The Extraordinary Life and Tragic Death of Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo - Chapter Two: A Dominican in Paris

The Extraordinary Life and Tragic Death of Evangelina Rodríguez -, Chapter Two:  A Dominican in Paris

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Laura Gómez: ​San Pedro de Macorís, 1921. The marina at the southern Dominican port city is bustling with activity. Fishermen head home for the day after selling their morning catch, while dockworkers load heavy sacks of cane sugar onto cargo ships under the hot sun. Hustling past them, wealthy travelers trailed by their porters line up to board the gangway of a passenger ship bound for New York City. In the midst of it all, a 42-year-old, Afro-Dominican woman quietly waits her turn to board. 

Few people notice her. Fewer still would guess that she is Dr. Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo, the first Dominican woman to graduate from medical school.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): What she did was really memorable for the time — the fact that she was a woman, from a poor background, who was able to study medicine and practice as a doctor.

Laura Gómez: Now, carrying nothing but a small, battered suitcase with a few changes of clothes, she’s setting sail on a weeks-long journey that will take her north to New York and then across the Atlantic to Paris, France. 

This is “Lost Women of Science.” I'm Laura Gómez. This is the second episode of our five-part series on the life of Dr. Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo, the first female doctor from the Dominican Republic. 

To find out how Evangelina, a poor girl born out of wedlock, went from selling sweets on the streets of San Pedro de Macorís to graduating from medical school. Go back and listen to Episode One. 

Today, our story crosses continents as Evangelina enters a whole new world.

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Episode Two: A Dominican in Paris. 

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Evangelina's dream of going to Paris was born over a decade before she set foot on the steamship in San Pedro. And it was born from tragedy. 

In 1907, mid-way through her medical studies, her beloved teacher and mentor, Anacaona Moscoso, died following the birth of her third child. It was a pregnancy her doctor had warned might kill her. But she didn’t have the power to keep from getting pregnant again. And her death left Evangelina devastated.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): She’s more like a mom. The mom Evangelina never had. And seeing that person die, the person who had really helped her keep going, the person who always told her, “You can do it, you can do it, you can do it”... that had to be really hard for her, right?

Laura Gómez: This is Mercedes Fernández, who we heard from in Episode One. She wrote her Ph.D. thesis on Evangelina. 

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): So, I think that's what convinced her to say, we have to help women. There has to be a way for women to have children and not have to die.

Laura Gómez: Mercedes believes that the death of Anacaona affected Evangelina so deeply that she made up her mind to do something. It was too late for Anacaona, but her case wasn’t an exception. So many women lost their lives giving birth in those days. The problem was, Evangelina’s med school hadn’t equipped her to do much about it.

There were no up-to-date training facilities at her school — the one med school in Santo Domingo. No dissecting room, no chemical laboratory, no pathology department, and no courses in bacteriology. And so, even after she’d beat all the odds to get to that school and become a doctor, Evangelina decided she had to keep training. 

And at that time, the number one place doctors went to specialize and study advanced medical techniques… was Paris.

But getting to Paris, let alone living and studying there, was incredibly expensive. Evangelina knew that raising money for the trip would take time. 

So after her graduation, in the early nineteen-teens, she kept the two side jobs she’d had throughout her studies. By day, she served as director of the school Anacaona founded, and in the evenings, she taught classes at a school for domestic workers. 

On top of this, she wanted to begin practicing in her hometown of San Pedro. She figured she could at least treat some patients, while she pulled together the money for her transatlantic voyage.  

Claudia Scharf (Voiceover): She began to practice timidly, because she was so serious about what she was doing. She had so much respect for the profession that she felt she wasn't quite ready to practice medicine yet.

Laura Gómez: This is Claudia Scharf, a pediatrician and medical professor in the Dominican Republic. She says that, unfortunately, when Evangelina tried to begin practicing, she found that many people in San Pedro weren’t willing to see her.

Claudia Scharf (Voiceover): People who were in the middle or upper class rejected her because they thought, how was it possible that she was a doctor being that she was a woman?

