Transcript

8.21.26 · History Hour

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Speaker 1: Hello and welcome. This is radioi's History show, and I'm
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Speaker 1: your host and reader Joseph Bolt, so happy to be
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Speaker 1: with you for this time. And before we begin today's show,
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Speaker 1: we need to remind you that Radio I is listener
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Speaker 1: people who are blind or have other disabilities that make
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Speaker 1: it difficult to read printed material. I'll cite the sources
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Speaker 1: as we go along today, and so let's get started.
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Speaker 1: I thought we'd talk about something about Kentucky this time,
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Speaker 1: and in particular or a lady by the name of
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Speaker 1: Mary Breckenridge. You may know that name. She actually created
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Speaker 1: the Frontier Nursing Service back over in eastern Kentucky, and
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Speaker 1: I thought we'd read about her and her life and
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Speaker 1: how she did this. Harry Breckenridge, you might be familiar
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Speaker 1: with her name. She created the Frontier Nursing Service over
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Speaker 1: in eastern Kentucky. So let's read about Mary and some
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Speaker 1: of the folks that surrounded her. So. This article comes
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Speaker 1: from the website HistoryNet dot com and it's called Call
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Speaker 1: the Midwife, Nurses on Horseback in the Appalachian Mountains, and
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Speaker 1: it's written by Christine M. Kryser in December of two
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Speaker 1: thousand and sixteen. Maternity is the young Woman's Battlefield, wrote
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Speaker 1: Mary Breckenridge in nineteen twenty seven. She says it is
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Speaker 1: more dangerous, more painful, more mutilating than war, and is inexorable.
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Speaker 1: I'm sorry a next hoorable as all the laws of
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Speaker 1: God end quote. Breckenridge's theater of operations was Leslie County.
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Speaker 1: The article comes from HistoryNet dot com and it's entitled
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Speaker 1: Call the Midwife, Nurses on Horseback in the Appalachian Mountains,
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Speaker 1: written by Christine M. Kryser in December of twenty sixteen.
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Speaker 1: Maternity is the young Woman's Battlefield, wrote Mary Breckenridge in
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Speaker 1: nineteen twenty seven. It is more dangerous, more painful, more
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Speaker 1: mutilating than war. Breckenridge's theater of operations was Leslie County, Kentucky,
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Speaker 1: deep in the heart of the Cumberland Mountains. There were
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Speaker 1: no paved roads in the county then, and no railroads.
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Speaker 1: The middle fork of the Kentucky River and its branches
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Speaker 1: snaked through tiny communities with names like cut Chin held
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Speaker 1: for certain in thousand sticks. Logging and subsistence farming kept
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Speaker 1: body and sould together for most folks. The coal boom
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Speaker 1: that was transforming neighboring counties had not reached Leslie, where
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Speaker 1: the only town of any size was the county seat
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Speaker 1: of Hayden, population three hundred or so. In this most
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Speaker 1: unlikely place, Mary Breckenridge made her stand for maternal and
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Speaker 1: child healthcare in rural America by founding the Frontier Nursing
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Speaker 1: Service in nineteen twenty five. For every one thousand live
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Speaker 1: births in the United States in the early twentieth century,
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Speaker 1: approximately one hundred babies died within the first year. The
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Speaker 1: maternal mortality rate was the highest in the developed world,
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Speaker 1: nearly twice that recorded in England at the time. In
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Speaker 1: rural areas like Leslie County, described by Appalachian chronicler Harry
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Speaker 1: Cuddle as the quote most primitive end quote in the
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Speaker 1: Cumberland Plateau, the numbers tended to be higher. Professional medical
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Speaker 1: care was practically nonexistent in eastern Kentucky hills and hollows
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Speaker 1: Our parents learned very early in life how to doctor
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Speaker 1: their children, remembered Leslie County resident Laura day Hogg in
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Speaker 1: a nineteen seventy nine interview. Laura goes on to say,
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Speaker 1: my mother used to go out and gather a lot
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Speaker 1: of herbs and have them to make teas in the winter,
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Speaker 1: cough syrups and things to break up coldes with enote.
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Speaker 1: Most births were attended by midwives called granny women, who'd
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Speaker 1: earned the trade, or rather learn the trade from their
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Speaker 1: mothers and grandmothers, or by just hard experience. Though they
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Speaker 1: had little formal education and were often illiterate, midwives were
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Speaker 1: respected members of their communities and their home remedies were
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Speaker 1: familiar parts of the birthing process. Catnip, ginger, and pepper
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Speaker 1: teas were used to ease labor pain. If the new
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Speaker 1: mother started to hemorrhage, the midwife might administer tea made
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Speaker 1: from bark taken from the north side of a black
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Speaker 1: gum tree steeped with bark from a sweet apple tree.
