Forgotten Legacy of Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/06/06
Lorena Galliot is a French-Venezuelan-American journalist and senior producer at Lost Women of Science. They discussed Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo, the Dominican Republic’s first female doctor. Rodríguez overcame poverty, trained in Paris, and pioneered maternal health and public health initiatives, including free milk distribution. Despite persecution under Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship, her legacy endured through local memory and later historical recovery. Her mental health deteriorated under political repression, leading to a tragic end. Today, slowly growing recognition honours her contributions, with hospitals, streets, and a postage stamp commemorating her, though much of her story remains rediscovered.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we heard from Lorena Galliot. She is a French-Venezuelan-American journalist, producer, and editor known for her audio storytelling and documentary filmmaking work. She is a senior producer at the Lost Women of Science podcast, producing notable series such as The Extraordinary Life and Tragic Death of Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo, highlighting the Dominican Republic’s first female doctor. Before joining Lost Women of Science, Galliot worked with Adonde Media, creating multilingual audio stories in French, Spanish, and English. Projects she has worked on have aired on platforms like Netflix, ABC News, National Geographic, and CNN Films. Her written work has been published in outlets such as the Christian Science Monitor, Scientific American, Grist, The Daily Climate, and The New York Times.
Her multicultural heritage and trilingual abilities enrich her narratives, bringing depth and authenticity to the stories she tells.
Now, big picture: How many stories do we have of the “first doctors” of [fill in the blank]? Are they well documented? Do we know?
Lorena Galliot: That’s a good question. I do not know a precise number, especially not for women doctors. The first doctors anywhere in history are probably too numerous to document, particularly if you include male doctors. However, regarding women, it is a much more recent development on that scale. The first women to break into the field—those can often be documented.
We were interested in a place like the Dominican Republicbut because it represented an area where health and medicine were not yet highly developed. Then A woman from a difficult, impoverished background came forward and helped push the field forward in her country. She was the first female doctor and was highly innovative and pioneering for her time.
Jacobsen: Regarding the training and methodology used to educate medical students, how different is what we now consider medicine compared to then?
Galliot: Well, medical schools did exist at the time. Evangelina Rodríguez was born in the late 1800s and graduated from medical school in 1911. At that time, there was only one medical school in Santo Domingo, and it was not nearly as developed or thorough as the medical schools we see today, whether in her region, the U.S., or Canada. The best-developed medical schools were primarily located in Europe and North America.
After studying in her own country, Evangelina felt there was still much more to learn. She aspired to follow in the footsteps of other Latin American doctors who trained in Europe, specifically in Paris. It remained her goal to complete her training there and become a “real doctor.”
Jacobsen: Because medicine is one of those weird fields that changes quite drastically, and its applicability is almost immediate, too, right?
Galliot: Well, in her case, it took her eight years to complete her curriculum, which is standard for a medical student today going through the whole process until the end of the residency. But it was considered long at the time. It makes me realize I do not know specifically what the standard would have been—whether it would have been five or six years—but eight years was considered a lengthy period because, during her entire time studying, she was also working. She had to work to support herself.
Jacobsen: When it comes to doing fieldwork as a storyteller, when you visit sites and start tracking this history on the ground, what do you notice about the smells of the area, the sights, how people conduct themselves—things that give you some insight into how social interactions might have been at that time?
Galliot: You mean, like, going into the field in Paris? For this story, I did not—though I have lived in Paris and am very familiar with the city. However, for this story, we worked with a collaborator in the Dominican Republic who helped us with local reporting in Santo Domingo.
Jacobsen: Oh, that’s fair. Now, in terms of her time studying in Paris, what did she bring insights into medical practice and perspectives on women’s health upon returning to the Dominican Republic?
Galliot: It has changed her in ways that were, I think, unexpected. The main thing that is documented—and I will say, one of the challenges in reporting the story of Evangelina is that not much is documented. There are a couple of biographies written, quite a long time after her death. She left some correspondence, but only a limited amount survived. However, she wrote one book before travelling, which still exists, and we were able to track it down in a digital version from the national archives in Santo Domingo. It’s called Granos de Polen.
She wrote the book before her trip to Paris. It’s a strange mix of some medical philosophies, a treatise to improve society, and advice to women on their health. She was young when she wrote it. Initially, her primary motivation for writing the book was to raise funds to travel to Paris. One thing that comes out is that she was heavily influenced by her Catholic upbringing and very much the Catholic religious structure of the Dominican Republic.
