January 8, 2018 • 32 mins
We have talked before on the show about pioneers who advanced the medical field specifically as it relates to infants, and today’s subject is definitely another to add to that list. But, there are some problematic elements to her story.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Uh So,
today we're going to talk about the topic that a
lot of people have requested, the one that I have
noted as the most recent requesters. The listener, Amy, I'm
(00:24):
a little worried. I'm going to confess because, Um, we've
talked before in the show about pioneers who advanced the
medical field, specifically as it relates to infants. They're usually
super uplifting and really great stories. Today's subject definitely adds
to that medical improvement for the health of children, but
it also has some problematic elements, and I don't know
(00:45):
that people who have requested it necessarily know those problematic parts,
and they may be disappointed to discover them. I have
several things that are on not the specific topic that
we're about to talk about, but several things on my
episode suggestion list that I know that people who have
asked it are expecting, like a firming, uplifting story, but
there's like a bad side to it that Yeah, yes, Um,
(01:09):
I was describing this story to my husband in the
car this morning, as I often do, sort of as
a way to make sure I've got basses covered, and uh,
you know, all the logic flows, and he said, I
feel like history is full of this one m Night
Shamalan plot twist where people seem amazing and then they
turn out to have like this horrible thing about them,
(01:30):
usually racism. I was like, it's a really good way
to put it, especially this particular time period. Yes, so
we're talking about Mary breckan Ridge. She is known as
the founder of American nurse Midwiffrey and she's an iconic
figure in Kentucky. But as we have just alluded to
their problematic parts of her her ideology, there's some udenics
(01:53):
we're gonna get to you. So we're gonna talk first
about sort of her life and what led her to
do this, and and then at the end will discuss
these problematic elements. So let's hit it. Mary Breckenridge was
born in Memphis, Tennessee, on February one. Her father, Clifton
Rhodes Breckenridge, was a congressman from Arkansas, so she spent
(02:14):
a lot of her childhood in Washington, d C. Yeah,
He's an interesting figure too. There's like a whole uh
scandal of voting scandal related to his his uh political career,
but maybe for another episode. After Washington, the Breckenridge Is
moved eventually across the globe to St. Petersburg, Russia, when
(02:35):
her father was appointed U S Minister to Russia, and
Mary's education, as you may guess from this uh life
of being in a pretty prominent family, was one of privilege.
She attended private schools in the US in Stanford, Connecticut
and at the Lausanne, Switzerland, and she had private tutors
in Russia as well. Basically everywhere they went she had
the best possible education. At the age of eighteen, Mary
(02:57):
moved to Arkansas, where she lived until her marriage to
Henry Ruffner Morrison, who was a lawyer. In nineteen o four.
Mary was widowed after just two years with her husband,
when Morrison died because of acute appendicitis. Still sort of
dealing with this loss, breck and Ridge enrolled in school again,
this time in New York City at a nursing school
(03:18):
at St. Luke's Hospital. She graduated and became a registered
nurse in nineteen ten, six years after the death of
her first husband, Mary got married a second time, this
time to the president of a woman's school in Eureka Springs, Arkansas,
Richard Ryan Thompson. Mary started to work at the school
as a teacher. Her international education lent itself to teaching language,
(03:40):
specifically French, and she also taught classes on hygiene. In
nineteen fourteen, Mary and Richard had a son, Clifton brick
and Ridge Thompson, who they nicknamed Brecky. Two years later,
in nineteen sixteen, they had a second child, this time
a daughter named Polly, and they were very excited about it,
but their joy was abruptly cut short. She died just
six hours after her birth. Mary wrote of this lost quote,
(04:05):
I grieved for the life she had missed, the splendid
work she might have done, the human motherhood she might
not know. Two years later, four year old Breckie also
died just days after his birthday. He got sick. He
underwent surgery to address what doctors thought was an intestinal blockage.
It became immediately clear that he had a serious abdominal infection,
(04:25):
and he never recovered. This death not only struck her
to the core as a grieving parent, but it also
really made Mary fear for her work and how it
would be perceived by the public. She had been writing
for several years about how to raise healthy children, and
she had, in the course of two years, lost both
of her own She was worried that people would think
(04:46):
that that meant she didn't know what she was talking about.
Throughout the rest of her life, she believed that Breckie
was ever present in a spiritual sense and that she
could communicate with him on the other side. The strain
of losing two chill dren also took a toll on
her marriage. Mary experienced bouts of depression which continued through
her life, and her husband, Richard, was not faithful. Mary
(05:09):
left Richard in nineteen eighteen while World War One was
still playing out, and she applied to work with the
American Red Cross as a nurse in Europe, but she
had to wait for an assignment. In case you are
ever looking at at information about her life, we didn't
go into it. They will often list her divorce as
nineteen twenty, which is when the divorce papers actually happened,
but they had been apart for two years by that point.
(05:30):
Uh this reason for her delay, though in joining the
Red Cross was due to the rule that no one
with a brother actively serving in the military could be
sent to areas where the war was taking place. This was,
you know, in order to preserve the family in the
likelihood that the place that the brother was stationed got
bombed or rated or attacked in some way, and like
(05:50):
a family would not lose multiple children at once. Uh.
Since Mary had a brother serving at the time, but
really felt strongly that she could make an impact on
the children of Europe who needed assistance, she and her
mother went to visit the head of the American Red
Cross Nursing Service, Jane Delano, and sort of lead her
case to get around the rule. Delano agreed that Mary
(06:11):
would be an asset, but she still couldn't send her
because of the brother rule. While Delano worked on Mary's behalf,
breck and Ridge took on a three month assignment, traveling
through the country collecting data on the state of children's
health and giving speeches. Yeah, and just to be clear
of that country is the u S. She went far
west and visited a variety of spaces places, and when
(06:32):
Mary was finally cleared you joined the Red Cross Children's
Bureau in France. She first went to Washington, d C.
To make arrangements and fill out the necessary paperwork, but
this actually ended up being quite a detour. All of
this was happening, you'll recall, in nineteen eighteen, and Washington,
d C, like many other places, was hit really hard
by the influenza epidemic, which we've talked about on the
(06:53):
show before. As a nurse, Mary was desperately needed, so
she volunteered to help. Almost immediately after seeing how badly
over texted the medical services in the area were, and
after she first asked Jane Delano if she could delay
her trip to France a little while longer, this volunteer
job almost immediately became more than Mary had anticipated. She
(07:14):
later wrote in her autobiography quote, the head nurse of
my area fell ill soon after I reported for duty,
so that I was plunged into the direction of nursing
care for thousands and thousands of stricken people. I don't
recall how many patients we had in my district at
the peak of the epidemic, but it could not have
been less than forty thousand. Nor do I remember how
many nurses I had to help me. But I don't
(07:36):
think there were more than five. We used hundreds of
aids for the day and nightcare of the patients with
pneumonia and the families where everybody had come down with influenza.
