Emeline Horton Cleveland (September 22, 1829 – December 8, 1878)[1] was an American physician and one of the first women to perform major abdominal or gynecological surgery in the United States.

She became one of the first woman physicians associated with a large public hospital in the United States, and she established one of the first nursing assistant training programs in the country.

[1] Though Cleveland had childhood aspirations of becoming a missionary, her father's death led her to work as a teacher in order to fund her college education.

By late 1856, she was invited to teach anatomy courses at the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, so Cleveland and her husband returned to Philadelphia.

[2] In 1875, an article was published in a regional medical journal regarding Cleveland's performance of an ovariotomy in a patient who had been suffering from a cystic tumor of the ovary that had led to a large fluid collection within the abdomen.

These factors may have helped her succeed in a male-dominated field because she was not seen as trying to upset the social order between men and women.

[7] Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi, an influential physician who attended the Female Medical College in the 1860s, said that Cleveland was "a woman of real ability... personal beauty, and grace of manner.