Journal Notes

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The Doctor Was A Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier

Eighteen-year-old Nellie Mattie MacKnight stepped confidently into the spacious examination room at San Francisco’s Toland Hall Medical School. Thirty-five male students stationed around cadavers spread out on rough board tables turned to watch the bold young woman enter. The smell of decomposing corpses mixed with the tobacco smoke wafting out of the pipes some of the students were puffing on, and it assaulted Helen’s senses. Her knees weakened a bit as she strode over to her appointed area while carrying a stack of books and a soft rawhide case filled with operating tools.

To her fellow students, Nellie was a delicate female with no business studying medicine. Determined to prove them wrong, she stood up straight, opened her copy of Gray’s Anatomy, and removed the medical instruments from the case. It was the spring of 1891. She nodded politely at the future doctors glowering at her. A tall, dapper, bespectacled professor stood at the front of the classroom, watching Nellie’s every move. The sour expression on his face showed his disdain for a woman’s invasion into this masculine territory.

The assignment the students were required to complete within an hour was the dissection of male cadavers’ heads, upper torsos, and pelvic regions. The part of the body Nellie was given to dissect was the pelvis. She studied the corpse lying before her, then nervously flipped through her anatomy textbook.

The students at the other operating tables around her were busy cutting and slicing, but Nellie couldn’t bring herself to pick up a scalpel. The annoyed instructor strode over to her, his brows furrowed. “Do you expect to graduate in medicine or are you just playing around?” he snarled. “I hope to graduate,” Nellie responded in a small voice. All eyes turned to watch the exchange between the professor and the first-year student.

To find out if Nellie was able to complete the assignment read

The Doctor Was A Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier

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A team of bald-faced horses pulling a buckboard wagon galloped wildly along a dirt road, heading toward the Santa Ynez Mountains, twenty miles outside of Santa Barbara. The driver, a pudgy man wearing a worried expression, urged the animals along. Dr. Harriet Belcher, a distinguished-looking forty-year-old woman with dark hair and dark eyes, held tightly to the railing next to her seat with her right hand and clutched a leather medical bag to her chest with her left.

The doctor had been summoned to help a young man suffering with erysipelas, a bacterial infection in the blood that had spread to the heart valves and bones. His condition was serious, and Harriet was needed right away. The driver and passenger rode through the rough country of deep creeks and high ridges. It was eight thirty at night when they came to a creek that was off the beaten trail, which the horses balked crossing. Tall black mountains loomed before them, and a half-moon emerged from behind a cluster of clouds. Though she didn’t know for sure, Dr. Belcher sensed they were lost, and she wanted to cry from sheer hopelessness. A man’s life depended upon her, and she was anxious to get to the patient.

The wagon hurried along over rocky, winding paths and under dense stands of oak trees. A singular pack of coyotes was standing in an open space at the top of a hill, and it quickly scattered without making a sound as the vehicle approached. After dragging the wagon over a row of tree trunks, the driver brought the horses to a stop. He hopped out of the wagon and hurried ahead of the team on foot. He returned moments later, climbed back into the vehicle, snatched up a whip resting beside his seat, and snapped it at the horses. The wagon jerked forward, and the team proceeded down a steep embankment into a dry streambed, over boulders, and up the opposite bank. The wagon creaked and groaned, and Harriet feared it wouldn’t make it to their destination.

To learn what happened to Dr. Belcher and her patient read

The Doctor Was A Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier.

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A loud rap on the door of the hat shop coaxed the diminutive young woman from her work of loading bolts of fabric into a trunk. The scruffy messenger on the other side of the door smiled politely when Bethenia Owens greeted him and then handed her a letter. The monogram on the envelope showed that the correspondence came from Dr. Palmer, a prominent physician in the northwestern area of the United States.

The messenger waited patiently for Bethenia to break the seal on the envelope and read the enclosed note. “How sad,” she said to no one in particular. “One of our elder citizens passed away . . . and six local physicians who treated him at one time or another want to do an autopsy. And as one of the newest doctors in town, I’m invited to attend the operation.”