Many of these aids were clerks turned over to us
from the for the emergency by the government bureaus, and
only a few of them had received training in home
care of the sick. To compound matters, this situation was
(07:57):
so chaotic as medical person know, when people who had
sort of been requisitioned into being medical personnel to keep
up with the ever growing roster of patients, that records
were a little bit haphazard, she notes in her autobiography,
like some of the reasons clerks tended to write things
about the decease that had more to do with like
their area of knowledge than actually, we're really relevant to
(08:20):
the illness. Like one person worked UH for the government,
and they talked about how one of the deceased patients
had been UH sacking away sugar, like she had been
kind of hoarding sugar, And it was like, this isn't
relevant to her medical information at all. Why are you
putting this? But it was just the mindset of his
his or her. I don't know the gender uh. The
(08:41):
previous job made them think of things in those terms.
Bed Bugs were also a really bad problem in the
area that year, so nurses were fighting both influenza and
infestation of their patients homes. When the influenza epidemic had passed,
Mary went back to preparing to join the Red Cross,
but her passport and yalty papers had a longer processing
(09:02):
time than she had anticipated. Unwilling to just wait, she
filled the time with the Boston Instructive District Nursing Association,
where she furthered her education after an abbreviated version of
the association Association's training courses. She worked in underprivileged neighborhoods
and tenements in Boston. She later said of the experience, quote,
I was to be grateful a thousand times over after
(09:24):
I got to France of all that I learned in Boston.
By the time she had her passport, it was after
November eleventh, nineteen eighteen, and the war was over. But
she still felt compelled to go, and so she made
arrangements to be released from her obligation to the Red Cross,
which was no longer sending medical personnel to France. And
then she did travel to France to work with the
American Committee for Devastated France. That was an organization founded
(09:48):
by JP Morgan's daughter, Anne Morgan, in which Mary deeply loved,
second only to the one that she would later found herself.
We're going to talk about Mary's work in France, but
first we will pause for a little sponsor break. The
loss of her children had really been Breckinridge's inspiration to
(10:10):
doggedly pursue work in children's health, and she never lost
that sense of calling. She had been interested in children's
health before then, but she really became hyper focused on
it after that, and she had been able to focus
some of her public health work in Boston and Washington,
d c. On the needs of children, and she obviously
was working in that area as she toured the country
for her reporting assignment with the Children's Bureau. She then
(10:33):
carried that focus and passion for the care of children
to Europe as well. In her work with the a
c DF, she started a program that focused on the
needs of pregnant women, children, and nursing mothers, providing both
medical care and vitally needed nutrition. Even though the war
was over, there were still heavy restrictions on where she
could travel, so she had to once again wait for
(10:53):
a military permit to travel into the war zone. Once
she finally was approved, she saw immediately that the people
of Ants needed all the basics, clothing, betting, and above
all food. She wrote quote and the parts of France
occupied by the Germans, it was not a question of
the people returning to their shattered homes, because they were
already there when the Germans withdrew, But all around them
(11:15):
the ground, the bridges, the roads were destroyed so that
it was almost impossible to get supplies to them, and
some villages in the Nord people had to be fed
by airplane. With such widespread destruction, the problem of transport
assumed gigantic proportions. One of the vital parts of rebuilding
the country that Mary was directly involved in was acquiring
wheat seeds so that rural areas would be able to
(11:37):
plant crops. She personally delivered the request for wheat, and
as the women chauffeurs in their organization were the only
ones who were managing regular transport in the area, they
delivered all of the wheat seed that ended up in
the ground for that following spring. Even so, getting crops
back up and running was actually quite dangerous because the
fields were filled with buried explosives and farmers who accidentally
(12:00):
hit them while digging off and died or required really
extensive medical treatment. The a c DF also helped people
re establish their households. In addition to seeing that they
got feeds to plant crops and medical treatment, they also
assisted by helping them get low or no cost furnishings
and providing small animals to farms, like rabbits and chickens.
(12:21):
And throughout all of this the nurses and other personnel
working under the umbrella of the American Committee for Devastated
France we're living in really rough conditions themselves. Public works
such as water and electricity services were not restored for
quite some time, and the nurses lived in a building
that had been severely damaged by bombings. Mary wrote quote
the American Committee for Devastated France was a masterpiece of
(12:43):
an organization, not only in its handling of direct relief
under baffling difficulties, but in later developments that were to
be integrated into the very heart of French life. Mary
really fell in love with the people of France, and
she wrote in one letter to her mother that she
saw so many families trying to fight their way back
from malnourishment after the war. She wrote, quote, if I
(13:04):
could give right now a goat to every family that
has a baby, I think we could go far towards
saving many that are dying. There is such grip and
pneumonia among them that they have no powers of resistance.
I wish I had a thousand goats right now. I
wish I had fifty. This goat thing is my favorite
part of her story mine too. Mary's mother passed the
(13:24):
letter around friends and family, and sum donations of money
for the purchase of goats poured into the a c DF.
Mary would later call this project her goat Crusade because
she also had to raise funds for feed for the
goats for their breeding, and letters back home to each
donor to tell them about the family who was benefiting
from their generosity. Yeah, that was kind of before a
lot of the modern um charity organizations do things like that.
(13:48):
But she was naming goats for families that had bought them,
and then you know, would keep these correspondences going of
like here's how the family that got your goat is
doing which is pretty interesting. There's a really great story
in her autobiography about the first truck, which I think
had twenty nine goats. Like she opens the door and
there was one goat that had apparently like destroyed a
bunch of their medical supplies like baby bottles, which she
(14:10):
was like, I don't even care. I'm so glad the
goats are here. Um. And while she was in Europe,
she also became acquainted with midwiffery practice in both France
and England, and she felt that it should be established
in the United States as well. Ever, eager for education,
I have to admit that problematic though she is, I
admire her constant quest to be educated. Uh, Breckinridge decided
(14:32):
to formalize her learning on this subject, and she studied
midwiffery in several different schools in Great Britain and was
certified by the UK's Central Midwives Board. And we should
know this isn't the first time that Mary Breckenridge had
been exposed the concept of a midwife assisted birth, and
her family was in Russia. Her mother had a midwife
in attendance at the birth of Mary's younger brother, and
(14:53):
that had made an impact on her, and we're going
to talk more about later. Like midwiffery has been along
as has been around in some way as long as
babies have been yea and in uh yeah she she
isn't like she discovered it now, just kind of how
she's sometimes uh framed in the US, we had no
idea this was a thing, and it's like no, no, no, no, no,
(15:14):
we're talking about more formal eyes Midwiffrey training and programs. Additionally,
she also studied how pre war France had provided for
infant care, and she learned that the Public Assistance Office
had this program which allowed new parents to bring their
babies to a government office, usually like a town hall,
where a doctor would be for weighing and for advice
(15:34):
on their care, and that there was also a service
in some cities of France which provided baby milk stations,
but there wasn't much education for parents and how to
handle milk and some of the other medical deeds their
child might have. She saw what she felt was a
gap in the system in the lack of parent education,
and she decided that a visiting nurse service could fill
that gap, so she set up a demonstration version so
(15:57):
that it could get some data on its successes. Soon
she was asked to expand the program, and she had
to really scramble to find properly trained nurses to staff it.
