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The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West.
Women Medical Students – 1893
“No Women Need Apply.” These four discouraging words of admonition often greeted female physicians looking for jobs in the frontier-era West. Despite the dire need for medical help, it seemed most trappers, miners, and emigrants would rather suffer and die than be treated by a female doctor. Nevertheless dozens of highly trained women headed West, where they endured hardship and prejudice as they set broken limbs, performed operations, and delivered generations of babies-and solidified a place for women in the medical field.
In the beginning, western communities where Doctor Mary Canaga Rowland practiced were reluctant to accept her skills. After hanging her shingle out in Lebanon, Oregon, she overheard people talking as they passed by her sign. “Doctor Mary Canaga Rowland, a woman doctor, well, well, well…” The first patient she saw in Oregon in 1909, was not opposed to women doctors. In fact he sought her out for just that reason: “He was a little boy of ten or eleven. He came to me about half past eleven one night and woke me up to take care of his hurt finger. He was crying and I asked him how he happened to come to me and he said, “Cause I know’d you’re a woman and you’d be careful…”
To learn more about Mary Canaga Rowland and other lady healers on the frontier read The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West.