It was and still is a predominantly Catholic country. Evangelina viewed sex outside of marriage as something negative, and she perceived sex work—prostitution—as something to be condemned. Prostitutes were seen as a threat to public health, spreading venereal diseases.
Somehow, during her time in Paris —but something switched. She came back from Paris and became pretty vocal about the opposite: about sex workers being victimized, about women needing to be treated and helped, and about offering medical treatment to them.
It was still approached through a public health lens—specifically concerning venereal diseases—but instead of punishing sex workers, she advocated for care. She began visiting brothels, offering medical treatment for free, and spreading awareness about contraception, particularly the use of condoms.
So, it was a central switch and very radical for her time. We do not know precisely what happened in Paris, but it changed her dramatically.
Jacobsen: What are reasonable speculations as to the reason? What was going on in Parisian culture at that time?
Galliot: We tried to dig into this. What we do know is that brothels in Paris were legal and regulated. Doctors regularly visited brothels and conducted examinations of sex workers.
That being said, while brothels were regulated, the French approach was still quite punitive. Workers were subjected to mandatory medical examinations, and the system was still harsh toward them overall.
I wish I knew more about what exactly shifted Evangelina’s ideological perspective—and I can only speculate because there is no definitive source to confirm. That remains a mystery.
Jacobsen: In her time between Paris and Santo Domingo, was there also a noticeable cultural change in the Dominican Republic? In other words, did society shift to an even more judgmental and punitive culture around sex workers and similar issues, or did it move in a more liberal direction, as Paris had to some extent?
Galliot: When she returned—no. Before anything became more liberal—the society in the Dominican Republic remained both heavily Catholic and very patriarchal.
In fact, within a decade of Evangelina’s return from Paris, the Dominican Republic fell into a lenthy period of dictatorship. So, both in terms of fundamental civil liberties and women’s roles in society, the country stayed deeply conservative, with the Catholic Church maintaining a strong influence until at least the 1960s.
Jacobsen: This is a tricky question: how long did it take before a second woman medical doctor in the Dominican Republic?
Galliot: Yeah, not that long. While Evangelina was still in Paris, another Dominican graduate had already made a similar trip, following in her footsteps. So we will talk within a couple of years. She was the first, but it did open doors. Doors were beginning to open.
Jacobsen: That leads to a natural question based on the prior question. Did this woman who went to Paris for medical school and came back—if she did come back—also similarly change her attitudes and opinions?
Galliot: No. It is a good question, but I do not know. I wish I could say.
What I will say, though, is that under the dictatorship that began in the 1930s, under Commander Rafael Trujillo—you might be getting to this later, so I do not want to delve too far ahead—he picked and chose the voices he wanted to elevate and reward, based on loyalty to him and his party but also the colour of skin. He had a policy of trying to “whiten” Dominican society.
When it came to intellectuals and public figures, he elevated mostly white Dominicans and marginalized Afro-Dominican intellectuals, which was the community Evangelina belonged to. She was Afro-Dominican.
In fact, under Trujillo’s regime, the National Registry of Doctors of the Dominican Republic—where Evangelina had been listed as the first woman doctor—temporarily erased her name. Another woman from a prominent white family who supported Trujillo was elevated in her place. During Trujillo’s time, There was an effort to erase her from the historical record. She was almost completely erased.
Only much later, after Trujillo was assassinated in 1961 was Evangelina’s rightful place and role reinstated.
Jacobsen: Now, for size and art, as well as for periods of history that were not exactly well-to-do by modern standards—Evangelina opened a maternity clinic and a free milk distribution program.
Milk has carbohydrates, protein, and calcium—it is a reasonably nutrient-dense sustenance source, particularly for impoverished societies. Why did she focus on a maternity clinic and free milk distribution, and how did those initiatives impact impoverished communities?
Galliot: Right. Well, I will start with the free milk. That was directly inspired by something she observed in Paris.
There was a longstanding public health program called goutte de lait—the “drop of milk”—to combat malnutrition in poor children and families. It distributed free milk to inject nutrition—calories, protein, calcium, and everything you just named—particularly for infants.
Breastfeeding was still encouraged and promoted, but milk distribution was additional support, with the understanding that in highly impoverished families, where women tended to have many children, breastfeeding alone might not be sufficient. Supplementation was necessary.
Evangelina saw the benefits of this approach and essentially replicated it, taking the same idea and even the same name. She called it La Gota de Leche in the Dominican Republic and sought to implement the same nutritional program because she saw the immediate health benefits.