Laura Gómez: So Evangelina left her job at the night school and moved to a place where she knew people needed her, a rural village outside San Pedro called Ramón Santana. Here’s Mercedes Fernández. 

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): In her letters, when she talks about Ramón Santana, she explains that they have almost no roads, that it's very inaccessible, that many things are lacking. So, my understanding is that it is a place where there are no resources.

Laura Gómez: The village was surrounded by sugar cane fields, and most people living there survived on the growth and sale of sugar cane. According to Claudia Scharf, the people in these communities couldn't be too picky about what kind of doctor they saw. 

Claudia Scharf (Voiceover): The people who worked in the sugar fields, cut the sugar cane, those laborers did not have many resources to go visit prestigious doctors. So it was with these people that Evangelina first began to practice.

Laura Gómez: Evangelina set up her practice in a small house next to the stump of a large oak tree. Since the area had no pharmacy, she opened one next door and stocked it with basic medicines. But it seems that Evangelina had too big a heart to be a savvy businesswoman.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): With this idea, she always has of wanting to help, this medicine dispensary never works because she gives everything away.

Laura Gómez: Mercedes Fernández again. 

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover):  She has no notion of basic economics. If you give something away, how are you going to pay for what you bought? I mean, you can't, you know?

Elizabeth Manley: I think because she was developing this commitment to public health and to addressing the concerns of those that couldn't pay that it's a combination of kind of her principles and the fact that there wasn't a ton of resources there to pay her in the first place.

Laura Gómez: That’s Elizabeth Manley. She’s a professor of Caribbean history at Xavier University in Louisiana. She explains that Evangelina’s efforts were making a difference in people’s lives, if only in her little pocket of the world. 

And those efforts went beyond treating patients. She organized sanitation services in the village and encouraged residents to sweep in front of their homes. She did what she could to make up for the absence of government services. 

At the time, the Dominican Republic was suffering from both political and economic instability. There had been a series of coups since the turn of the century, and the country was steep in debt. The U.S. had tried to mediate to protect its commercial interests in sugar production, but the unrest continued. The successive regimes had little capacity to invest in rural public health. 

For the time being, Evangelina settled into her quiet new life, away from most of this turmoil. But out in the broader world, more trouble was brewing — and her country was about to get sucked in. 

In 1914, the first World War broke out in Europe, pitting Germany against France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and their allies. Of course, it wasn’t the “world” war yet, and at first, the dangers seemed a world away. But a couple of years later, when the U.S. began planning to enter the war on the side of France and Britain, the political instability inside the Dominican Republic became a real concern. The U.S. was worried that Germany might try to use the Dominican Republic as a military base. So, in 1916, they took the drastic step of invading the island, citing national security interests… but they had some other motives too.

Robin Derby: One of the most important measures that the U.S. Marines instigated during the occupation was privatizing land. 

Laura Gómez: This is Robin Derby. She's a professor of Caribbean and modern Latin American history at UCLA. 

Robin Derby: This is a time, you know, when there were important agribusiness interests, which wanted to expand in, in sugar, and that area becomes a place where a lot of sugar corporations wanted to establish plantations.

Laura Gómez: “That area” was the Eastern Provinces, specifically the area around Ramón Santana, where Evangelina lived. And the ambitions of American agribusiness companies had massive ramifications for the people in Evangelina's community. 

Robin Derby: There was no private property and land in the Dominican Republic before the U.S. Marines sought to privatize land. So, people had what they called Terrenos Comuneros, which were basically, land was held by shares, collectively among large extended clans, people who, over the course of generations, had seen themselves as having usufruct, as having squatters rights. And I'm sure it was a violent process to evict them.

Laura Gómez: And the man spearheading this violent process was named Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. The same Rafael Trujillo who would later seize control of the Dominican Republic and rule as a dictator for over three decades. But in the nineteen-teens, he was a rising young officer in the newly formed Dominican National Guard, stationed in the Eastern Provinces, and under the control of the United States. 