Her little experiment. People were like, this is great, Uh,
can you widen your area of coverage? And she was like,
oh um. Before long, her nurses were seeing to the
general health care needs of the communities in which they worked,
(16:19):
and not just prenatal in early childhood care. She was
really pleased with her success in this endeavor, but the
administrative duties that it required took her away from the
hands on nursing that she loved so much. And as
her role with the American Committee for Devastated France grew,
breckon Ridge was offered a car and a chauffeur to
drive her as needed, but she opted to actually pool
(16:40):
those resources with the other drivers who were already helping
to deliver aid. Mary also traveled to Scotland to expand
her medical knowledge while she lived in Europe. There she
studied a nursing service that cared for a largely rural
and decentralized patient base. Yeah. That sort of helped her
form a model for her later work. UH In ninewe
(17:00):
Mary was ready to return home to be near her parents.
They were getting older and she definitely felt a poll
to be with them. She also felt that the programs
that she had worked to establish in France had reached
a point where they could continue without her, and she
felt that it was really important that they do so.
Like she was aware that she couldn't stay there and
direct all of this forever. She wasn't exactly sure what
she would do next, but she wrote in a letter
(17:22):
to her mother, quote, I know that the way leads
back over the ocean to the country where my own
children were born and where they are buried, the country
whose development my own people have furthered for nearly two
hundred years. Despite this resolve, she actually felt really conflicted
about leaving France. There was pressure to stay and develop
nursing school programs for France, and for her last year
(17:43):
she worked tirelessly to fulfill this request, only to have
effort after effort fall flat. She felt in some ways
as though she had failed, but having friends and associates
remark on the incredible improvement of the health of France's
children really bolstered her, and next for going to delve
into the project that consumed the rest of Mary Breckenridge's life,
in which became her claim to fame. But before that,
(18:06):
let's take a little break and have a word for
one of our sponsors. Once Mary was back in the
United States, she again opted for additional education, and she
took classes at Teachers College of Columbia University that focused
on public health nursing. In Mary Breckenridge relocated to Leslie County,
(18:29):
Kentucky to try to make her idea a reality. She
had inherited money from her mother, who had passed away
not long after Mary returned to the United States. She
used her inheritance to found and fund the Frontier Nursing Service.
Her concentration for the service was on prenatal in early
childhood care, which harkened back to her experiences with the
families and post war France. She wrote quote in France,
(18:52):
I felt, as I was to feel later in the
Kentucky Mountains, that a program for children should begin before
the children are born and should place emphasis on the
six years of life. So she chose the Appalachian Mountain
area for a number of reasons. I know some people
like to pronounce it Appalachian. We all do it differently.
This one is one where I'm good with what I like.
(19:12):
I grew up in North Carolina and spent seven years
in western North Carolina, and I say Appalachian. Yeah, I
mean I grew I was in Florida, and I think
I probably learned that word and they I was taught
it as Appalachian. But no disrespect to anybody who prefers
the other pronunciation, just saying, whichever way we say it,
somebody will be chagrined. Uh So she chose this area,
(19:34):
as I said, for a number of reasons. First, it
was woefully underserved medically and most of the residents were
too poor to travel elsewhere for care. Second, because her
family had Southern roots, she believed that she would be
able to use their prominence to garner funding for her program.
And third, she was kind of thinking long term, and
she thought if she could manage to launch a nursing
service successfully in the decentralized communities of the mountains, covering
(19:58):
roughly seven hundred square miles, it would be a clear
proof of concept that similar programs could work almost anywhere.
So to be clear, it wasn't as though Mary Breckinridge
was the first person in the United States to think
midwiffery should be instituted here. And as we said earlier,
there was more informal midwiffery going back generations. Even in
the area of Kentucky where she set up her service,
(20:20):
there were lay midwives who delivered babies like that has
been a thing pretty much always, but they didn't have
actual medical training. Yeah. I think they're referred to in uh.
I'm not sure if it's her autobiography or another paper
that I was reading about her where they're called granny midwives.
And it's basically like, you know, an older experienced woman
(20:41):
who has been through childbirth herself and then kind of
helps later generations do the same thing well. And and
when a birth goes smoothly, that's often fine, right, That's yes,
that's often the care that is needed is that kind
of help. But when things don't go smoothly, that you
want medical training, right yeah. Uh. And it was of
(21:01):
course really hard to get this service up and running.
This was a mountain situation spread all over the place,
but over time Mary established a home visitation service so
that patients could receive care without traveling themselves, as well
as a number of district nursing centers and eventually a hospital.
Mary's work had obvious results. After her service had been
(21:23):
established and she had been providing education to nurse midwives
in Kentucky, the region's neo natal and maternal death rates dropped.
In the f and s opened Heyden Hospital, which had
twelve beds. Thanks to money raised through donors, it soon
expanded to offer eighteen beds and eight bassonets, and an
expansion in nineteen forty nine increased patient capacity to twenty
(21:45):
five beds and twelve bassonets. As a direct result of
Mary's work and the success of the Frontier Nursing Service,
the American Association of Nurse Midwives was founded in nineteen
twenty nine, just four years after breckon Ridge had founded
her service. In nineteen thirty one, Mary's cousin, Marvin Breckenridge Patterson,
directed a film which was called The Forgotten Frontier, and
(22:06):
it promoted the importance of the Frontier Nursing Service and
the types of carrot offered. The film, which is silent,
opens with title cards that read, quote, do you know
that America is still a frontier country for about fifteen
million people with almost no medical nursing or dental care,
and that in our history we have lost more women
in childbirth than men in war according to that documentary,
(22:29):
and the maternal mortality rate and the Appalachian Mountains was
cut by more than two thirds thanks to the Frontier
Nursing Service. Scenes in the film are re enactments of
previous events played out by the same people who were
involved originally and volunteered to recreate moments in there from
their interactions with the F and S. Yeah, the film
features shots of wind Over, which was the log cabin
(22:49):
that served as administrative building and nursing center and guest
quarters for the service, and it makes it very clear
just how remote the patients being served by this service were.
Guests in the film arriving at the nearest train station
had to travel twenty five miles by car and then
switched to horses before they could get to that central
headquarters because the road ended abruptly and there was nothing
(23:11):
but trail after that. One of the visitors to the
F and S asked how the nurses managed to get
to their patients during the winter, and the reply was, Oh,
it's our most important work, so of course we go
in any kind of weather. Nurses were shown on horseback
crossing icy rivers in winter to deliver babies, and in
another scene, a man is carried on a makeshift stretcher
for seven hours to get to the hospital after receiving
(23:33):
a gunshot wound. You can actually watch this entire documentary online.
