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 (“Doctors were few and far between in the unsettled land,” she writes, and yet “for a time it seemed most trappers, miners, and merchants would rather suffer than consult a woman doctor”). Among the “lady physicians” and “hen medics,” there was Lilian Heath, a pioneer of plastic surgery who in 1886 mended the face of a man who’d shot himself in despair (she told him he looked better after her 30 surgeries than before); Emma French, the 16th wife of a Mormon who received the midwifery training common among her sister wives; and Bessie Efner, who was seduced to Wyoming by boosters of the Union Pacific Railroad Company, only to find that the men were unwilling to see her—her first patient was a horse she cured of colic. 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. (Feb.)