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Speaker 1: An axe placed under the bed with the blade up
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Speaker 1: was thought to stem the flow. If all else failed,
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Speaker 1: Divine intervention could be called on by reciting Bible verses
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Speaker 1: particularly Ezekiel sixteen six, which reads, and when I passed
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Speaker 1: by thee and saw thee polluted in the own blood,
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Speaker 1: I said into thee. Live. Newborns were often dosed with
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Speaker 1: castor oil and catnip tea, their navals greased with lord
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Speaker 1: or castor oil and dressed with a scorched rag. Mary
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Speaker 1: Breckinridge's genteel background was worlds away from impoverished Appalachia. Born
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Speaker 1: in Memphis in eighteen eighty one, she was the granddaughter
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Speaker 1: of Kentucky's own John C. Breckinridge, vice president to James
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Speaker 1: Buchanan eighteen sixty presidential contender, Confederate General, and Secretary of
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Speaker 1: War to Jefferson Davis. Her father, Clifton, was a Confederate
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Speaker 1: veteran who later represented in Arkansas in the US House
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Speaker 1: before being appointed Minister to Saint Petersburg. Mary grew up
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Speaker 1: in privilege, attending boarding schools in Switzerland, in Connecticut, and
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Speaker 1: traveling often among her extended family in the South, but
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Speaker 1: she also knew her sheriffs sorrow. Her first husband died
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Speaker 1: of appendicitis, and Breckenridge resolved to become a nurse, graduating
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Speaker 1: from the prestigious Saint Luke Hospital School of Nursing in
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Speaker 1: New York. In nineteen ten, an unhappy second marriage ended
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Speaker 1: in divorce after the deaths of her two children, a
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Speaker 1: daughter who died in nineteen sixteen just hours after her birth,
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Speaker 1: and a son who died in nineteen eighteen at the
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Speaker 1: age age of four. Mournful but determined, Breckinridge headed overseas
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Speaker 1: and joined the American Committee for Devastated France, a group
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Speaker 1: of volunteers organized by Anne Morgan, daughter of financier J. P. Morgan,
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Speaker 1: all to help French refugees of World War One. Breckinridge
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Speaker 1: was deeply touched by the children, whose lives had been
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Speaker 1: uphended by brutal and brutality and want, but she longed
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Speaker 1: to learn or returned rather home to work for the
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Speaker 1: welfare of American children. When she learned of a British
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Speaker 1: program that trained women as nurse midwives to provide vital
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Speaker 1: medical care in areas where doctors and hospitals were scared,
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Speaker 1: Breckinridge found what she called quote the logical response to
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Speaker 1: the needs of the young child in rural America end quote.
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Speaker 1: After studying midwifery at the British Hospital for mothers and babies,
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Speaker 1: and spending time in Scotland observing the work of the
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Speaker 1: Highlands and Islands Medical and Nursing Service, Breckinridge was ready
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Speaker 1: to implement a similar healthcare delivery system in the remote
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Speaker 1: mountains of eastern Kentucky. For her idea work there, she
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Speaker 1: reasoned it could work anywhere in the world. The Kentucky
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Speaker 1: Mountaineer has been written up and talked about as though
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Speaker 1: he were a special kind of Homo sapien, Breckinridge wrote
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Speaker 1: in her nineteen fifty two autobiography entitled Wide Neighborhoods. She
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Speaker 1: goes on to say the picture that people from beyond
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Speaker 1: the mountains hold of him is uniform. They see a
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Speaker 1: lean man with a gun, tending his moonshine still, while
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Speaker 1: his wife and fifteen children clutter his one room log
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Speaker 1: cabin by night and plow his hillside by day. If
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Speaker 1: he speaks at all before shooting, it will be enworded
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Speaker 1: to our cake for comprehension. There was some truth to
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Speaker 1: this notion of appellations as our contemporary ancestors, a phrase
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Speaker 1: coined by William Goodall Frost in his eighteen ninety nine
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Speaker 1: book about the distinct culture of the Southern Mountains. Folk
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Speaker 1: ways and language dating back to the earliest mountain settlers,
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Speaker 1: many of them emigrants from the British Isles, have been
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Speaker 1: preserved by the region's isolation. When industrial logging and coal
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Speaker 1: mining began making inroads in the late nineteenth century, outsiders
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Speaker 1: often looked on appellations as quaint throwbacks to some purer time.