In terms of the maternity clinic, it is interesting. It also boils down to Evangelina’s— I find her psychology, or at least what I wonder about it, very interesting. She was abandoned at birth by both her mother and her father because they came from impoverished backgrounds. Her mother was essentially a servant in a household. Her father was a soldier in the army at the time, and it was an illegitimate birth.
They were not a couple. He was not around, and her mother could not care for her, so she was abandoned. Evangelina experienced firsthand the dire consequences when a pregnancy resulted in a child who was unplanned, unwanted and brought into an environment without the resources to care for her.
She ended up being raised by her paternal grandmother, but in extremely humble circumstances—selling gofio , a traditional Dominican sweet, in the street.
So, coming from that background—fast-forward to her teenage years—one of the most significant transformative moments in Evangelina’s story is that she was introduced to a woman named Anacaona Moscoso. Anacaona was also Afro-Dominican but came from a far wealthier background. She had been one of the first students at one of the early women’s secondary schools in Santo Domingo—a normalized school.
These schools were part of a mission to provide secular education for women. They were essentially teacher training institutes but were more broadly aimed at expanding women’s educational opportunities.
Anacaona Moscoso was creating a women’s institute in San Pedro de Macorís, the town where Evangelina lived, a sugar-producing town east of the Dominican Republic. She heard about Evangelina, a very humble but unusually bright and intelligent girl who might be a promising candidate for her school.
Anacaona met Evangelina, immediately recognized her potential, and took her under her wing. She arranged for Evangelina to work teaching night literacy classes to workers so she could earn money to pay her school tuition—something she otherwise could not have afforded.
This moment—the opportunity—completely changed the trajectory of Evangelina’s life. Anacaona became a mentor, friend, and mother figure to her.
Now, coming back to your question: before Evangelina became a doctor—when she was already aspiring to study medicine and, I think, had already started her medical journey—Anacaona became pregnant with her third child. She was warned that it would be risky to carry another pregnancy, that it could bring serious complications. But she had no access to means of preventing it, and she died following childbirth.
Again and again, Evangelina witnessed firsthand the tragic consequences when women could not choose whether or not to become pregnant—and when maternal care was lacking or inadequate.
That experience—the personal loss of her mentor and the broader social realities—pushed her not just to become a doctor but to specialize specifically in maternal care and open a maternity clinic.
Jacobsen: It sounds like many of these events were also in the backdrop of her expansion as a person. She experienced these things happening around her, and, as people do, they continued with their lives despite tragedies.
The period of being away from home gave time for those experiences to gestate and reflect, ultimately changing her mind. Being away provided contrast. Those moments may have served as inflection points during reflection rather than being seen simply as isolated incidents—like losing family members on the Titanic, but the realization and meaning come later.
I am just being mindful of time—we will be kicked off in about four minutes.
Jacobsen: What kind of opposition did she face to getting maternal health support and the milk program going? Was there resistance from the people who were supposed to benefit from it?
Galliot: It was very, very well received. The response was extremely positive and welcoming, and she was applauded for her efforts.
Officials in her town—San Pedro de Macorís, where she returned to work—had provided her with financial support for her trip to Paris. They expected her to return and develop health services, especially for poor people. So, this kind of initiative was supported.
However, her more controversial efforts—like distributing condoms to married women and visiting prostitutes and sex workers in brothels—were not received as warmly. Those initiatives garnered a much more mixed response.
Jacobsen: How did Rafael Trujillo persecute her through the dictatorship? How much of a threat was she seen as, especially given her work on contraception provision and related initiatives?
Galliot: Shee was not on Trujillo’s radar at all. She was operating primarily in the Eastern Provinces, focusing on local work, and at the beginning of his regime, that was not something Trujillo was overly concerned about.
However, Trujillo became increasingly obsessed with fostering a cult of personality around himself. He demanded extreme loyalty, and joining his party was mandatory. If you did not enter, you were automatically blocked.
After a few years in power—around the late 1930s—he became aware of Evangelina, presumably after encountering her at a medical conference where they crossed paths. She was present, and he noticed her: an Afro-Dominican woman doctor who already did not place her in his good graces, operating independently and without showing the required reverence to him.
Trujillo was not known for supporting women’s roles outside the domestic sphere, and he certainly did not favour independent-minded, outspoken figures, especially women of African descent. So, at that point, she became more of a target.
She had not joined the party. Whenever she received any kind of honour, she never thanked or acknowledged Trujillo or publicly bolstered him.