I will link to it. There's an archival version of
it that is available. And this documentary had a really
clear purpose. It wasn't just like a hey, this is neat.
It was intended to help promote the frontier nursing service
and more importantly, drum up donations. This entire enterprise was
(23:53):
privately funded from Mary's inheritance as we mentioned before, and
from donations, and while the f and S continued its
work over the next two decades, that remained how it
kept going through donations. It didn't receive any sort of
government funding. I don't think until the nineteen sixties, no
patient was ever turned away if they couldn't pay, but
they could offer a trade of goods for care. The
(24:15):
nurses were authorized to accept that. But if they could
offer nothing, they still got treatment. It seems like that
two thirds mortality drop from a promotional documentary might be
a little inflated, but still there was an obvious positive
impact in the nursing service. Yeah, it's a little tricky.
That's one of the things that it would be an
easy number to fudge because a lot of the people
(24:37):
in those remote areas were not necessarily reporting things like
bursts and mortalities regularly to the government, So we don't
know how accurate. But I agree it seems a little
as a big number. Yeah, it is a big number,
but like unquestionably, having access to basic medical care that
wasn't there before would have made a big difference. World
(24:58):
War Two impacted the way in which the nurse s
for the FNS were trained. Before ninety nine, many of
the nurses were sent to Great Britain to train as midwives,
just as Mary herself had done, but the tensions in
Europe surrounding the war made that unsustainable, and it was
then that breck and Ridge founded the Frontier Graduate School
of Midwiffery. The school continues today under the name Frontier
(25:19):
Nursing University. Yeah, obviously it has changed and evolved and modernized,
but it is still the the thing that has grown
out of that core entity. In ninety two, Mary published
her autobiography, which was titled Wide Neighborhoods The Story of
the Frontier Nursing Service. Once again, this was at least
in part, a way to make money for the f
n S. The proceeds from the sale of the book
(25:41):
went right back into keeping the people of rural Kentucky
care for and educated about their health. Breck and Ridge
died on May sixteenth, nineteen sixty five, and Hyde in Kentucky.
She worked right up until the end. I mean she
literally she had fallen off a horse at one point
and had to wear a brace, but she still had
to keep riding the horses to get to her patients.
She was working basically until the day she died. Uh,
(26:04):
Which is all pretty inspirational. But we got to talk
about the problematic parts now. Um. While Breckenridge's contributions to
medicine or undeniable, she had some deeply problematic views. First,
she was a fan of eugenics. From early on in
her career. She wrote articles for publications such as Southern
Woman's Magazine, in which she encouraged women to carefully select
(26:27):
their mates as only people of quote good blood should
be having children. Eugenics was by the nineteen teens gaining
popularity in the United States as a way to to
eradicate disease and infirmity. As if you haven't listened to
our podcast about the Calicacs and the eugenicists, Like, we
talked a lot about how this this wasn't just something
that was a fringe element in society. It was like
(26:48):
a mainstream taught in standard high school biology textbooks kind
of thing. So it is absolutely easy to see why
someone interested in nursing might have been into eugenics. But
the way most eugenicists in the United States envisioned these
improvements was specifically through keeping the bloodlines pure without integration
of immigrants into families. Breck and Ridge believed that women
(27:12):
in the US were duty bound to have healthy babies
to keep the country strong, and that to do so,
those babies had to be white, ideally white blood from
Anglo Saxon roots. Yeah, she definitely had like a hierarchy
of even people that would all be sort of umbrella
under white of which ones were the best kind of
(27:34):
went Anglo Saxon, Nordic, and then kind of went down
from there. Like she really very clearly had no problems
comparing people and deciding which ones she thought were the
good ones and which ones were lesser. She also thought
that women couldn't be creative like men because their creativity
expressed itself biologically through making children. And while an official
(27:55):
stance on birth control wasn't included any any literature of
the Frontier Nursing Service, Mary Breckinridge believed that contraceptives weren't
as good a remedy for rural Kentucky's problems as education
would be. She had to personally approve any tubal legations
performed by the service, and even then she would only
do it if there was a medical reason or for
(28:16):
women who already had at least five children. Yeah, she
didn't seem to really get super involved in any of
the politics surrounding other aspects of healthcare outside of like
maternal and children. And she even wrote that she thought
(28:37):
like birth control was interesting and that uh, you know,
that was that was good for some people, but not
for her patients, which is a little again, she's problematic.
Five years after Mary's death, ground was broken for a
new hospital to be built and named for her, and
the Mary Breckenridge Hospital was dedicated in nine so it
took a while to build, and it assumed the gen
(29:00):
oral care duties that had been handled previously at the
Hayden Hospital. And then the heightened facility was converted into
a teaching center, the Frontier School of Midwiffery and Family Nursing.
In Mary Breckinridge was posthumously inducted into the American the
American Nurses Association Hall of Fame. As often there were
thirty nine accredited graduate midwiffery programs in the United States
(29:23):
and more than eleven thousand certified midwives and certified nurse midwives.
So while she is considered the the sort of mother
of midwiffery in the United States, it really grew very
quickly and clearly. I mean it was addressing a need
that was there already. Other people were super interested in
really more than midwiffery. I feel like she should be
(29:45):
maybe lauded as a person who introduced medical like formalized
medical training in general. Uh, but that's Mary Breckinridge. Do
you have some listener mail for us to I do,
and it made me smile really big when I read it,
So that's why you get it. It is from our
listener Debbie um and Debbie Rights. Dear Tracy and Holly. Hi.
(30:06):
My name is Debbie and I love to listen to
your podcast while grading mounds of math homework, assuming that
the teenagers I teach actually turn in their homework. Thank
you for your well researched and entertaining stories to help
make grading not as monotonous. Your podcasts also feed my
insatia insatiable thirst for knowledge. I find myself sharing what
I learned from your podcast with colleagues, students, and my
friends and family regularly. The question how do you know
(30:29):
so much? Is asked of me by more people all
the time, and I give you credit on at minimum
a weekly basis. I was just listening to your podcast
on Scaling Michael, and in it you talked about the
bee hives uh in their natural form peabloids. Those are
the beehive huts that were on Scaling Michael. As a
fan of both large words and math, that was right
up my alley. That combined with the fact that this
(30:49):
island is a character in Star Wars, which is another
way I get my geek card on, will give my
students in math for Liberal Arts major something fun to
read about for their next Socratic discussion. Thank you, and
she also gives us a suggestion. Uh, Debbie, thank you
for being an educator and for you know, finding new
ways to connect things to students and get them excited
about math, which I know is sometimes a struggle. I
(31:11):
was not always a great math student myself. Um and yeah.
I always love it when educators write us because it
gives me a chance to thank them for the work
they do, which sadly is often thankless and is, to
my mind, one of the most important jobs you could
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Works dot com. You can also find us across the
(31:33):
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(31:54):
visit us at missed in History dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't housetop works
dot com.
