From delivering babies to recordkeeping, Mendocino County women did it all

FORMAL MEDICAL CARE on the Mendocino coast was sparse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, due to few doctors living here. Women often acted as nurse, doctor and pharmacist, treating their families as best as they could before calling for a physician. Doctors could take hours to arrive by horse or foot. In 1906, the Fort Bragg Advocate commented on this (with a sarcastic twist), writing “Every mother is a trained nurse, with the two unimportant exceptions of the uniform and the wages.”

In March 1982, “Mendocino Medicine & Gazetteer” ran a piece titled “Frontier Medicine: Healthcare in Mendocino County at the Turn of the Century,” which featured oral histories that testified to women’s role in healthcare. In his interview, Elmer Walker stated “Medicine? Mother doctored me up.” Walker told a story of his brother choking on a fishbone, and the nearest doctor being too far away even on horseback. To save her choking son, his mother used a buttonhook to fish the bone out. “And the patient lived,” said Walker.