Wyoming’s First Female Physician

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

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