Dr. Susan Anderson

By Anna Kathryn Lanier

The genre I have fallen into as far my writing goes is American Western. Though most of my stories are contemporary, the Early American West is really dear to my heart. The women of the west fascinate me. The hardships they endured following either their men or their own hearts west are amazing. But they went and helped to shape the west and the country as much, if not more, than the men.

One such woman was Dr. Susan Anderson, who practiced medicine in the mining towns of Colorado when women doctors were far and few between.

Susan Anderson, born in 1870, she and her brother were both well-educated by their parents. After her parents’ divorce, she moved with her father and brother to Kansas. There she excelled in Morse code, but when she told her father she wanted to be a telegrapher, William told her to set her sights higher and become a physician.

(Susan with her brother and father)
After graduating high school in 1892, Susan followed her father and step-mother to Colorado. In 1893 she enrolled into the University of Michigan’s medical school. With the handful of other women in the school Susan attended the co-ed lectures, but the anatomy class was separated by the sexes. The school did not think men and women should take this class together.

As Susan attended medical school, she also interned at the local hospital. The hours were grueling and it was at the hospital that she contracted tuberculosis, a disease that plagued her the rest of her life. After graduating in 1897, she turned down a position at the hospital and instead returned to Colorado to practice and to improve her health in the clean air.

(Susan's graduation picture)

There were 55 other doctors in the area she settled, so she drew mostly female patients. However, her proficiency in cleaning wounds and staving off infections—thus prevent amputations—grew her reputation as a good doctor. The thriving practice and clean fresh air did improve her health, as did her engagement to marry a man she loved.
Tragedy struck twice, however, in a short amount of time. First, her fiancée left her at the altar, breaking her heart. Before she could pick up the pieces of her broken engagement, her beloved brother and best friend John died of influenza. Dr. Anderson was sent into a deep depression and to help lift her spirits, she travelled Colorado. Finally settling in Denver, she once again set up a practice, but with a glutton of physicians already in the area, the budding business floundered. She then moved to Greeley and took a job as a nurse in the local hospital.

When a typhoid epidemic struck the area, she decided to leave for the good of her health and moved to Fraser, Co. There, she decided to practice medicine again and opened shop. After proving herself a good doctor, her practice thrived. “She mended bullet wounds, set broken limbs, and even removed abscessed teeth.” She was so admired by the local loggers she treated that they built her a house.

Dr. Anderson became well-known throughout Colorado and the country. Colorado General Hospital recognized her as an exceptional healer and Grand County, Co. appointed her as coroner.

As coroner, she held the commission overseeing the blasting of a tunnel through the mountain accountable for any on-the-job deaths or injuries due to safety negligence. When accidents did happen in the tunnel, she’d travel the six miles into the Moffat Tunnel to give first aid and retrieve dead bodies.

Dr. Anderson practiced for more than 50 years. At age 88, she was hospitalized and lived the remainder of her life in Colorado General Hospital. After her death in 1960, she was buried near her brother in Cripple Creek, Colorado.

Reference:
THE DOCTOR WORE PETTICOATS by Chris Enss

Further reading:
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-drsusy.html
http://www.ellensplace.net/hcg_fac3.html

Next month, I’m teaching a class on Pioneering Women of the West. Win a free workshop by leaving a comment. One lucky winner will receive a free workshop registration. Another commenter will win a copy of my ebook SALVATION BRIDE….the heroine is a mail-order bride and practicing physician.

Pioneering Women of the West Workshop
By Anna Kathryn Lanier

August 1-31, 2011
Hearts Through History RWA’s Campus
www.heartsthroughhistory.com

The West was discovered by men looking for adventure and fortune. But it was civilized by women who brought families, schools, churches, and stability to the area.

In PIONEERING WOMEN OF THE WEST, you’ll learn about the western movement, the treacherous journey hundreds of thousands people took and of the lives of specific women who helped shape the West, intentionally or not. Some women went looking for a better life; others followed their man into the wilderness.

There will be three lectures a week, with time for questions and answers and additional research on the participants’ part.