April Mayes: Rafael Trujillo really comes of age and comes to his moment, being trained by U.S. Marines and the Dominican National Police Force, in the Dominican National Guard, so to speak, and that transforms his life.

Laura Gómez: That’s April Mayes, a professor of Afro-Latin American history, who we heard from in Episode One. Here’s Robin Derby.

Robin Derby: One of his, his moves was ingratiating himself to the United States. He rose up through the Marines, who rather liked him, in part because he learned to cut this profile as a very effective man of action. 

Laura Gómez: April Mayes.

April Mayes: He proved himself to be very willing to, you know, implement cruel and unusual punishments and also go after peasants and revolt against U.S. military occupation.

Laura Gómez: There's little by way of actual records documenting Trujillo's actions in Ramón Santana at this time... there's not even a clear understanding of how the people occupying land bought by U.S. sugar corporations were removed. But an oral history gathered by one of Evangelina’s biographers describes Trujillo and his men as, quote, "simply killing people, whole families, in order to take their land." To Elizabeth Manley, this comes as no surprise.

Elizabeth Manley: There is no doubt in my mind that that man was ruthless from the jump. As soon as he had decided what his aspirations were and what the needs of the U.S. sugar interests were, I have no doubt that he would have been someone's man Friday in terms of protecting those interests.

Laura Gómez: According to her biographer Antonio Zaglul, Evangelina witnessed some of these atrocities, and she was horrified. It’s not surprising that from this time on, she harbored a deep-felt animosity towards her future ruler ... an animosity that would later cost her dearly.

But for the time being, as conflict raged around her, Evangelina kept working at her longtime goal: to save money to go study medicine in Paris. 

In the end, it took Evangelina a full decade to pull together the funds. Since her medical practice didn’t pull in much, she tried branching out. First, she wrote a book titled “Granos de Polen,” or “Pollen Seeds.” 

Part sociological treatise, part advice pamphlet for women, it was published in 1915 and endorsed by many of Evangelina's intellectual friends. 

But what she perhaps failed to consider was that the majority of Dominicans were illiterate at the time. And it didn’t help that “Granos de Polen” wasn’t the easiest read. So, unsurprisingly, despite all the praise it received…

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): The book is not as successful as she thought it would be because it's a bit complicated to read.

Laura Gómez: Mercedes Fernández. 

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): So, this quixotic idea she has of publishing a book and making money... doesn't work out for her.

Laura Gómez: When the book failed, Evangelina took up public speaking. An article in 1918 in the newspaper, “Listín Diario,” gave this account: 

“Now Evangelina is going around cities and villages in the interior of the island, preaching the gospel of love, work, ideals, peace, civility, all in order to raise the funds necessary for her move to the heart of the most advanced centers of science.”

Meanwhile, she also resorted to asking for donations from friends and benefactors, with her mentor Anacaona's widower giving the biggest one. But Evangelina’s travel fund still wasn’t enough to get her to Paris.

Finally, nearly 10 years after graduating from medical school, Evangelina got her big break. Here's April Mayes. 

April Mayes: The fact that she was connected to Anacaona and then also the ongoing legacy of her connection with the Deligne brothers, she still remained in kind of this orbit of these intellectual cultural groups in San Pedro. And when she asked, will you send me to Paris to study medicine? The city council said, we'll try our best, but yes, we'll do what is necessary. And that's what happened.

Laura Gómez: Endowed with a scholarship from the city council of San Pedro de Macorís, Evangelina was finally ready to tackle the next chapter of her life. And that's how, in 1921, at the age of 42, Dr. Evangelina Rodriguez stepped onto the steamship for the first part of her journey to Paris. What happened next, after the break.

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[Mid-roll]

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Laura Gómez: When Evangelina first set foot in Paris in 1921, she entered a whirlwind. It was just three years after the Allies’ victory over Germany in the First World War, and Paris was entering a period known as "Les Années Folles"... the wild years. 