Welcome to steph you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Uh So,
today we're going to talk about the topic that a
lot of people have requested, the one that I have
noted as the most recent requesters. The listener, Amy, I'm
(00:24):
a little worried. I'm going to confess because, Um, we've
talked before in the show about pioneers who advanced the
medical field, specifically as it relates to infants. They're usually
super uplifting and really great stories. Today's subject definitely adds
to that medical improvement for the health of children, but
it also has some problematic elements, and I don't know
(00:45):
that people who have requested it necessarily know those problematic parts,
and they may be disappointed to discover them. I have
several things that are on not the specific topic that
we're about to talk about, but several things on my
episode suggestion list that I know that people who have
asked it are expecting, like a firming, uplifting story, but
there's like a bad side to it that Yeah, yes, Um,
(01:09):
I was describing this story to my husband in the
car this morning, as I often do, sort of as
a way to make sure I've got basses covered, and uh,
you know, all the logic flows, and he said, I
feel like history is full of this one m Night
Shamalan plot twist where people seem amazing and then they
turn out to have like this horrible thing about them,
(01:30):
usually racism. I was like, it's a really good way
to put it, especially this particular time period. Yes, so
we're talking about Mary breckan Ridge. She is known as
the founder of American nurse Midwiffrey and she's an iconic
figure in Kentucky. But as we have just alluded to
their problematic parts of her her ideology, there's some udenics
(01:53):
we're gonna get to you. So we're gonna talk first
about sort of her life and what led her to
do this, and and then at the end will discuss
these problematic elements. So let's hit it. Mary Breckenridge was
born in Memphis, Tennessee, on February one. Her father, Clifton
Rhodes Breckenridge, was a congressman from Arkansas, so she spent
(02:14):
a lot of her childhood in Washington, d C. Yeah,
He's an interesting figure too. There's like a whole uh
scandal of voting scandal related to his his uh political career,
but maybe for another episode. After Washington, the Breckenridge Is
moved eventually across the globe to St. Petersburg, Russia, when
(02:35):
her father was appointed U S Minister to Russia, and
Mary's education, as you may guess from this uh life
of being in a pretty prominent family, was one of privilege.
She attended private schools in the US in Stanford, Connecticut
and at the Lausanne, Switzerland, and she had private tutors
in Russia as well. Basically everywhere they went she had
the best possible education. At the age of eighteen, Mary
(02:57):
moved to Arkansas, where she lived until her marriage to
Henry Ruffner Morrison, who was a lawyer. In nineteen o four.
Mary was widowed after just two years with her husband,
when Morrison died because of acute appendicitis. Still sort of
dealing with this loss, breck and Ridge enrolled in school again,
this time in New York City at a nursing school
(03:18):
at St. Luke's Hospital. She graduated and became a registered
nurse in nineteen ten, six years after the death of
her first husband, Mary got married a second time, this
time to the president of a woman's school in Eureka Springs, Arkansas,
Richard Ryan Thompson. Mary started to work at the school
as a teacher. Her international education lent itself to teaching language,
(03:40):
specifically French, and she also taught classes on hygiene. In
nineteen fourteen, Mary and Richard had a son, Clifton brick
and Ridge Thompson, who they nicknamed Brecky. Two years later,
in nineteen sixteen, they had a second child, this time
a daughter named Polly, and they were very excited about it,
but their joy was abruptly cut short. She died just
six hours after her birth. Mary wrote of this lost quote,
(04:05):
I grieved for the life she had missed, the splendid
work she might have done, the human motherhood she might
not know. Two years later, four year old Breckie also
died just days after his birthday. He got sick. He
underwent surgery to address what doctors thought was an intestinal blockage.
It became immediately clear that he had a serious abdominal infection,
(04:25):
and he never recovered. This death not only struck her
to the core as a grieving parent, but it also
really made Mary fear for her work and how it
would be perceived by the public. She had been writing
for several years about how to raise healthy children, and
she had, in the course of two years, lost both
of her own She was worried that people would think
(04:46):
that that meant she didn't know what she was talking about.
Throughout the rest of her life, she believed that Breckie
was ever present in a spiritual sense and that she
could communicate with him on the other side. The strain
of losing two chill dren also took a toll on
her marriage. Mary experienced bouts of depression which continued through
her life, and her husband, Richard, was not faithful. Mary
(05:09):
left Richard in nineteen eighteen while World War One was
still playing out, and she applied to work with the
American Red Cross as a nurse in Europe, but she
had to wait for an assignment. In case you are
ever looking at at information about her life, we didn't
go into it. They will often list her divorce as
nineteen twenty, which is when the divorce papers actually happened,
but they had been apart for two years by that point.
(05:30):
Uh this reason for her delay, though in joining the
Red Cross was due to the rule that no one
with a brother actively serving in the military could be
sent to areas where the war was taking place. This was,
you know, in order to preserve the family in the
likelihood that the place that the brother was stationed got
bombed or rated or attacked in some way, and like
(05:50):
a family would not lose multiple children at once. Uh.
Since Mary had a brother serving at the time, but
really felt strongly that she could make an impact on
the children of Europe who needed assistance, she and her
mother went to visit the head of the American Red
Cross Nursing Service, Jane Delano, and sort of lead her
case to get around the rule. Delano agreed that Mary
(06:11):
would be an asset, but she still couldn't send her
because of the brother rule. While Delano worked on Mary's behalf,
breck and Ridge took on a three month assignment, traveling
through the country collecting data on the state of children's
health and giving speeches. Yeah, and just to be clear
of that country is the u S. She went far
west and visited a variety of spaces places, and when
(06:32):
Mary was finally cleared you joined the Red Cross Children's
Bureau in France. She first went to Washington, d C.
To make arrangements and fill out the necessary paperwork, but
this actually ended up being quite a detour. All of
this was happening, you'll recall, in nineteen eighteen, and Washington,
d C, like many other places, was hit really hard
by the influenza epidemic, which we've talked about on the
(06:53):
show before. As a nurse, Mary was desperately needed, so
she volunteered to help. Almost immediately after seeing how badly
over texted the medical services in the area were, and
after she first asked Jane Delano if she could delay
her trip to France a little while longer, this volunteer
job almost immediately became more than Mary had anticipated. She
(07:14):
later wrote in her autobiography quote, the head nurse of
my area fell ill soon after I reported for duty,
so that I was plunged into the direction of nursing
care for thousands and thousands of stricken people. I don't
recall how many patients we had in my district at
the peak of the epidemic, but it could not have
been less than forty thousand. Nor do I remember how
many nurses I had to help me. But I don't
(07:36):
think there were more than five. We used hundreds of
aids for the day and nightcare of the patients with
pneumonia and the families where everybody had come down with influenza.
