Emily G. Whitten Auge, M.D.

Alexander Whitten made a very good living selling liquor and his daughter, Emily, knew that. She also knew it was a time when the question of prohibition was taking root. By the time she was a teenager she must have seen how some people develop an addiction and end up destroying their lives, so she made a moral decision. Emily wanted to see lives restored, not ruined, so she became a physician.

Her parents had married in Ireland and arrived in Philadelphia with their first son when he was three months old. Emily grew up with four brothers and two sisters on what is now Art Museum property on Spring Garden Street. The family attended Fourth Reformed Presbyterian Church.

Alexander left a fairly substantial estate when he died in 1888, which enabled Emily to attend the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Right after graduating in 1894 she became Assistant Superintendent of the newly opened State Asylum for the Chronic Insane (now the Wernersville State Hospital) in Wernersville, Pennsylvania, just west of Reading.

A few years later she returned to Philadelphia. An older brother, James, was also a doctor, but he drowned during a vacation in Florida in 1899. It was a difficult time because her mother died the year before and the residue of her father’s estate was divided among the remaining children. In 1901 she married a fellow physician, Samuel Truman Auge. He had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, which at that time was exclusively for men. 

They were both in private practice and made their new home at 2734 Wharton Street. She became chief of surgery at West Philadelphia Hospital for Women, which specialized in maternity cases and obstetrics. (It was incorporated into the University of Pennsylvania in 1964.) Truman was on staff at Samaritan Hospital, founded in 1892 and renamed Temple University Hospital in 1929. Emily gave birth to Emily W. Auge in 1904 and Eleanor F. Auge in 1909.

As time went on, Truman was associated with Philadelphia General Hospital and also served as a medical inspector for the city’s Bureau of Health. Emily became the senior chief of surgery at Woman’s Hospital of Philadelphia, shown here, which was the teaching hospital beside her alma mater on North College Avenue.

The 1920 census lists husband and wife living separately. Truman’s father died in 1915 in his home at 2802 North Broad Street, and that’s where Truman was living with his sister and her husband. It was an easier commute since it was just down the street from Samaritan Hospital, but he listed his marital status as single. Meanwhile, Emily resided at 233 North 40th Street with her daughters and a sister, and she listed her marital status as married.

Truman died suddenly from a stroke in 1925 at his Broad Street address while daughter Emily was at Cornell University and Eleanor was in high school. Their mother continued her work as a surgeon while also founding the Clinic of Notre Dame at 47th & Wyalusing Avenue and serving as chief urologist.

Dr. Auge moved to a large duplex at 3712 Baring Street by 1930 with her two daughters and two sisters. One day, after another schedule of performing routine surgeries, she came home from work, enjoyed her meal, had a sudden heart attack, and died.

A funeral service was conducted at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 35th & Baring Street, where her daughter Emily had been married three years earlier.  A memorial service was also held at Notre Dame Clinic a few weeks later. The Whitten family monument, above,  lists her on one side underneath her parents’ names. Among those inscribed on the other sides are four siblings, a nephew, and her daughter, Eleanor. Dr. Emily also has a small individual stone.