Anna Kathryn Lanier
www.aklanier.com
www.annakathrynlanier.blogspot.com

Frontier Medicine

In my novella SALVATION BRIDE, the heroine Laura Slade, is a trained doctor. Set in the 1870’s, this was not common, but possible. By this time, several medical schools admitted women. Laura, however, didn’t. Instead, she apprenticed under her Uncle John, who had been to medical school and served as a doctor in the Civil War.

More common in the 19th Century women were home-trained healers and midwives, who learned the art of healing from their mothers and grandmothers. My current work in progress takes place in the 1860’s shortly after the Civil War. The hero, Garrison and the heroine, Sammie, are on a wagon train heading West. Sammie has been trained as a healer by her mother. She takes with her on the trip her medicine chest.

The chest would contain such items as those listed in BLEED, BLISTER, AND PURGE by Volney Steele, M.D. Common household remedies would be “feverfew, fleabane, boneset, rhubarb, oak of Jerusalem, thyme [and] marjoram,” (page 138). A few store-bought items would also be included: Opium tincture or laudanum and whiskey for pain and surgeon’s plaster to bind broken limbs (the latter comes in handy when Garrison breaks a bone during the trip).

Sammie would know how to make poultices to relieve pain, help heal burns and possibly, even, to prevent pregnancy. She’d make plaster of mustard to “ease the ache of bruises, arthritis, and pleurisy.” She might even apply sugar to wounds, once commonly known to dry out a fresh wound and inhibit the growth of bacteria. (page 143).

Cholera was the most common and the deadliest disease to sweep through a wagon train or settlement. It wasn’t understood at the time that cholera was caused by contaminated drinking water. The best way to fight the disease was to replace fluids ‘volume to volume” as the patient suffered from severe diarrhea. However, this treatment was not well known. Opium, if available, was also given to “relieve the pain and slow down the increased bowel action and cramps,” (page 80).

Diphtheria, measles, small pox and scarlet fever were all deadly diseases, especially among children, with no cures but to wait it out. Diphtheria, in particular, was the most dreaded. Highly contagious, a single case could start an epidemic, resulting in a high number of children dying when a “pseudo-membrane in the throat and pharynx…obstructed the windpipe and shut off air to the lungs.” If the child survived this, she might still die from heart failure, caused when a potent toxin was secreted that effected the heart, (page 264).

One often overlooked disease on the frontier was scurvy, which was almost as deadly to the immigrants as cholera. With a common diet of corn meal, flour, beans and boiled or salted beef and few fresh vegetables and fruit, scurvy ran rampant in the West. Scurvy affects the overall health of the patient, causing extreme fatigue, nausea, pain in the muscles and joints of the body, bleeding of the gums (oftentimes resulting in the loss of teeth) and hair and skin become dry. The simple cure for scurvy is the intake of Vitamin C, but the correlation between diet and scurvy was not discovered until the late 1800’s. Ironically, a common native plant along the trail, watercress, was full of Vitamin C and would have been a simple cure to this disease, if the immigrants had only known.

Many an immigrant’s diary is filled with entries of sickness and death on the journey. In COVERED WAGON WOMEN by Kenneth Holmes, two journalists note such occurrences. Anna King, on page 42, relates, “I wrote to you at Fort Larim that the whooping cough and measles went through our camp, and after we took the new route a slow, lingering fever prevailed….Eight of our two families have gone to their long home. Upwards to fifty died on the new route.”

Sallie Hester reports “We had two deaths in our train within the past week of cholera – young men going West to seek their fortune. We buried them on the banks of the Blue River, far from home and friends,” (page 237).

By today’s standards, medicine in the 19th Century was crude in the best of hospitals. On the frontier, it was downright rudimentary. As much as I’d love to give my heroines insight to the knowledge we have now, I shall have to resist and let them heal their patience with the remedies tired and true at the times.

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I’ll give away a copy of SALVATION BRIDE, an best-seller from The Wild Rose Press to one lucky commenter. Also, anyone leaving a comment on my blog today will be eligible for the Seduced by History monthly prize, a book bag full of romance novels (see left for the details).