Many of these aids were clerks turned over to us
from the for the emergency by the government bureaus, and
only a few of them had received training in home
care of the sick. To compound matters, this situation was
(07:57):
so chaotic as medical person know, when people who had
sort of been requisitioned into being medical personnel to keep
up with the ever growing roster of patients, that records
were a little bit haphazard, she notes in her autobiography,
like some of the reasons clerks tended to write things
about the decease that had more to do with like
their area of knowledge than actually, we're really relevant to
(08:20):
the illness. Like one person worked UH for the government,
and they talked about how one of the deceased patients
had been UH sacking away sugar, like she had been
kind of hoarding sugar, And it was like, this isn't
relevant to her medical information at all. Why are you
putting this? But it was just the mindset of his
his or her. I don't know the gender uh. The
(08:41):
previous job made them think of things in those terms.
Bed Bugs were also a really bad problem in the
area that year, so nurses were fighting both influenza and
infestation of their patients homes. When the influenza epidemic had passed,
Mary went back to preparing to join the Red Cross,
but her passport and yalty papers had a longer processing
(09:02):
time than she had anticipated. Unwilling to just wait, she
filled the time with the Boston Instructive District Nursing Association,
where she furthered her education after an abbreviated version of
the association Association's training courses. She worked in underprivileged neighborhoods
and tenements in Boston. She later said of the experience, quote,
I was to be grateful a thousand times over after
(09:24):
I got to France of all that I learned in Boston.
By the time she had her passport, it was after
November eleventh, nineteen eighteen, and the war was over. But
she still felt compelled to go, and so she made
arrangements to be released from her obligation to the Red Cross,
which was no longer sending medical personnel to France. And
then she did travel to France to work with the
American Committee for Devastated France. That was an organization founded
(09:48):
by JP Morgan's daughter, Anne Morgan, in which Mary deeply loved,
second only to the one that she would later found herself.
We're going to talk about Mary's work in France, but
first we will pause for a little sponsor break. The
loss of her children had really been Breckinridge's inspiration to
(10:10):
doggedly pursue work in children's health, and she never lost
that sense of calling. She had been interested in children's
health before then, but she really became hyper focused on
it after that, and she had been able to focus
some of her public health work in Boston and Washington,
d c. On the needs of children, and she obviously
was working in that area as she toured the country
for her reporting assignment with the Children's Bureau. She then
(10:33):
carried that focus and passion for the care of children
to Europe as well. In her work with the a
c DF, she started a program that focused on the
needs of pregnant women, children, and nursing mothers, providing both
medical care and vitally needed nutrition. Even though the war
was over, there were still heavy restrictions on where she
could travel, so she had to once again wait for
(10:53):
a military permit to travel into the war zone. Once
she finally was approved, she saw immediately that the people
of Ants needed all the basics, clothing, betting, and above
all food. She wrote quote and the parts of France
occupied by the Germans, it was not a question of
the people returning to their shattered homes, because they were
already there when the Germans withdrew, But all around them
(11:15):
the ground, the bridges, the roads were destroyed so that
it was almost impossible to get supplies to them, and
some villages in the Nord people had to be fed
by airplane. With such widespread destruction, the problem of transport
assumed gigantic proportions. One of the vital parts of rebuilding
the country that Mary was directly involved in was acquiring
wheat seeds so that rural areas would be able to
(11:37):
plant crops. She personally delivered the request for wheat, and
as the women chauffeurs in their organization were the only
ones who were managing regular transport in the area, they
delivered all of the wheat seed that ended up in
the ground for that following spring. Even so, getting crops
back up and running was actually quite dangerous because the
fields were filled with buried explosives and farmers who accidentally
(12:00):
hit them while digging off and died or required really
extensive medical treatment. The a c DF also helped people
re establish their households. In addition to seeing that they
got feeds to plant crops and medical treatment, they also
assisted by helping them get low or no cost furnishings
and providing small animals to farms, like rabbits and chickens.
(12:21):
And throughout all of this the nurses and other personnel
working under the umbrella of the American Committee for Devastated
France we're living in really rough conditions themselves. Public works
such as water and electricity services were not restored for
quite some time, and the nurses lived in a building
that had been severely damaged by bombings. Mary wrote quote
the American Committee for Devastated France was a masterpiece of
(12:43):
an organization, not only in its handling of direct relief
under baffling difficulties, but in later developments that were to
be integrated into the very heart of French life. Mary
really fell in love with the people of France, and
she wrote in one letter to her mother that she
saw so many families trying to fight their way back
from malnourishment after the war. She wrote, quote, if I
(13:04):
could give right now a goat to every family that
has a baby, I think we could go far towards
saving many that are dying. There is such grip and
pneumonia among them that they have no powers of resistance.
I wish I had a thousand goats right now. I
wish I had fifty. This goat thing is my favorite
part of her story mine too. Mary's mother passed the
(13:24):
letter around friends and family, and sum donations of money
for the purchase of goats poured into the a c DF.
Mary would later call this project her goat Crusade because
she also had to raise funds for feed for the
goats for their breeding, and letters back home to each
donor to tell them about the family who was benefiting
from their generosity. Yeah, that was kind of before a
lot of the modern um charity organizations do things like that.
(13:48):
But she was naming goats for families that had bought them,
and then you know, would keep these correspondences going of
like here's how the family that got your goat is
doing which is pretty interesting. There's a really great story
in her autobiography about the first truck, which I think
had twenty nine goats. Like she opens the door and
there was one goat that had apparently like destroyed a
bunch of their medical supplies like baby bottles, which she
(14:10):
was like, I don't even care. I'm so glad the
goats are here. Um. And while she was in Europe,
she also became acquainted with midwiffery practice in both France
and England, and she felt that it should be established
in the United States as well. Ever, eager for education,
I have to admit that problematic though she is, I
admire her constant quest to be educated. Uh, Breckinridge decided
(14:32):
to formalize her learning on this subject, and she studied
midwiffery in several different schools in Great Britain and was
certified by the UK's Central Midwives Board. And we should
know this isn't the first time that Mary Breckenridge had
been exposed the concept of a midwife assisted birth, and
her family was in Russia. Her mother had a midwife
in attendance at the birth of Mary's younger brother, and
(14:53):
that had made an impact on her, and we're going
to talk more about later. Like midwiffery has been along
as has been around in some way as long as
babies have been yea and in uh yeah she she
isn't like she discovered it now, just kind of how
she's sometimes uh framed in the US, we had no
idea this was a thing, and it's like no, no, no, no, no,
(15:14):
we're talking about more formal eyes Midwiffrey training and programs. Additionally,
she also studied how pre war France had provided for
infant care, and she learned that the Public Assistance Office
had this program which allowed new parents to bring their
babies to a government office, usually like a town hall,
where a doctor would be for weighing and for advice
(15:34):
on their care, and that there was also a service
in some cities of France which provided baby milk stations,
but there wasn't much education for parents and how to
handle milk and some of the other medical deeds their
child might have. She saw what she felt was a
gap in the system in the lack of parent education,
and she decided that a visiting nurse service could fill
that gap, so she set up a demonstration version so
(15:57):
that it could get some data on its successes. Soon
she was asked to expand the program, and she had
to really scramble to find properly trained nurses to staff it.
