The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West (11 page)

BOOK: The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West

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By the age of sixteen, Mary had graduated from high school and had been given permission from her parents to further her education at a school in the nearby town of Indianola. She found a place to live where she could work for her room and board. During the three-month break in between terms, Mary taught school and prepared herself as much as she could for the day she could attend medical college.

During her time at the school in Indianola, Mary met a lawyer and teacher by the name of J. Walter Rowland. Walter was a widower with four children, and although he was a fine teacher, it was not his life’s ambition. Like Mary, he too had an interest in medicine. Their common goal to become doctors sparked a friendship that quickly blossomed into romance.

Mary and Walter courted for five years. During that time both had decided to go forward with their pursuit to be doctors. Walter left for Missouri to attend the Kansas City Medical College. Mary took a job as a schoolteacher in nearby Goodland, Kansas, and provided Walter with funds to get him through school. He promised to do the same for her when the time came.

Shortly after Walter graduated, he and Mary decided to get married. The two exchanged vows on March 26, 1897, and then moved to Herndon, Kansas, where Walter established a medical practice.

A doctor’s services in the growing midwestern territory were greatly needed. The nearest hospital was 300 miles away, and other physicians were far and few between. A myriad of patients visited Doctor Walter Rowland at the couple’s home office at all hours of the day and night. Mary had not had any formal medical training at that time and could only act as Walter’s nurse. She assisted him on house calls as well, helping with bandaging and dressing wounds and providing the moral support necessary to deal with difficult cases. Before settling down in the evenings, she studied his medical journals:

It was a fortunate thing for me that I could bury myself in Doctor Rowland’s medical books. I wanted to understand everything so that I might be of help to him. How wonderful to study the human body, its physical makeup, the why and where of each part and its function; to study how to tell one ailment from another, the best forms of treatment and how the baby develops in the mother.

After the Rowlands had been in Herndon for a year, Walter suggested Mary enroll at a school in Topeka, Kansas. In the fall of 1898, Mary happily entered the institution to begin her first year of study. She described herself in her journal as “full of ambition to be taught” and “absorbed in learning about the human body.”

Mary enjoyed the required medical courses of chemistry, anatomy, and pharmaceutical instruction, and because she’d had practical experience in each subject, she made excellent marks. She transferred in 1899 to the Women’s Medical College of Kansas City, Missouri, and graduated school in 1901. She then returned to Herndon and joined her husband in his thriving practice.

One of the first cases she treated involved broken bones. The way some of the injuries occurred was shocking to the new doctor. A family sent a nine-year-old Bohemian boy out at four in the morning on a June morning to herd cattle. About ten in the morning he grew sleepy and the cattle were doing all right so he lay down to sleep in the deep rut of the road. It was shaded by grass. It was time to cut the wheat and some men drove along with a team hitched to a header box, but because the rut was deep and the grass long, they didn’t see him lying there. The little fellow woke up as the horses were passing over him. He tried to get out, but a wheel caught him across the thigh and broke the bone; it also cut his head.

Her method for treating the hurt boy was just as unconventional as the accident that had brought him to her care. Although Mary followed the instructions given in her college book on minor surgery, Walter worried the patient’s leg would not mend. Mary, however, was confident the procedure she used would work:

The men called for me and I put the lad on a flat bed on his back. Then I ran adhesive tape down both sides of the broken leg and under the foot. I ran a bandage through the tape beneath his foot and to this I attached a flat iron for traction. This method is called Buck’s Extension. When the femur breaks, the muscles pull the broken ends apart and they do not heal. With continuous pull, however, the muscles give way after a while and the leg straightens out.

Mary let the boy rest in that position for a few days. After eight weeks, the boy’s leg had healed so completely that no one could detect it had been broken.

Once Mary felt her career as a doctor was on firm footing, she and Walter made plans to start a family. Both longed to have children of their own, and on April 25, 1902, the couple had a daughter. Mary named the baby Nellie:

As soon as I heard her cry she was mine against the world, and as long as life should last. I love my husband and now I loved my baby. It seemed that life had given me everything that one could desire. My heart was full of joy. My cup was running over. Surely God had laid his hand on me to bless me.

Mary and Walter barely had a chance to enjoy their little girl when tragedy struck the family. In what authorities described as a senseless act of violence, Walter was struck down by a town merchant named George W. Dull. The two men had exchanged words in a heated argument that to this day remains a mystery. Dull hit Rowland over the head with a blunt object, killing him almost instantly.

Doctor Mary Rowland laid her husband to rest beside his first wife at the cemetery in Indianola. Her grief was overwhelming at times, but she knew she needed to see beyond it to concentrate on providing for her child. Less than a month after Walter’s murder, Mary resumed her work as town physician.

Her schedule was hectic. She would see to patients and then hurry off to nurse her baby. A young girl helped her with housework duties, meals, and laundry.