The messenger grinned and nodded, anticipating a negative response. Bethenia knew the invitation was meant as a joke and was determined to turn the tables on the pranksters. There were very few women in medicine in 1872, and, by and large, they were not well received by men in the same profession. Bethenia studied the note, carefully considering the proper response. “Give Dr. Palmer and the others my regards,” she announced, “and tell them I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

A stunned look fell over the courier’s face as he turned and hurried off down the dusty thoroughfare in Roseburg, Oregon. Bethenia followed a safe distance behind the messenger to Dr. Palmer’s office, where she waited outside. She listened in as the courier relayed the information she had given him and heard the doctors laughing heartily. Bethenia opened the door, momentarily interrupting the merriment.

One of the doctors regained his composure and walked toward her with his hand outstretched. She shook it, and the physician choked back a giggle. “Do you know the autopsy is on the genital organs?” he snickered. “No,” Bethenia replied, “but one part of the human body should be as sacred to the physician as another.” The mood in the room quickly changed to one of disbelief and then, in an instant, to indignation.

To learn more about Dr. Owens and other brave physicians like her read

The Doctor Was A Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier

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“Historian Enss (The Widowed Ones) profiles in this colorful account 10 of the first female physicians on America’s Western frontier. She portrays them as highly determined individuals, whose resolve not only saw them through the medical schools that resisted admitting them, but also through the treatment of recalcitrant patients…Between the brief biographies are insightful notes on topics such as treating influenza, sterilizing patients, and extracting bullets. Readers who enjoyed Campbell Olivia’s Women in White Coats will want to check this out.”

― Publishers Weekly

Ten percent of all sales of The Doctor Was A Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier is being donated to Hospice Care. The book is available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, and everywhere books are sold.

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She cut. The bullet that slammed into the injured cowboy’s chest had come to rest next to his lungs and had to be removed. Dr. Emma French widely opened the wound to extract the slug. Her hand was steady and eyes sharp. She was no stranger to performing complicated medical procedures under pressure.

A woman in the profession in the 1890s was not readily accepted, and some ran the risk of being beaten if they were discovered practicing medicine. As this was an emergency, Dr. French was given a free hand to do whatever she could to save the two patients before her.

A pair of cowboys had gotten into a drunken brawl and were seriously hurt as a result. One had been shot, and the other cut to pieces with a knife. After tending to the gunshot victim, she turned her attention to the man with the knife wounds. She put back into place intestines and muscle and stitched the inebriated soul together.

The incident occurred in Winslow, Arizona, in December 1892. A respected male physician visiting from Santa Fe, New Mexico, was called to the scene first, but after examining the two men, he decided it was hopeless and left them to die.

The authorities decided to send for Dr. French to see if she could save their lives. Within two weeks of the doctor operating on the mortally wounded men, both were back on their feet and back in the saloon.

The Doctor Was a Woman

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To learn more about Dr. French and other daring lady practitioners read

The Doctor Was A Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier

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The Doctor Was A Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier

This wonderful photograph is of medical students acting up while studying for an anatomy test in 1892. To learn about their struggle to follow their dream to become a doctor when you read The Doctor Was A Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier.

“Historian Enss (The Widowed Ones) profiles in this colorful account 10 of the first female physicians on America’s Western frontier. She portrays them as highly determined individuals, whose resolve not only saw them through the medical schools that resisted admitting them, but also through the treatment of recalcitrant patients…Between the brief biographies are insightful notes on topics such as treating influenza, sterilizing patients, and extracting bullets.”   Publishers Weekly

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The Doctor Was A Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier

The gunshot victim occupying a room in Dr. Sofie Herzog’s office winced in pain while struggling to remain still. His discomfort was not entirely due to the bullet lodged in his abdomen but to the uncomfortable position in which the Brazoria, Texas, physician had him placed. The lower half of the man’s body had been raised, with his ankles fashioned to a horizontal pole. The upper portion of his body was flat against the mattress.

Dr. Herzog’s procedure for removing bullets and buckshot was unconventional but had proven to be successful. It had been her personal experience that probing the wound in search of the bullet with a surgical instrument was detrimental to the patient. If, indeed, she had to do any probing at all, she preferred to use her fingers, but that was only a last resort. After tending to more than a dozen gunshot wounds, the doctor had learned the most effective way to deal with such an injury was to let gravity do the work.

When the victim’s body was elevated, the bullet often found its way to the surface for easy extraction. Dr. Herzog’s reputation for the treatment of gunshot sufferers spread rapidly throughout the region in the 1890s. Her talents were in constant demand. When she’d removed more than twenty bullets from outlaws and lawmen alike, she had a necklace made from the slugs, with gold links to separate each projectile.