At the time, there was this theatricality where people were expected to credit Trujillo for anything positive. For example, if new infrastructure was built, people were expected to say something like, “Thanks to the magnificence of our Generalísimo Trujillo…”
Evangelina never participated in that. She always refused to engage in that kind of obsequiousness—am I saying that right? I am not sure—but she refused.
Not only that, but she was not shy about criticizing him, whether with her patients, in private conversations, or public settings, even as people around her became increasingly nervous and afraid to speak out as his grip on society tightened.
At some point—perhaps at that 1933 conference where they were both present or possibly later—he became aware that she was not behaving as she “should” in his eyes. She came into his crosshairs, and her persecution began.
Jacobsen: How severe was the persecution?
Galliot: Extremely severe. It started with her losing what she had spent so long building. In particular, her maternity clinic in San Pedro de Macorís was shut down.
Beyond that, her name was stripped from the National Registry of Doctors. Two years after the 1933 conference—where she had received an award but failed to mention or thank Trujillo in her acceptance speech—she tried to attend another medical conference organized in Santo Domingo. She had participated in such conferences for years, but this time, she was denied entry.
She was increasingly and systematically sidelined. Patients—particularly wealthier ones who could afford other providers—also began to avoid her because being associated with her became dangerous by association.
Biographers believe that Evangelina may have had underlying mental health vulnerabilities, though there is no formal diagnosis. These cascading losses—the shuttering of her clinic, the erasure from public records, and the social isolation—triggered a mental health crisis.
Symptoms that had not previously been visible now manifested, and she began experiencing hallucinations.
Jacobsen: What was she hallucinating?
Galliot: She would hallucinate that thugs were persecuting her—chasing her, threatening her. It was very much in keeping with the climate of fear and persecution at the time.
Coming back from that conference, Evangelina was ranting and raving about thugs who had chased her and were trying to beat her up. However, there was no evidence that this happened—she seemed to be imagining these threats. She gradually entered phases where she would lose touch with reality.
Jacobsen: Is this a common phenomenon among people—particularly capable— under this kind of intense duress and persecution?
Galliot: I certainly do not think she is the only case. And we are talking about the 1930s—a time when mental health treatment was very rudimentary, and fear was an overwhelming force in many regimes.
Of course, some are cut off under fear, and others are sent into a spiral. There is a historical precedent. But in her particular context, there is an added weight of political persecution, gender discrimination, and racial marginalization.
Since her mental health crisis was never formally diagnosed, we have to be cautious. One of her biographers speculated that she exhibited symptoms consistent with schizophrenia, but again, I hesitated to put a medical label without definitive evidence.
That said, the case of John Nash is often cited—a brilliant mind plagued by schizophrenia. You can see some parallels between his experiences and what Evangelina endured, especially her hallucinations.
Jacobsen: In terms of her hallucinations at the end of her life, what are the characteristics we know about them? And how did everything fully unravel near the end?
Galliot: The end of her life was truly tragic. Everything unravelled once she lost her medical practice.
Earlier, when she was in her fiftes, adopted a little girl named Selisette. The baby’s mother had died during childbirth. Evangelina had tried to save the mother but had been unable to. She adopted the orphaned girl, loved her deeply, and raised her alone.
By all accounts, Evangelina adored children and did everything in her power to care for them. She treated entire families—mothers, fathers, and children—with incredible compassion.
One of her biographers was a child in her practice. He remembered her as a warm, deeply caring pediatrician. Later in life, realizing how she had disappeared from historical records, he dedicated himself to digging up everything he could about the woman who had once been his doctor—and he wrote the first major biography of her.
However, when Evangelina’s mental health deteriorated further, the situation worsened.
The father of the adopted girl—who had never been absent but had not been able to care for her financially—was warned about Evangelina’s declining stability. He ultimately took Selisette away from her, and . That loss devastated Evangelina.
By that point, the people closest to her had all died. Her mentor and friend, Anacaona Moscoso, had passed away. Her grandmother—the woman who raised her—had long since died. Evangelina was increasingly alone.
She had always been so selfless, described both positively and negatively, that she never kept much for herself. Whatever she earned, she gave away or spent in service of others.
When everything else fell apart—her clinic, her professional standing, her adopted daughter, her support network—there was almost nothing left holding her up.
She always used whatever money she had for her work and gave generously to others. So, she eventually found herself alone, persecuted by the government, and pretty much penniless.
At one point, arrangements were made for her to live with a distant half-brother she barely knew in a remote village in the southeast.
So, Evangelina was sent to live in this very rural area. According to oral histories—because there are no written records about this period—she was remembered as a woman who began wandering the countryside, carrying a basket of flowers and muttering nonsensically.
