Pioneer Women and Medicine

Women in the 18th and 19th centuries often worked together to provide medical care. They treated common ailments, sicknesses, and injuries, assisted childbirths, and shared home-manufactured medicines, including salves, syrups, teas, ointments, poultices, and dressings.¹ At a time before modern medicine had attained high rates of success, many people distrusted doctors and relied on herbal remedies and faith.² Early Latter-day Saints, like their American contemporaries, developed informal health networks within their communities, relying on each other both for medical care and for blessings and prayers.

In Nauvoo, Church leaders valued the practical wisdom, compassion, and faith of midwives like Patty Sessions and Zina Huntington. These women were set apart as healers to deliver care, administer medicine, mentor other midwives, and perform healing blessings.³ In July 1851 women in Utah organized the Female Council of Health. The council sustained midwife Phoebe Angell, mother of Brigham Young’s wife Mary Ann Angell, as their first president, with two other midwives as her counselors. This council designated a woman in most of the city’s 19 wards “to look after the poor.”⁴

In the 1870s, after medical practice had advanced following the Civil War and after the railroad had more closely connected Utah with the rest of the country, Church leaders began to consider ways that Saints could receive professional education in the eastern United States. By this time, President Brigham Young had developed greater confidence in scientific medicine and sought to integrate it with healing by faith.⁵ He turned to Eliza R. Snow and the Relief Society to facilitate women’s formal training as physicians at a time when few American women enjoyed such educational opportunities.⁶ In 1873 Snow asked the Relief Society women of Ogden, Utah, for volunteers: “Are there here, now, any sisters who have ambition enough, and who realize the necessity of it, for Zion’s sake, to take up this study[?]”⁷

Deseret Hospital exterior

Deseret Hospital in Salt Lake City, circa 1857–1900.

Women answered the call. In 1877 Romania Pratt became the first Latter-day Saint woman to graduate from medical school at a time when germ theory helped make medical practitioners more effective at preventing and fighting disease.⁸ Additional women followed Romania’s example, returning home after their schooling to then teach classes in obstetrics and family care. Women like Emma Liljenquist of Hyrum, Utah, were formally set apart as midwives, with their training costs paid by their local Relief Societies.⁹ In 1882 the Relief Society established the Deseret Hospital in Salt Lake City, where patients could receive treatment from trained physicians as well as healing blessings.¹⁰ As medical science continued to advance, Saints in Utah, like their American contemporaries, increasingly sought out professional medical care.

Church Resources

“Eliza R. Snow, Discourse, August 14, 1873,” in Jill Mulvay Derr, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Kate Holbrook, and Matthew J. Grow, eds., The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2016), 380–88.

“Emma Anderson Liljenquist, Reminiscences of 1887, in ‘The Story of My Life,’ circa 1948 (Excerpt),” in The First Fifty Years of Relief Society, 530–34.

“A Wide and Extensive Sphere of Action,” in Daughters in My Kingdom: The History and Work of Relief Society (2011), 39–59.

Bibliography

The following publications provide further information about this topic. By referring or linking you to these resources, we do not endorse or guarantee the content or the views of the authors.

Susanna Morrill, “Relief Society Birth and Death Rituals: Women at the Gates of Mortality,” Journal of Mormon History, vol. 36, no. 2 (Spring 2010), 128–59.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “‘Eye to Eye in Faith and Scientific Knowledge’: Esther Romania Bunnell Pratt Penrose (1839–1932),” in Richard E. Turley Jr. and Brittany A. Chapman, eds., Women of Faith in the Latter Days: Volume Two, 1821–1845 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2012), 275–87.

Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).

Related Topics: Healing, Relief Society, Church Academies

Notes

1. See Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Random House, 1991), 11–12, 47, 61–66.

2. See Z[ebedee] Snow, in “Speeches Delivered at the Assembly of the Council of Health, on Ensign Peak,” Deseret News, July 24, 1852, vol. 2, no. 19; Christine Croft Waters, “Pioneering Physicians in Utah, 1847–1900” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1976), 14, 16.

3. Jonathan A. Stapley and Kristine Wright, “Female Ritual Healing in Mormonism,” Journal of Mormon History, vol. 37, no. 1 (Winter 2011), 7–8 note 18, 14–15; Steven C. Dinger, “‘The Doctors in This Region Don’t Know Much’: Medicine and Obstetrics in Mormon Nauvoo,” Journal of Mormon History, vol. 42, no. 4 (October 2016), 65–67; Carol Cornwall Madsen, “Faith and Community: Women of Nauvoo,” in Susan Easton Black and Charles D. Tate Jr., eds., Joseph Smith: The Prophet, The Man (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, 1993), 232.

4. “Part 2: 1854–1866,” in Jill Mulvay Derr, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Kate Holbrook, and Matthew J. Grow, eds., The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2016), 177–234. See also Topic: Healing; Phoebe M. Angell, “Seek to the Lord for Wisdom,” in Jennifer Reeder and Kate Holbrook, eds., At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2017), 27–28.

5. See Lester E. Bush Jr., Health and Medicine among the Latter-day Saints: Science, Sense, and Scripture (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 93–96. See also Lou Mueller, “Divine Duty: Midwifery in Southeastern Utah at the Turn of the Century,” Blue Mountain Shadows, vol. 17 (Summer 1996), 51–62; Thomas W. Simpson, American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 11–25.

6. See Simpson, American Universities, 18–19. See also Matthew J. Grow, “Liberty to the Downtrodden”: Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 143–48.

7. “Eliza R. Snow, Discourse, August 14, 1873,” in The First Fifty Years of Relief Society, 380–88.

8. See Jessie Del Macdonald Clawson, “Pioneer Physicians,” in Museum Memories, 9 vols. (Salt Lake City: International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 2010), 2:67; Simpson, American Universities, 17; Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 8.

9. See Clawson, “Pioneer Physicians,” 49–96; “Emma Anderson Liljenquist, Reminiscences of 1887, in ‘The Story of My Life,’ circa 1948 (Excerpt),” in The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History; Simpson, American Universities, 18–23. For more on medical classes, see “Report of Deseret Hospital Dedication, July 17, 1882,” in The First Fifty Years of Relief Society, 497–506.

10. “Report of Deseret Hospital Dedication, July 17, 1882,” in The First Fifty Years of Relief Society, 497–506; see also Topic: Healing.