On this day in ...... 1857, in Mount Pleasant, Ontario, Canada, a daughter, Ann Augusta, was born to suffragist physician Emily Howard Stowe and her carpenter husband, John Stowe. In 1883 the daughter married Dr. John Benjamin Gullen and, moreover, earned her M.D. from the Faculty of Medicine at Victoria University, Toronto. Augusta Stowe-Gullen was the 1st woman to graduate from a Canadian medical school (left). Stowe-Gullen was active in suffrage, temperance, and other social movements, "and she succeeded her mother as President of the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association in 1903." She was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1935, 8 years before her death in Toronto. A medical professor and practitioner at numerous hospitals in Canada, she was a founding member, in 1909, of the Women's College Hospital in Toronto, site of this anecdote:
One day, a visitor remarked upon the hospital's extensive female staff and asked whether everyone in the hospital was female. 'Of course not,' Gullen replied. 'Half the babies born are male.'
... 1953 (55 years ago today), in a purpose-built hall at Panmunjom, a village on the de facto border dividing the northern and southern portions of the Korean peninsula, representatives of 16 U.N. member states signed an armistice "ending hostilities in the three-year-old Korean war." The truce document was not a final peace accord:... [T]hough the shooting would cease within twelve hours after the signing, only an uneasy armed truce and political difficulties, perhaps even greater than those of the armistice negotiations, were ahead.
The agreement remains to this day the lone basis for cessation of the conflict.