Her little experiment. People were like, this is great, Uh,
can you widen your area of coverage? And she was like,
oh um. Before long, her nurses were seeing to the
general health care needs of the communities in which they worked,
(16:19):
and not just prenatal in early childhood care. She was
really pleased with her success in this endeavor, but the
administrative duties that it required took her away from the
hands on nursing that she loved so much. And as
her role with the American Committee for Devastated France grew,
breckon Ridge was offered a car and a chauffeur to
drive her as needed, but she opted to actually pool
(16:40):
those resources with the other drivers who were already helping
to deliver aid. Mary also traveled to Scotland to expand
her medical knowledge while she lived in Europe. There she
studied a nursing service that cared for a largely rural
and decentralized patient base. Yeah. That sort of helped her
form a model for her later work. UH In ninewe
(17:00):
Mary was ready to return home to be near her parents.
They were getting older and she definitely felt a poll
to be with them. She also felt that the programs
that she had worked to establish in France had reached
a point where they could continue without her, and she
felt that it was really important that they do so.
Like she was aware that she couldn't stay there and
direct all of this forever. She wasn't exactly sure what
she would do next, but she wrote in a letter
(17:22):
to her mother, quote, I know that the way leads
back over the ocean to the country where my own
children were born and where they are buried, the country
whose development my own people have furthered for nearly two
hundred years. Despite this resolve, she actually felt really conflicted
about leaving France. There was pressure to stay and develop
nursing school programs for France, and for her last year
(17:43):
she worked tirelessly to fulfill this request, only to have
effort after effort fall flat. She felt in some ways
as though she had failed, but having friends and associates
remark on the incredible improvement of the health of France's
children really bolstered her, and next for going to delve
into the project that consumed the rest of Mary Breckenridge's life,
in which became her claim to fame. But before that,
(18:06):
let's take a little break and have a word for
one of our sponsors. Once Mary was back in the
United States, she again opted for additional education, and she
took classes at Teachers College of Columbia University that focused
on public health nursing. In Mary Breckenridge relocated to Leslie County,
(18:29):
Kentucky to try to make her idea a reality. She
had inherited money from her mother, who had passed away
not long after Mary returned to the United States. She
used her inheritance to found and fund the Frontier Nursing Service.
Her concentration for the service was on prenatal in early
childhood care, which harkened back to her experiences with the
families and post war France. She wrote quote in France,
(18:52):
I felt, as I was to feel later in the
Kentucky Mountains, that a program for children should begin before
the children are born and should place emphasis on the
six years of life. So she chose the Appalachian Mountain
area for a number of reasons. I know some people
like to pronounce it Appalachian. We all do it differently.
This one is one where I'm good with what I like.
(19:12):
I grew up in North Carolina and spent seven years
in western North Carolina, and I say Appalachian. Yeah, I
mean I grew I was in Florida, and I think
I probably learned that word and they I was taught
it as Appalachian. But no disrespect to anybody who prefers
the other pronunciation, just saying, whichever way we say it,
somebody will be chagrined. Uh So she chose this area,
(19:34):
as I said, for a number of reasons. First, it
was woefully underserved medically and most of the residents were
too poor to travel elsewhere for care. Second, because her
family had Southern roots, she believed that she would be
able to use their prominence to garner funding for her program.
And third, she was kind of thinking long term, and
she thought if she could manage to launch a nursing
service successfully in the decentralized communities of the mountains, covering
(19:58):
roughly seven hundred square miles, it would be a clear
proof of concept that similar programs could work almost anywhere.
So to be clear, it wasn't as though Mary Breckinridge
was the first person in the United States to think
midwiffery should be instituted here. And as we said earlier,
there was more informal midwiffery going back generations. Even in
the area of Kentucky where she set up her service,
(20:20):
there were lay midwives who delivered babies like that has
been a thing pretty much always, but they didn't have
actual medical training. Yeah. I think they're referred to in uh.
I'm not sure if it's her autobiography or another paper
that I was reading about her where they're called granny midwives.
And it's basically like, you know, an older experienced woman
(20:41):
who has been through childbirth herself and then kind of
helps later generations do the same thing well. And and
when a birth goes smoothly, that's often fine, right, That's yes,
that's often the care that is needed is that kind
of help. But when things don't go smoothly, that you
want medical training, right yeah. Uh. And it was of
(21:01):
course really hard to get this service up and running.
This was a mountain situation spread all over the place,
but over time Mary established a home visitation service so
that patients could receive care without traveling themselves, as well
as a number of district nursing centers and eventually a hospital.
Mary's work had obvious results. After her service had been
(21:23):
established and she had been providing education to nurse midwives
in Kentucky, the region's neo natal and maternal death rates dropped.
In the f and s opened Heyden Hospital, which had
twelve beds. Thanks to money raised through donors, it soon
expanded to offer eighteen beds and eight bassonets, and an
expansion in nineteen forty nine increased patient capacity to twenty
(21:45):
five beds and twelve bassonets. As a direct result of
Mary's work and the success of the Frontier Nursing Service,
the American Association of Nurse Midwives was founded in nineteen
twenty nine, just four years after breckon Ridge had founded
her service. In nineteen thirty one, Mary's cousin, Marvin Breckenridge Patterson,
directed a film which was called The Forgotten Frontier, and
(22:06):
it promoted the importance of the Frontier Nursing Service and
the types of carrot offered. The film, which is silent,
opens with title cards that read, quote, do you know
that America is still a frontier country for about fifteen
million people with almost no medical nursing or dental care,
and that in our history we have lost more women
in childbirth than men in war according to that documentary,
(22:29):
and the maternal mortality rate and the Appalachian Mountains was
cut by more than two thirds thanks to the Frontier
Nursing Service. Scenes in the film are re enactments of
previous events played out by the same people who were
involved originally and volunteered to recreate moments in there from
their interactions with the F and S. Yeah, the film
features shots of wind Over, which was the log cabin
(22:49):
that served as administrative building and nursing center and guest
quarters for the service, and it makes it very clear
just how remote the patients being served by this service were.
Guests in the film arriving at the nearest train station
had to travel twenty five miles by car and then
switched to horses before they could get to that central
headquarters because the road ended abruptly and there was nothing
(23:11):
but trail after that. One of the visitors to the
F and S asked how the nurses managed to get
to their patients during the winter, and the reply was, Oh,
it's our most important work, so of course we go
in any kind of weather. Nurses were shown on horseback
crossing icy rivers in winter to deliver babies, and in
another scene, a man is carried on a makeshift stretcher
for seven hours to get to the hospital after receiving
(23:33):
a gunshot wound. You can actually watch this entire documentary online.
I will link to it. There's an archival version of
it that is available. And this documentary had a really
clear purpose. It wasn't just like a hey, this is neat.