Anna Kathryn Lanier

Where Tumbleweeds Hang Their Hats
http://www.aklanier.com/
http://annakathrynlanier.blogspot.com/

Housing in the 1800's America

Houses in the 19th Century were not the way we know ours to be today....three bedrooms, two baths, family room, kitchen, dining room, maybe even an office. Oh, and don't forget the two-car garage. Or the carpet, tile, indoor plumbing, electric lights.

When you think about the size of the country and the population, it's easier to understand that most of America did not live in what we would consider a 'nice-sized' house. Keturah Belknap, in her diary reprinted in COVERED WAGON WOMEN, describes the house her husband built in the prairie land of Iowa. It was 24 feet x16 feet. (pp. 201) Most frontier homes had dirt floors. Or, if they were lucky, a puncheon (plank) flooring. Even in the city and larger towns, a great many citizens didn't have their own homes. They lived in crowded tenements or boarding houses.

Whether a tiny frontier cabin or a tiny tenement, the options were normally the same. Usually only the parents had their own bedroom, with infants or toddlers sharing the room. Older children shared not only a room, but a bed. Sometimes as many as five youngsters slept together. On other occasions, the bed would be shared with houseguests, or by houseguests. EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE 1800'S says that “Even travelers barely acquainted with one another slept together at roadside inns.” (pp. 92) When one had multiple bedrooms and hosted a large gathering of people, the custom was to put the men together in one room and the women together in another, sharing beds or bedrolls. Only the wealthy slept in “amply stuffed feather beds; the poor made do with straw mattresses.” (pp 92)

Kitchens were used for both preparing and cooking food and for warming the house. Until the invention of the cast-iron stove in the 1820's, the cooking was done in the open hearth. In their early days, it was mostly the rich who could afford these items that were made to cover the fireplace and burned one-third less wood. They were also waist high, so a woman didn't have to stoop to check the food. By the 1850's most homes except those on the frontier and the very poor had cast-iron stoves. Keturah tells us “I had never cooked a meal on a stove.” (pp 203) Instead, she cooked a meal for 12 “by the fire.”

Bathtubs, let alone bathrooms, were nearly unknown. Though the first tub was installed in a Boston hotel in the late 1820's, only hotels and wealthy households had them as fixtures by the 1850's. EVERYDAY LIFE tells us “previously, a round, wooden or tin tub was hauled out onto the kitchen floor or onto the bedroom and filled with hot water from the fireplace or stove.” (pp 92) Having seen some of these tubs in antebellum home tours, I can tell you that one could not sit back and relax in them, as we often read of romance heroes doing.

Chamber sets consisted of a basin and pitcher for washing, a cup for brushing the teeth and a chamber pot. EVERYDAY LIFE explains that hotels provided the sets in the 1830's, with homes using them by the 1840's. (pp 94).

Since there was no electricity or a flick of the switch to provide lights, households used several different methods to illuminate the household after dark. Candles were the most common throughout the country, especially during the first half of the century. Lamps were used as well. Whale-oil lamps made of tin, brass or pewter were used through the 1880's. Lard-oil lamps became popular in the 1840's. Kerosene lamps were widely used after 1865 and replaced whale-oil lamps for the most part. Kerosene tended to produce a smoky, torchlike light.

So, we can see that life was not at all full of the conveniences we have today, but you already knew that. What one modern convenience would you miss the most if you had to go back in time? Leave a comment and you could win a copy of my novella “Salvation Bride,” my mail-order story set in 1873 Texas. Can determined doctor Laura Ashton heal Sheriff David Slade’s pain before the dark secret in her past turns up to steal his Salvation Bride?

EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE 1800'S: A Guide for Writers, Students & Historians, by Marc McCutcheon

COVERED WAGON WOMEN: Diaries & Letters From The Western Trails, 1840-1849, edited by Kenneth L. Holmes

Anna Kathryn Lanier
Where Tumbleweeds Hang Their Hats
Heartwarming, Sensual Westerns
http://www.aklanier.com/