The loss of Doctor Walter Rowland was keenly felt in Mary’s life as well as in the community. Male patients could not bring themselves to be seen by a woman physician and decided to live with their ailments rather than seek Mary’s expertise. Until she could prove herself capable of saving lives, most men stayed away.

A true test of her medical skills came in June of 1902, when she was called on to help a woman in labor who was dying. Mary’s fragile patient was a seventeen-year-old girl, eight months along and suffering from convulsions. The convulsions momentarily stopped after Mary gave the teenager a small dose of morphine that put her to sleep. When the young woman awoke the next morning and her convulsions started again, Doctor Rowland decided to dilate the uterus and take the baby.

It sounds easy but the uterus has the strongest muscle in the body and it contracted on my hand like a vise. It was some time before I was able to bring down the baby’s foot. When I had succeeded in bringing down both feet and legs, my hand and arm were paralyzed and I let an assistant finish delivering the baby. . . . After a while he said, “I can’t get the head out.” Then I instructed him to let the baby’s legs straddle his arm and to slip his fingers in the baby’s mouth. After doing this the baby flexed its chin on its chest and slipped right out.

The young woman’s condition was questionable for a few hours, but Mary was able to nurse the weak new mother back to health. Mary’s ability in such a crucial circumstance earned her the respect and confidence of the men who had stopped seeking medical attention.

Doctor Rowland’s reputation as a “fine woman physician” soon spread throughout the territory. Although her practice was consistently busy, she did not make a large salary. Many people offered her food and handmade items, as opposed to hard currency, in exchange for her care. She worried a great deal about how she would be able to continue providing for her daughter.

Concern for her child’s well-being and the desire for a companion’s support prompted her to accept a marriage proposal from a local businessman. Mary first met August Kleint when he was working as the town butcher. He had since abandoned that job in favor of a profession in real estate. The couple had problems from the moment they exchanged vows in 1904. August was resentful of the time Mary spent away from home with her patients. They battled over the changes he wanted her to make. Mary called their union “the greatest mistake of her life.” Within a year of their marriage, the couple separated. They were not officially divorced, however, until 1909.

Some time before the dissolution of Mary’s second marriage, she decided to turn her attention almost solely to the study of medicine. She wanted to go back to school and learn more about the subject that had become her life. With Nellie in tow she traveled to Omaha, Nebraska, and enrolled at the Creighton University School of Medicine. On April 19, 1905, Doctor Mary Rowland received her second medical degree.

Once Doctor Rowland graduated from Creighton University, she and her daughter moved to Topeka. She opened another practice, but quickly grew tired of the blowing dust and wind that was so prevalent in Kansas. From there she relocated to Lebanon, Oregon, and for the third time in her career, she opened a medical office.

In the beginning, both communities were reluctant to accept her skills. After hanging her shingle out in Lebanon, she overheard people talking as they passed by the sign. “Doctor Mary Canaga Rowland, a woman doctor, well, well, well . . .” The first patient she saw in Oregon was not opposed to women doctors. In fact he sought her out for just that reason:

He was a little boy of ten or eleven. He came to me about half past eleven one night and woke me up to take care of his hurt finger. He had been in a bowling alley and a ball had hit his finger. He was crying and I asked him how he happened to come to me and he said, “Cause I know’d you’re a woman and you’d be careful . . .”

The cornerstone of Mary’s practice was always family medicine. She did, however, seek out job opportunities in other areas of the field. Hoping to aid United States soldiers fighting in the Mexican-American War, she traveled to Portland to join the U.S. Army. It was 1916, and military officials scoffed at her efforts before informing her that the Army did not take women. “I didn’t know the first thing about the organization of any army,” she later wrote in her autobiography. “I was unaware that women were not part of any army.” Mary’s brazen attempt to enlist made the front pages of several Oregon newspapers.

At the age of forty, Doctor Rowland uprooted her life again to continue her study of medicine. She left eleven-year-old Nellie behind while she attended a post-graduate school in New York. She appreciated the chance to add to her education, but found being away from her daughter quite difficult. Many of her letters to Nellie expressed her sorrow over the time they were apart. On August 4, 1913, she wrote:

My darling Baby, I am so homesick for you, dear, but you be a good girl and I’ll be back as soon as I can. I am learning a lot of new things here at the school and the hospital. I will send you some stamps in this letter so you can write to me often. Don’t forget Mamma and be a good girl. Write. A world of love for you, baby. Mamma.

The absence from her child proved too great to bear. In four months’ time, Mary was back home again with Nellie.

Doctor Rowland’s career as a female physician in the West spanned more than sixty years. In addition to maintaining a number of medical practices, she also held a position as the chief physician for the Chemawa Federal Indian School in Salem, Oregon, from 1913 to 1927.

In 1935, Mary remarried and had a second child. She kept up with her new family while attending to her patients, who suffered from illnesses ranging from measles to tuberculosis. Doctor Rowland’s life ended on August 1, 1966. She died from natural causes at her Salem home. She was ninety-three years of age.

ELLIS REYNOLDS SHIPP

CHILDREN’S DOCTOR