female doctor

The rough-and-tumble town of Deadwood, South Dakota, was home to a variety of notorious western characters in the mid-1800s.  Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Calamity Jane were just a few of the infamous names associated with the gold-mining camp.  These three legends of the West were at one time patients of the first...

Eighteen-year-old Nellie Mattie MacKnight stepped confidently into the spacious dissecting room at San Francisco’s Toland Hall Medical School.  Thirty-five male students stationed around cadavers spread out on rough board tables turned to watch the bold young women enter.  The smell of decomposing corpses mixed with tobacco smoke wafting out of the pipes some of the...

Fifteen-year-old Bethenia Owens-Hill stared out the window of her aunt’s farmhouse, rocking her infant son to sleep.  A brisk wind pelted the glass with sand and dust.  Drought-twisted sagebrush tumbled past her bleak, hazy view and continued on.  Bethenia’s baby whimpered a bit and she kissed his tiny forehead.  Tears drifted down her face and...

Eighteen year-old Nellie Mattie MacKnight stepped confidently into the spacious dissecting room at San Francisco’s Toland Hall Medical School.  Thirty-five male students stationed around cadavers spread out on rough board tables, turned to watch the bold young women enter.  The smell of decomposing corpses mixed with tobacco smoke wafting out of the pipes some of...