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Speaker 1: Breckinridge regularly made reference to this old American stock, descendants
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Speaker 1: of ancient Anglo Saxons who have only recently emerged from
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Speaker 1: pioneer days, in her publicity and fundraising efforts for the
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Speaker 1: Frontier Nursing Service. In an age of rapid social change,
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Speaker 1: with an influx of millions of emigrants and a resurgence
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Speaker 1: of the klu Klux Klan, potential donors responded to the
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Speaker 1: idea that they were helping worthy Americans in need. This
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Speaker 1: nativist attitude was common to progressive reformers, often upper class
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Speaker 1: white Protestant women of the time, and in Leslie County,
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Speaker 1: the numbers largely backed up Breckinridge's claim. The nineteen twenty
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Speaker 1: census recorded nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety eight of
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Speaker 1: the county's ten thousand ninety seven residents as native born whites.
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Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty five, Breckinridge won the support of the
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Speaker 1: state Health Commissioner to bring modern healthcare to Leslie County.
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Speaker 1: She recruited two New York nurses who received Midwiffrey training
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Speaker 1: in England, their names Frida Kaffin and Edna Rockstow to
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Speaker 1: join her in Haydn and she put her money where
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Speaker 1: her mouth was. She says, I promised to underwrite the
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Speaker 1: work for the first three years and meet whatever deficits
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Speaker 1: were incurred. She goes on to say, I didn't want
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Speaker 1: to do this because it would have to be done
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Speaker 1: out of my capital, and I liked having an independent income,
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Speaker 1: but there was no other way to get started. It
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Speaker 1: was just one of those things, she says. Well, they
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Speaker 1: went on and set up a hospital the counties first
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Speaker 1: in the only vacant house in heided. This was a
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Speaker 1: two story dwelling in bad repair, but there was room
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Speaker 1: for a dispensary and a barn for the horses. We
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Speaker 1: had no plumbing, but the outside conveniences were decent and
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Speaker 1: we had a clean well, she says. By nineteen thirty,
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Speaker 1: the Frontier Nursing Service had established nine county districts and
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Speaker 1: set up six satellite clinics. Two nurses were assigned to
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Speaker 1: each district, the idea being that care should never be
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Speaker 1: more than an hour away by horseback. Some mountaineers initially
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Speaker 1: distrust distrusted the newcomers because no training program for nurse
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Speaker 1: midwives existed in the United States, Breckinridge recruited nurses from
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Speaker 1: England and Scotland. Nellie Asher, whose first child was the
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Speaker 1: first baby delivered by the frontier nurse in September of
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Speaker 1: nineteen twenty five, remembered hearing gossip that quote the nurses
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Speaker 1: from England would kill the little babies end quote. British
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Speaker 1: nurse Betty Lester, who arrived in haydn in nineteen twenty eight,
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Speaker 1: attributed the rumors to fear of the unknown. The nurses
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Speaker 1: were strangers, she said, young, unmarried women who had no
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Speaker 1: children of their own. What could they possibly know about
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Speaker 1: birthing babies in hard scrabble Kentucky. In times, rumors died
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Speaker 1: down as word began to circulate of the nurse's success
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Speaker 1: and delivering healthy babies in difficult circumstances. A local advisory
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Speaker 1: committee of prominent county residents, including the sheriff, a pastor,
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Speaker 1: the school superintendent, the editor of the county newspaper, and
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Speaker 1: a bona fide war hero Willie Sandlin, whose exploits in
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Speaker 1: Europe rivaled those of fellow Kentuckian Alvin York. Also helped
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Speaker 1: legitimize the nursing service. The Frontier nurses made regular rounds
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Speaker 1: introducing themselves and their services. Sherman Wootton, one of dozens
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Speaker 1: of participants in a University of Kentucky oral history project
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Speaker 1: that documented the impact of the Frontier Nursing Service, remembered
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Speaker 1: the impression the nurses made. Wooton, born on Cutshin Creek
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Speaker 1: in nineteen ten, said, quote, there was a couple of
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Speaker 1: public health nurses in Leslie. We never did see any
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Speaker 1: of them anyway on Hell for certain, or Bull Creek
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Speaker 1: or anywhere down in there. After Miss Breckinridge was here
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Speaker 1: for a short period of time, she put these centers
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Speaker 1: out in parts of the county. The community would get
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Speaker 1: together and build up a small little house to serve
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Speaker 1: as a clinic. End quote. Frontier nurses encouraged expectant mothers
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Speaker 1: to get regular prenatal checkups, an idea just then gaining
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Speaker 1: traction in professional medicine and one that had been unheard
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Speaker 1: of in the mountains. Breckenridge said that quote, the midwife
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Speaker 1: never leaves her patient once labor starts, staying two days
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Speaker 1: and nights in the home if need be. Because we
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Speaker 1: have been trained in midwiffery, we are able to see
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Speaker 1: the normal cases through and also to recognize the abnormal
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Speaker 1: and get medical aid, carrying on with courage until it
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Speaker 1: comes end quote. And to prove to the medical community
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Speaker 1: and to outside supporters of the program that this level
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Speaker 1: of care made a significant difference. Reckinridge insisted on meticulous
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Speaker 1: record keeping. No mothers died in the first thousand live
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Speaker 1: births attended by Frontier nurses. The national maternal death rate
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Speaker 1: was five point two per thousand. In nineteen thirty two.