She went from being the first woman doctor in the Dominican Republic, a pioneer who had opened a maternity clinic and made significant contributions to her community, to becoming a beggar on the streets.
Jacobsen: A hallucinating beggar on the streets.
Galliot: Exactly—a hallucinating beggar on the streets.
People would give her food, and she would often pass that food on to others, barely eating herself. It seemed she was always looking for someone more destitute than herself to help.
These stories were preserved through oral history, passed down generation after generation. Dominican families remembered her not from official records but as a kind of wandering figure—a memory, almost a folktale.
Sadly, after about a decade of this “in-between” period—during which she was no longer practicing medicine and instead wandering from town to town, sometimes walking for days at a time—she reemerged in the official records.
In 1946 , there was a major sugar workers’ strike against Trujillo’s regime. The crackdown that followed was brutal: strike leaders were arrested, and some were even hanged in public.
During the government’s witch hunt for scapegoats, someone at some point pointed a finger at Evangelina—the former doctor who had long been critical of Trujillo.
She was swept up and arrested, even though she was harmless by then.
She spent several days in a prison in San Pedro. According to all accounts, she was tortured and beaten during her imprisonment.
She was eventually released—probably because it was evident she was already broken, both mentally and physically.
Soon after, Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo died. She was found dead on the street.
The cause of death listed on her death certificate is officially recorded as starvation. In her final days, she was not feeding herself enough.
Jacobsen: Usually, famous people leave some kind of record behind—quotes, writings, reflections. What are some of your favourite quotes that you found from her?
Galliot: There is one, though it is not originally hers, that she reportedly repeated often to her patients, particularly her female patients and expectant mothers.
There is a saying in the Dominican Republic: “Every baby is born with a loaf of bread under their arm.” It is meant to be comforting—as if to say, “Do not worry, the child will bring prosperity.”
But Evangelina would tell her patients: “You know that saying? It is not true. It has never been true.”
She used it as a counterexample, a warning. She was one of the early proponents of family planning—the idea that pregnancies should be spaced and planned—at a time when that was a radical notion.
Jacobsen: Is there a redemptive arc after her death? Has anyone carried on her work? Are there institutes named after her?
Galliot: Slowly but surely, yes.
The end of her life was so tragic and heartbreaking that, for a long time, her story was overlooked. She died in the 1960s, and her first biography was not published until 1980—twenty years later. During those two decades, she was almost entirely forgotten.
Since then, however, there have been genuine efforts to honour her legacy.
A network of family planning clinics—similar in spirit to Planned Parenthood in the Dominican Republic—named one of their early clinics after her. Hospitals in Santo Domingo have named maternity wards after her. There is now a street in her hometown bearing her name.
In 1988, a postage stamp was issued featuring the only surviving photograph of her—an image of Evangelina as a young woman, looking polished, with neatly styled hair and a string of pearls.
Recently, a few plays inspired by her life have been staged at festivals in the Dominican Republic.
Her story is entering the public consciousness, though it is still not as widely known as one might expect for a pioneering woman doctor.
One thing we realized during this project—and this is the whole mission of the Lost Women of Science podcast—is that even in her home country, she was not a household name.
For example, our series host, Laura Gómez—a Dominican actress and podcaster you might recognize from Orange is the New Black—had never heard of her. When we approached her about the project, Laura said, “Now that you are bringing her up, and now that I see everything you have uncovered, I cannot believe I had never heard of her.” Neither had many of her friends.
So Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo’s story is still in the process of being reclaimed and celebrated.
It is still slow, but yes, little by little.
Jacobsen: I see assumptions like that as a spinoff or derivative of the just-world theory—or the just-world hypothesis.
The idea that the world is just—that if someone achieves something noble, fair, and reasonable, it will automatically be recognized and secure its place in history. But many of those stories must be rediscovered through deliberate and conscious effort. Hers appears to be one of them.
Galliot: Absolutely. One of the historians we interviewed for this series pointed out that the people of her hometown—San Pedro de Macorís—helped prevent her story from disappearing completely.
This was where she had practiced medicine for most of her life—the city that initially helped fund her trip to Paris. They held onto her memory. The biographer who wrote her first biography was from there.
Thanks to the dedication of a relatively small number of people, her place in history began to be reaffirmed slowly.
Jacobsen: Lorena, thank you very much for your time today. I appreciate your expertise, and it was nice to meet you.
Galliot: It was lovely meeting you, too. Thank you so much for your interest and questions.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much. Have a great rest of your day.
Galliot: Cheers. Bye.
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