Dr. Edith Schad was a pioneering Bellefonte physician who was the first woman elected to serve as president of the Centre County Medical Society. She also was a leader in moral reform movements locally and across Pennsylvania.
Schad was born on October 5, 1865. She was the daughter of John P. Harris, who served as the cashier of the First National Bank of Bellefonte and the Bellefonte Trust Company for forty-five years. He was also involved in business with Daniel Hastings, a local resident who served as governor of Pennsylvania.
In the late nineteenth century, the medical profession remained a male domain. Schad challenged the gender barrier. She graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and nearly became a member of the royal household of the Empress of China.
Her obituary in the New York Times, which described her as “one of Pennsylvania’s leading women physicians,” reported that in her senior year in medical school she was invited to become the medical adviser to the Empress of China. Her family, however, “refused to allow her to go to China and insisted on her practicing in her hometown.”
Dr. Schad had to make an adjustment to her career because of a man. When she finished medical school around 1890 a male doctor with the surname Harris, her maiden name, was already practicing in the community. To avoid confusion, she adopted the more informal title of “Dr. Edith,” which everyone called her from then on, even after she married Rudolph Schad, with whom she had two children, Mary and Frederic. Her husband died in 1899.
Dr. Schad was a general practitioner and handled the usual assortment of family ailments. In the process, she also treated one of the few cases of smallpox in Centre County. She earned the recognition of her peers who elected her to lead the local medical association twice. She often represented the society at annual conventions in Philadelphia.
Although still relatively rare, women doctors increasingly permeated the profession, with the Woman’s College in Philadelphia churning out hundreds of alumnae who assumed positions across the country and even overseas. An early history of the college boasted that, by 1897, only a hospital at Danville had no women physicians and a hospital at Norristown was the only one in which women patients remained under the exclusive care of women physicians.
Dr. Schad expanded her influence locally and across the state by becoming involved with moral reform movements. In 1910, she joined thirty-four influential women who marched on the Bellefonte council to protest the laxity of enforcement of Sunday laws. They protested against candy and tobacco stores remaining open despite the law and claimed the temptations led to dishonesty in children who spent money intended for church or Sunday school on sweets instead. The women also argued for a plainclothes policeman “to run down women of immoral characters.”
Dr. Schad also joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), where she was a frequent speaker against patent medicines and “soothing syrups” as a marketing scheme to sell alcohol. She advocated for “scientific temperance” and served as superintendent of the Medical Temperance Department of the statewide WCTU. She called for a ban on the promotion of these sham medicines in newspaper advertisements.
Dr. Schad spent most of her life in Bellefonte until retiring from medicine sometime in the 1920s, after thirty-two years of medical practice. She moved to Bellevue, a suburb of Pittsburgh, to live with her daughter, Mary Chaney, and son-in-law. She died in Pittsburgh on February 2, 1942, and is buried in Union Cemetery in Bellefonte.
William Blair
Sources:
“Bellefonte Women March on Council.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 24, 1910.
“Denounce Patent Medicines.” Carbondale Daily News, October 8, 1912.
“Dr. Edith Harris Schad.” The New York Times, February 4, 1942.
“‘Dr. Edith,’ Now Bellevue Housewife, Recalls 32 Years of Medical Practice.” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, February 18, 1839.
Marshall, M.D., Clara. The Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, An Historical Outline. Philadelphia: P. Blakeston, Son & Co., 1897.
“State W.C.T.U. in High License Law Talk.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 6, 1912.
First Published: April 23, 2025
Last Modified: February 19, 2026