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Speaker 1: The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company reviewed the nursing service records
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Speaker 1: and concluded that its work quote safeguards the life of
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Speaker 1: the mother and babe. If such a service were available
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Speaker 1: to the women of the country, generally, there would be
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Speaker 1: a savings of ten thousand mothers lives a year, thirty
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Speaker 1: thousand less stillbirths, and thirty thousand children alive at the
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Speaker 1: end of the first month of life. For their services,
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Speaker 1: the Frontier nurses charged five dollars for prenatal care, delivery
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Speaker 1: and ten days of postpartum care. A fee of one
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Speaker 1: dollar per family per year paid for general medical care
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Speaker 1: and vaccinations against outbreaks of such deadly diseases as typhoid
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Speaker 1: and diphtheria. With little cash on hand, the average yearly
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Speaker 1: family income in nineteen thirty two was four hundred and
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Speaker 1: sixteen dollars and fifty cents with less. With less than
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Speaker 1: half of that received in cash, mountaineer often paid their
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Speaker 1: bills with produce, hay for the horses, or manual labor.
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Speaker 1: By the mid nineteen thirties, nurses on horsebacks were a
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Speaker 1: familiar sight, dressed in blue gray uniform coats, breeches, white shirts, ties, caps,
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Speaker 1: and knee high riding boots, their saddle bags packed full
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Speaker 1: of supplies for almost any medical emergency. When mountain children
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Speaker 1: asked where babies came from, they were told, the nurses
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Speaker 1: bring them in the saddle bags. It was an image
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Speaker 1: that Breckinridge used to great effect in the publicity campaign
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Speaker 1: she engineered to attract both donations and staff. If some
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Speaker 1: county residents bristoled a national press that portrayed their home
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Speaker 1: as a backward backwater. They largely spared Breckinridge in the nurses.
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Speaker 1: We don't like to see the worst possible conditions that
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Speaker 1: can be described and exaggerated, pedaled upon as the fruits
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Speaker 1: and products of Leslie County, wrote one resident to a
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Speaker 1: local newspaper. But we honor miss Breckinridge for her work
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Speaker 1: in our behalf in quote. A nineteen thirty seven life
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Speaker 1: story praised the scope of that work. Three thousand babies
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Speaker 1: delivered with no maternal deaths, ninety thousand inoculations, and vaccines
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Speaker 1: administered well chlorinated across a seven hundred square mile area,
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Speaker 1: one million rays from private donors. There was something romantic
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Speaker 1: about the notion of a woman riding through the hills alone,
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Speaker 1: delivering babies and hope any hour may come the call,
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Speaker 1: wrote Breckenridge in the American Journal of Public Health in
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Speaker 1: nineteen twenty seven, from a man to fetch help for
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Speaker 1: his laboring wife. Quote, Hey woman, my woman is needing you.
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Speaker 1: And the nurse midwife gets her lantern and rides of.
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Speaker 1: But the work of the nursing service depended on more
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Speaker 1: than just medical staff. A sense of adventure and a
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Speaker 1: promise of usefulness drove many young women from privileged backgrounds
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Speaker 1: to join the service as couriers. Couriers cared for the
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Speaker 1: horses where there were no veterinarians nearby, kept the riding
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Speaker 1: tack in good repair, delivered supplies to the outlying clinics,
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Speaker 1: and sometimes accompanied the nurses on their rounds. Dorothy Caldwell,
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Speaker 1: a doctor's daughter from Cincinnati, became a courier in nineteen
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Speaker 1: thirty five. It was a way of life that most
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Speaker 1: young women just out of school could never imagine. We
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Speaker 1: were going into strange territory with the use of nothing
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Speaker 1: but a map, Caldwell said in nineteen seventy nine. She
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Speaker 1: goes on to say, I had a map of the
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Speaker 1: county that showed the creeks, and the creeks were the roads.
