Tonsil snare with a "PATENTED April 2 05" inscription. Although the patent has not been identified, we suspect the form was designed by Alice Gertrude Bryant (1862-1942), a graduate of Vassar College and of the Women’s Medical College of New York (1890) who practiced at the New England Hospital for Women and Children and at the New England Deaconess Hospital, and who is regarded as the first woman to specialize in otolaryngology.
Ref: Alice G. Bryant, “A New Tonsil Tenaculum,” The Larygnoscope 15 (1905): 947.
Alice G. Bryant, “The Use of the Cold Wire Snare in the Removal of Hypertrophied Tonsils,” The Journal of Laryngology (Nov. 1906): 556-561.
“DR. ALICE G. BRYANT, A BOSTON PHYSICIAN,” New York Times (July 27, 1942), p. 15.
“Dr. Alice Bryant, Surgeon, Artist, Is Dead at 80,” Boston Globe (July 27, 1942), p. 8.
Autumn Stanley, Mothers and Daughters of Invention (Rutgers University Press, 1993), p. 108.
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