The economy was booming and the cultural milieu and glittering nightlife attracted writers and artists from around the world–including Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. Performers like Josephine Baker graced cafés and cabarets, inspiring women to crop their hair short and ditch their corsets and long skirts for knee-length flapper dresses. Freedom was the order of the day, as was a certain debauchery... 

But according to her biographer Antonio Zaglul, Evangelina wasn't one to be swept up in the never-ending party of the Roaring 20s. She was in Paris to study. Here’s Mercedes Fernández. 

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): She's attending class and training at different hospitals and clinics.

Laura Gómez: From what we know, she took courses with a famous French pediatrician named Pierre Nobecourt, whose work focused on infant hygiene and nutrition. She also trained in Obstetrics and Gynecology at two different Parisian hospitals. 

One of those, the Baudelocque Maternité, had earned an excellent reputation for having the lowest infant mortality rates in the country. Its previous director, a French doctor named Adolphe Pinard, was a pioneer of modern perinatal care. Pinard invented devices such as the fetal stethoscope, which let doctors listen to the baby’s heartbeat. And he established the practice of routine pre- and post-natal exams to monitor the health of expectant mothers and newborns. 

The contrast could not have been sharper with the Dominican Republic, where a pregnant woman might never see a doctor until the moment she gave birth. Evangelina eagerly took it all in. 

And at the same time, even as she focused on her specialization, she was also getting a broad view of the world around her. Mercedes Fernández.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): And she's seeing the difference in infrastructure between one country and the other.

Laura Gómez: One thing was impossible not to notice: families in France looked really different from the families Evangelina grew up around.

For one, they had fewer children: around two per family on average, compared to 5 or more in the DR. But the kids they did have were better cared for, in part thanks to help from the government. For example, a public health program called “La Goutte de Lait,” or Drop of Milk, distributed free cows’ milk to infants and their mothers. Social norms also helped promote better hygiene.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): This idea that the sun is therapeutic, that physical exercise is necessary, and also this idea of prophylaxis, of the need to bathe and have good hygiene to avoid getting sick, to maintain health... She is seeing all these things in France.

Laura Gómez: But Evangelina didn't just come away from Paris with a new understanding of public health, or sharper medical skills. Here’s Elizabeth Manley.

Elizabeth Manley: It seems pretty clear that she was also radicalized, in terms of her understanding of the world, of feminism, of the role of public health, of the role of sexual education. Because if you look at what she wrote in “Granos de Polen,” which was a fairly conservative tract, that she will actually later kind of denounce, her worldview changes while she's there.

Laura Gómez: Before Evangelina left for France, the Dominican Republic had seen an uptick in prostitution following the arrival of U.S. Marines. And that had led to the spread of venereal diseases like syphilis. Mercedes Fernández again. 

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): She's very concerned, because all these women who are prostitutes are not taking care of themselves. And by not taking care of themselves, they're getting sick and they're spreading venereal diseases to different individuals in the society.

Laura Gómez: And in her book “Granos de Polen,” Evangelina blamed the sex workers for that. 

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): She attacks prostitutes and sees them as a danger to society. She sees them as a negative force, something that has to be eradicated. When she comes back from France, she no longer feels that way.

Laura Gómez: Paris had changed her.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): She sees that prostitutes are human beings who are part of society and as such, they are people who maybe haven't had any other choice in life.

Laura Gómez: We don't know exactly what Evangelina saw or experienced in Paris that caused this change of heart. She may have witnessed France’s very different approach to handling prostitution: Brothels were strictly regulated, and sex workers were subjected to mandatory medical exams. 

Meanwhile, their male clients were educated on the benefits of using condoms to limit the spread of disease... The French army even supplied soldiers with condoms during World War I. 

Whatever the reason, Evangelina’s mind was swimming with new ideas.

She was no longer just thinking of healthcare as something that happened behind a doctor’s door. She was seeing it as something that was woven into society. Into homes and schools, into infrastructure, and yes… even into brothels.

And she didn’t have to wait until she was back home to start spreading these ideas there.

