E. Amelia Sherman - A few simple facts concerning the life of one of the first physicians to be born in Clayton county are that Ellen Amelia Sherman, A. B., M. D., was born in Farmersburg township, Clayton county, Iowa, on November 29, 1849, the third child and third daughter of Mark Bachelor Sherman and Sibyl Melissa (Clark) Sherman, whose biographies are written elsewhere in this volume, and to which reference may be made for her ancestry. She was fortunate in having energetic, frugal ancestors who endeavored to make the record of their lives such that it might be an inspiration to those who came after them. Dr. Sherman says, "My earliest recollection of the country was that at least half of the surrounding prairie was unbroken and unfenced, the common pasture of the farmers," and here many varieties of wild flowers grew which she and her sisters delighted to gather. She remembers distinctly of gathering wild flowers in the summer of 1852, with Samuel Whitman, a Harvard College student, and silently wondering why he stopped so long to look at them and dug up the roots of some of them. The following winter, one evening she was seated in her little chair by her mother while the mother read to a company from the New York Tribune an article by Gail Hamilton; after the reading the company discussed whether Gail Hamilton was a man or woman (then unknown), when one of the gentlemen emphatically declared that the writer could not be a woman as no woman could write like that. She looked from one to the other and thought, my mother can write as well as my father and why can not a woman write like that! This shows the intuition of some children. In the spring of 1854 the brick walls and roof of the first school house in the district were made on the open prairie, half a mile from her home, and the first day of school she attended with her two older sisters, their seats being the freshly cut green lumber piled around the unplastered walls to season, there being no desks. At the close of the summer school the school-house was plastered and seats with desks made. Wild things were abundant. A neighbor's boys gathered two hundred prairiehens' eggs and hatched them under tame hens, wishing to tame prairie-hens, but every chick eventually skulked off and died. Thousands of prairiehens and wild pigeons in their season were killed for food, but the larger game of wild turkey, deer, bear, etc., were not abundant in the fifties. Her parents encouraged their children in getting an education, but she was not blessed with robust health and at times, in almost every term of school, she had to be absent on account of sickness. When fifteen years old she had so well mas tered the branches taught in the home school that her parents then sent her for four terms to the Upper Iowa University. When about seventeen years old she decided she wished to be a doctor, then perhaps a missionary. When she told her parents of her choice of a profession, her mother opposed the idea, her father said nothing. Later she again told her parents of her desire to be a doctor; still her mother did not approve, but her father, who always endeavored to grant any reasonable wish of his children, had in the meantime considered the question, and then said, "Why not let her study medicine? It will not hurt her." Then there was no more opposition. She then taught rural schools for two years and saved her wages to go to school with. While teaching she was interested in natural history and made a collection of birds' eggs and insects. In 1869 she went with her sisters, Ada and Althea, to Oberlin College and studied for an A.B. degree, for the reason that she had observed that usually the most successful M.D.'s were those who had also an A. B. degree, and she wished to be one of the best of doctors. She received her A.B. degree from Oberlin College in 1874. Thereafter she taught almost continuously in public and private schools until the fall of 1876, when, with her sister (now Dr. Ada Sherman-St. John of Wichita, Kansas), she entered the Woman's Medical College of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she studied nine months, and then was given, for about three months, the position of assistant to the resident physician and surgeon of the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia. Then she received the appointment of interne for one year in the New England Hospital for Women and Children, Boston, Massachusetts, for which positions they could not procure enough women M.D.'s, so accepted well recommended undergraduates. In the fall of 1878 she entered the Senior Medical class of Michigan University and received the degree of M.D. in 1879. On her way home, stopping in Chicago she met Dr. Mary Thompson, who was looking for a resident physician for the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children (now the Mary Thompson Hospital), and Dr. Sherman accepted the position, residing in the hospital for nine months; then for three years she was in private practice in Chicago, but held clinics two days each week at the hospital, and was anaesthetist for Dr. Thompson; also two days each week she held clinics at the Woman's Temperance Union. In 1884 she received the appointment of assistant physician for women in the Iowa Independence State Hospital for the Insane, which position she held for three and one-third years, then resigned to go into private practice where she could care for her aged parents at their home in National. Never having had rugged health, many years of arduous devotion to her profession brought on heart disease in 1894, so she had to give up her large general practice and limit her work mostly to mental diseases and office practice, but she will not entirely give up her chosen profession, and devotes much time to postgraduate work, attending medical and scientific meetings, writing articles, and posting herself in the advancement of science and medicine. Of her articles read before various medical societies, some of them have been printed, including the following: "Diseases of Women as Causes of Insanity" (printed in the Transactions of Iowa State Medical Society, Vol. VII) ; State vs. County Care of the Insane (Woman's Medical Journal) ; Immaterial Remedies and Their Uses in the Regular Practice of Medicine. (Ibid) ; When Should We Advise Operative Treatment for Fibroid Tumors of the Uterus (Ibid) ; The Consumptives' Plea (a poem) (Ibid). source: History of Clayton County,
Iowa; From The Earliest Historical Times Down to the
Present; by Realto E. Price, Vol. II, 1916; pg.
377-379 [Ellen Amelia Sherman] |
