Elizabeth Gooking Greenleaf
American apothecary
Elizabeth Gooking Greenleaf (November 11, 1681 – November 11, 1762) was the first female apothecary in the Thirteen Colonies. She is considered to be the first female pharmacist in the United States.
Biography
Elizabeth Gooking was born in Edison, Province of New Jersey in 1681, the daughter of Samuel and Mary Gooking. She married minister, physician, and apothecary Daniel Greenleaf (a Harvard graduate) in 1699. The couple had twelve children.
In 1727, Elizabeth moved to Boston to open an apothecary shop. Though this was a role which had been exclusively performed by men, Massachusetts did not have any laws in place to prevent women from practicing. This made her the only woman among the 32 apothecaries working in New England at the time.
Later in 1727, Daniel moved to Boston to join her after resigning his post as pastor of the Congregational Church in Yarmouth. They ran the shop together for several decades.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elizabeth Gooking Greenleaf” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.