The Beloved Santa Barbara Doctor

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

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.