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Speaker 1: Anytime you met someone, which was very seldom, you questioned
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Speaker 1: them about where you were, Were you on the right road.
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Speaker 1: Everybody was always helpful, very friendly. These horse riding debutants,
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Speaker 1: as one historian described them, were also walking recruiting posters
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Speaker 1: for the Frontier Nursing Service, spreading the word to their
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Speaker 1: affluent communities back home. Breckinridge was a masterful networker as
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Speaker 1: a nurse with the American Committee for Devastated France. In
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Speaker 1: nineteen twenty, she wrote to her mother about the lack
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Speaker 1: of milk for the refugees. If I could give right
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Speaker 1: now a goat to every family that has a baby,
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Speaker 1: I think we could go far towards saving many that
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Speaker 1: are dying. I wish I had a thousand goats right now.
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Speaker 1: I wish I had fifty. Her mother, Catherine, organized donations
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Speaker 1: from family and friends across the country, and before long,
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Speaker 1: the first shipment of goats arrived from France. Given Mary's
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Speaker 1: past work for the American Committees for Devastated France, Breckinridge
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Speaker 1: called on similar connection to set up regional committees for
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Speaker 1: the Frontier of Nursing Service in cities such as New York, Detroit, Chicago.
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Speaker 1: The committees, which included the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and
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Speaker 1: Clara Ford, wife of the automobile Titan Henry Ford, provided
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Speaker 1: a relatively steady income for the service. A cousin, Mary
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Speaker 1: Marvin Breckinridge, was an accomplished photographer who shot many of
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Speaker 1: the service's early publicity images and even made a documentary film,
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Speaker 1: The Forgotten Frontier in nineteen thirty one, Marvin Breckinridge, as
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Speaker 1: she chose to be called to distinguish her from cousin.
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Speaker 1: Mary went on to cover the London Blitz with Edward
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Speaker 1: or Mural in November of nineteen thirty nine. The first
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Speaker 1: female reporter for the CBS World News Roundup Always hands On,
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Speaker 1: Mary Breckinridge directed the Frontier Nursing Service until her death
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Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty five. In those forty years, Frontier nurses
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Speaker 1: delivered fourteen thousand, five hundred babies, with only eleven maternal deaths,
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Speaker 1: and treated some fifty eight thousand patients overall. By almost
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Speaker 1: any standard, the service was an unqualified success in bringing
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Speaker 1: effective health care to an underserved area, and Breckinridge's lasting
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Speaker 1: contribution to public health was the establishment in nineteen thirty
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Speaker 1: nine of the Frontier Graduate School of Midwiffery and Heyden,
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Speaker 1: the first school of its kind in the United States.
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Speaker 1: The front Tier Nursing Service no longer makes house calls
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Speaker 1: on horseback, but its work continues in the Merry Breckinridge
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Speaker 1: Appellachian Regional Healthcare Hospital in heidn Ironically, its maternity ward
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Speaker 1: closed in twenty ten, part of a national trend that
27:11
Speaker 1: critics complain severely limited healthcare options for rural America. The
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Speaker 1: spirit of the service, however, is alive and well, as
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Speaker 1: home births are once again on the rise. The Centers
27:26
Speaker 1: for Disease Control reported that the number of home births
27:28
Speaker 1: in the United States increase by fifty nine percent between
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Speaker 1: two thousand four and twelve, though it's still an extremely
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Speaker 1: small number of total births. The need for skilled nurses
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Speaker 1: midwives is likewise expected to increase for the foreseeable future.
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Speaker 1: The Merry Breckenridge Hospital operates daily with a new women's
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Speaker 1: healthcare center that fulfills the mission that Breckenbridge created in
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Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties. On her deathbed, Breckinridge commented, quote the
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Speaker 1: glorious thing about it is that it has worked end
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Speaker 1: quote Well, that about does it for to Day's Radio
28:13
Speaker 1: Eye History. I hope you enjoyed to day's program as
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Speaker 1: much as I did reading it to you. I'm your host,
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Speaker 1: Joseph Bolt, and I'll be back next time with another
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Speaker 1: chapter of Radio eye History. Until then, happy trails to you.