To learn more about Dr. Herzog and her revolutionary medical treatments read

The Doctor Was A Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier

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Blood gushed from fifty-three-year-old sheepherder George Webb’s head as physician Thomas Maghee eased the man onto a hospital bed in his office in Rawlins, Wyoming. Dr. Maghee’s assistant, Lillian Heath, covered what was left of the injured patient’s nose and mouth with a chloroform-soaked cloth, and within a few moments, Webb was unconscious. Lillian helped Dr. Maghee peel layers of bandages and rags saturated with sanguine fluid from Webb’s neck and face.

The potentially fatal wound had been caused by a self-inflicted gunshot. George Webb no longer wanted to live and, on November 2, 1886, had attempted suicide. According to the Colorado Medicine Journal, Webb had “placed a shotgun containing a charge of eighteen buckshot in each barrel on his body, pressed the muzzle under his chin and fired one charge with his foot.” When the gun fired, the concussion knocked him back a bit, and the ammunition had exploded in his face. “The chin, lips, nose, anterior portions of the mandible and alveolar border of the superior maxilla, in fact everything from the pomum adami to the tip of the nasal bone was destroyed,” noted the author of the story in the medical journal.

Webb’s suicide attempt had taken place on his ranch some thirty miles from Rawlins. Friends transported him to Dr. Maghee’s office, where Maghee and aspiring physician Lillian Heath cleaned and dressed the wound and prepared the injured man for surgery.

To learn more about Dr. Heath’s role in the surgery and her career read

The Doctor Was A Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier

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“Enss follows up Doctor Wore Petticoats with 10 more accounts of women healers who plied their trade during the early days of American frontier settlement. Women physicians encountered predictable resistance in the East, but out West, healers of Western medicine were scarce, offering these new physicians the chance to practice their skills in the community. Not surprisingly, women doctors faced criticism because people doubted their abilities and many considered a woman clinician to be “unwomanly.” However, Enss illuminates how their boldness and persistence earned them respect from frontier patients and other clinicians. At the end of each chapter, there’s a case study report written by that doctor on some aspects of her clinical experience, including plastic surgery, dentistry, autopsies, reproductive illnesses, and others.

Verdict:  A collection of tales about real superhero women and how they won respect. This title would be a good museum store book or as an adjunct resource for a senior high classroom module on the American West.”

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The Doctor Was a Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier

The Doctor Was a Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier is a women’s history that profiles ten selected female doctors who made their marks and helped patients in the days of the Wild West.

From Wyoming and Nevada to California, these women did more than treat gunshot wounds. They fought lung disease, pioneered dental techniques, often became the first women to practice medicine in their areas, and overcame much male resistance to the notion to achieve their goals.

Chris Enss outlines history in a reasoned manner, presenting instances where women were as prejudiced about the notion of female physicians as their male counterparts:

“Lillian had difficulties with female patients too. One elderly woman in town frequently asked Dr. Heath to make house calls but had no intention of paying her. The woman was a minister’s wife, and Lillian felt her behavior should have been better than the average person’s. She only responded to the woman’s calls for help a handful of times. Eventually, she refused to continue seeing her because the minister’s wife refused to compensate her for her services because she was a woman doctor.”

Thus, personal biographical sketches weave into community and Western history in a manner that represents all the perceptions, reactions, and influences on female physicians of the times.

Enss also includes footnoted references to source materials and notes to document this background, including a 1921 tuberculosis symptoms public health report and how women such as Dr. Sofie Herzog (who was employed by the railroad to treat its workers and patrons) made names for themselves against all odds. Black and white vintage photos pepper the story, bringing these people and times to life.

The Doctor Was a Woman reads with the drama of fiction and the authority of well-researched nonfiction. It is highly recommended for women’s history collections, American history holdings, libraries attractive to medical students and researchers, and general-interest audiences alike. Its powerful stories are sterling examples of early women who succeeded, yet are rarely mentioned in the chronicles of medical or American history.

In the aforementioned Sophie Herzog’s case:

“Although Sofie was employed with the railroad, she continued to maintain her own practice. Not only did she treat those suffering with everything from deep cuts to pneumonia, but she was also intent on finding cures for more serious ailments such as smallpox.”

To learn more about the first female physicians on the frontier read

The Doctor Was a Woman

Midwest Book Review