leadership and the future of the world depends on America.”
While at Vassar, she also served as an instructor in medicine at the University of Rochester. One day a week she travelled to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City where she served in a clinic. She was on the Board of Visitors for the NY State Training Schools for Girls in Hudson and the Central Islip State Hospital.
Bean retired in 1963 and she and her life-long friend Dr. Barbara Stimpson moved to a home they designed in Owl’s Head, Maine. Bean kept busy serving as a school physician, a member of the Knox County General Hospital long-range planning committee, and director of the Knox County chapter of the American Red Cross. She died in 1975.