It was intended to help promote the frontier nursing service
and more importantly, drum up donations. This entire enterprise was
(23:53):
privately funded from Mary's inheritance as we mentioned before, and
from donations, and while the f and S continued its
work over the next two decades, that remained how it
kept going through donations. It didn't receive any sort of
government funding. I don't think until the nineteen sixties, no
patient was ever turned away if they couldn't pay, but
they could offer a trade of goods for care. The
(24:15):
nurses were authorized to accept that. But if they could
offer nothing, they still got treatment. It seems like that
two thirds mortality drop from a promotional documentary might be
a little inflated, but still there was an obvious positive
impact in the nursing service. Yeah, it's a little tricky.
That's one of the things that it would be an
easy number to fudge because a lot of the people
(24:37):
in those remote areas were not necessarily reporting things like
bursts and mortalities regularly to the government, So we don't
know how accurate. But I agree it seems a little
as a big number. Yeah, it is a big number,
but like unquestionably, having access to basic medical care that
wasn't there before would have made a big difference. World
(24:58):
War Two impacted the way in which the nurse s
for the FNS were trained. Before ninety nine, many of
the nurses were sent to Great Britain to train as midwives,
just as Mary herself had done, but the tensions in
Europe surrounding the war made that unsustainable, and it was
then that breck and Ridge founded the Frontier Graduate School
of Midwiffery. The school continues today under the name Frontier
(25:19):
Nursing University. Yeah, obviously it has changed and evolved and modernized,
but it is still the the thing that has grown
out of that core entity. In ninety two, Mary published
her autobiography, which was titled Wide Neighborhoods The Story of
the Frontier Nursing Service. Once again, this was at least
in part, a way to make money for the f
n S. The proceeds from the sale of the book
(25:41):
went right back into keeping the people of rural Kentucky
care for and educated about their health. Breck and Ridge
died on May sixteenth, nineteen sixty five, and Hyde in Kentucky.
She worked right up until the end. I mean she
literally she had fallen off a horse at one point
and had to wear a brace, but she still had
to keep riding the horses to get to her patients.
She was working basically until the day she died. Uh,
(26:04):
Which is all pretty inspirational. But we got to talk
about the problematic parts now. Um. While Breckenridge's contributions to
medicine or undeniable, she had some deeply problematic views. First,
she was a fan of eugenics. From early on in
her career. She wrote articles for publications such as Southern
Woman's Magazine, in which she encouraged women to carefully select
(26:27):
their mates as only people of quote good blood should
be having children. Eugenics was by the nineteen teens gaining
popularity in the United States as a way to to
eradicate disease and infirmity. As if you haven't listened to
our podcast about the Calicacs and the eugenicists, Like, we
talked a lot about how this this wasn't just something
that was a fringe element in society. It was like
(26:48):
a mainstream taught in standard high school biology textbooks kind
of thing. So it is absolutely easy to see why
someone interested in nursing might have been into eugenics. But
the way most eugenicists in the United States envisioned these
improvements was specifically through keeping the bloodlines pure without integration
of immigrants into families. Breck and Ridge believed that women
(27:12):
in the US were duty bound to have healthy babies
to keep the country strong, and that to do so,
those babies had to be white, ideally white blood from
Anglo Saxon roots. Yeah, she definitely had like a hierarchy
of even people that would all be sort of umbrella
under white of which ones were the best kind of
(27:34):
went Anglo Saxon, Nordic, and then kind of went down
from there. Like she really very clearly had no problems
comparing people and deciding which ones she thought were the
good ones and which ones were lesser. She also thought
that women couldn't be creative like men because their creativity
expressed itself biologically through making children. And while an official
(27:55):
stance on birth control wasn't included any any literature of
the Frontier Nursing Service, Mary Breckinridge believed that contraceptives weren't
as good a remedy for rural Kentucky's problems as education
would be. She had to personally approve any tubal legations
performed by the service, and even then she would only
do it if there was a medical reason or for
(28:16):
women who already had at least five children. Yeah, she
didn't seem to really get super involved in any of
the politics surrounding other aspects of healthcare outside of like
maternal and children. And she even wrote that she thought
(28:37):
like birth control was interesting and that uh, you know,
that was that was good for some people, but not
for her patients, which is a little again, she's problematic.
Five years after Mary's death, ground was broken for a
new hospital to be built and named for her, and
the Mary Breckenridge Hospital was dedicated in nine so it
took a while to build, and it assumed the gen
(29:00):
oral care duties that had been handled previously at the
Hayden Hospital. And then the heightened facility was converted into
a teaching center, the Frontier School of Midwiffery and Family Nursing.
In Mary Breckinridge was posthumously inducted into the American the
American Nurses Association Hall of Fame. As often there were
thirty nine accredited graduate midwiffery programs in the United States
(29:23):
and more than eleven thousand certified midwives and certified nurse midwives.
So while she is considered the the sort of mother
of midwiffery in the United States, it really grew very
quickly and clearly. I mean it was addressing a need
that was there already. Other people were super interested in
really more than midwiffery. I feel like she should be
(29:45):
maybe lauded as a person who introduced medical like formalized
medical training in general. Uh, but that's Mary Breckinridge. Do
you have some listener mail for us to I do,
and it made me smile really big when I read it,
So that's why you get it. It is from our
listener Debbie um and Debbie Rights. Dear Tracy and Holly. Hi.
(30:06):
My name is Debbie and I love to listen to
your podcast while grading mounds of math homework, assuming that
the teenagers I teach actually turn in their homework. Thank
you for your well researched and entertaining stories to help
make grading not as monotonous. Your podcasts also feed my
insatia insatiable thirst for knowledge. I find myself sharing what
I learned from your podcast with colleagues, students, and my
friends and family regularly. The question how do you know
(30:29):
so much? Is asked of me by more people all
the time, and I give you credit on at minimum
a weekly basis. I was just listening to your podcast
on Scaling Michael, and in it you talked about the
bee hives uh in their natural form peabloids. Those are
the beehive huts that were on Scaling Michael. As a
fan of both large words and math, that was right
up my alley. That combined with the fact that this
(30:49):
island is a character in Star Wars, which is another
way I get my geek card on, will give my
students in math for Liberal Arts major something fun to
read about for their next Socratic discussion. Thank you, and
she also gives us a suggestion. Uh, Debbie, thank you
for being an educator and for you know, finding new
ways to connect things to students and get them excited
about math, which I know is sometimes a struggle. I
(31:11):
was not always a great math student myself. Um and yeah.
I always love it when educators write us because it
gives me a chance to thank them for the work
they do, which sadly is often thankless and is, to
my mind, one of the most important jobs you could
possibly have. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at house to
Works dot com. You can also find us across the
(31:33):
spectrum of social media as missed in History that includes Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, etcetera.
You can also visit us at missed in History dot com,
where we have an our kind of every episode of
the show that has ever existed, long before Tracy and
I were involved, and for the ones that have happened
since Tracy and I were involved. You'll also find show
notes in the occasional additional blog post. So come and
(31:54):
visit us at missed in History dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't housetop works
dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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