Because in 1922, a radical new publication was launched in the Dominican Republic, called “Fémina.” Mercedes Fernández.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover):  ”Fémina” was a very, very important magazine because it became a forum for discussing many issues related to Dominican women of the time, and it received correspondence from all over Latin America.

Laura Gómez: Fémina’s founder and editor-in-chief was a woman called Petronila Gómez, a former Normalista teacher, like Evangelina. The two had taught night classes at the same evening school for domestic workers years earlier. And it turns out, Petronila and Evangelina had a lot in common. Here’s Elizabeth Manley.

Elizabeth Manley: They both came from families of lower economic status, not expected to do much with their lives, and they were both, you know, Afro-Dominican as well, both being kind of distinguished in that way of being educated. So I think they would have found kinship in each other. 

Laura Gómez: Petronila invited Evangelina to write dispatches from Paris for Fémina. Just a handful of these have survived, and to be honest, Evangelina still wasn’t the best writer. Mercedes Fernández.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover):   I have to say that, when it came to Evangelina Rodriguez's writing... style was never her thing. I think she was a woman of science.

Laura Gómez: But in her dispatches, Evangelina enthusiastically described the city’s advanced approach to public health. She singled out programs like “Drop of Milk,” as well as another French public health program that sent poor city kids to visit the countryside for fresh air and sunshine. 

As far as we can tell from these dispatches, Evangelina was taking in a lot during her time in Paris. But it’s hard to imagine the daily life of this middle-aged Afro-Dominican woman walking the same streets of Paris as Picasso, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. We just don’t have that many details. We do know that despite all she was learning, it wasn’t the easiest time for her.

Reading between the lines of her enthusiastic descriptions of Paris, Mercedes also sensed a sadness — and a loneliness — coming through in Evangelina's writing. 

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): She describes an image where she sees a little bird in the sun, and then she has a moment where she admits, “Yes, I miss the sun. Yes, I feel lonely.” So maybe what she’s trying to say in this unveiled confession is that that time in France was a time of learning, yes, but at the same time, it must have been a very lonely time.

Laura Gómez: Still, she stayed there for almost four years. Then in 1925, she decided to return home to bring her newfound knowledge back to her home country. 

U.S. occupation of the island had ended just a year earlier, and the Dominican Republic had a new president, Horacio Vásquez, who promised to usher in a new era of peace and democracy.

Back in the DR, many people seemed eager for Evangelina to bring her new knowledge back home: The San Pedro City Council even helped fund her return journey. And none celebrated the news of her return more than her friend, Petronila Gomez.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover):  Immediately, the first one to announce it, the first one to spell it out in capital letters, is Petronila Angélica Gómez, and she hails her as the "woman of science" who is going to return. She really shows a remarkable admiration for Evangelina.

Laura Gómez: In 1925, Evangelina once again stepped onto a steamship for the reverse transatlantic journey home, to her sorely missed Caribbean sun. She carried the same battered suitcase with her clothes... but this time, she also brought three trunks full of books. 

And based on Petronila's celebratory op-ed in “Fémina,” she had every reason to expect a warm welcome at her return. Here was a highly trained doctor, determined to bring her new skills to improve health and well-being in her home country, and especially to help women.

In fact, she was in for a rude awakening… That's next week.

This episode of “Lost Women of Science” was produced by Lorena Galliot, with help from associate producer Natalia Sánchez Loayza. Samia Bouzid is our senior producer, and our senior managing producer is Deborah Unger. 

David De Luca was our sound designer and engineer. Lizzie Younan composed all of our music. We had fact-checking help from Desirée Yépez.

Our co-executive producers are Amy Scharf and Katie Hafner. Thanks to Eowyn Burtner, our program manager, and Jeff DelViscio at our publishing partner, “Scientific American.” Our intern is Kimberly Mendez.

“Lost Women of Science” is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX.

For show notes and an episode transcript, head to lostwomenofscience.org — where you can also support our work by hitting the donate button.

I’m your host, Laura Gómez. Thanks for listening, and until next week!