Remarkable Women of Old Lyme (American Heritage) by Lampos Jim & Pearson Michaelle

Author:Lampos, Jim & Pearson, Michaelle [Lampos, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2015-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

Miss Sarah Porter, founder of Miss Porter’s School. Ludington-Saltus Records.

Uncomfortable in the game of love, Alice chose a life of social service. She selected the field of medicine “because as a doctor I could go anywhere I pleased—to far off lands or to city slums—and could be quite sure I could be of use anywhere.” She attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and received her MD in 1893. At Ann Arbor, she received not only a medical education but also a social awakening. While interning at the hospital, she came across a case that shook her to the core and made her reexamine the foundation of her moral judgment. In a letter to Agnes, Alice described the case of “an exceedingly pretty girl” who was “much better bred than the other girls in the ward,” but she was “infected with a disease that bad women often have and that renders the approaching confinement very dangerous, almost surely fatal. She is so young, so utterly alone, and has probably been so wicked.” Alice was tortured by the fact that, try as she might, she couldn’t reach her to establish a personal connection: “Cannot get at her at all. I simply don’t know how. I would give anything to reach her. It is all my own fault.” Alice found that her attitudes resulting from a strict Christian upbringing flew in the face of what was necessary for her to actually accomplish a genuine Christian act of mercy. It was at this moment that she declared a revolution against herself, resolving to overcome her personal limitations by using all the privileges she acquired by virtue of her social class while discarding the prejudices that came with it. She would root them out from the darkest recesses of her being, through her will and self-conscious efforts, and also materially, by placing herself in the center of the most dangerous and challenging slums. In this way, by relating to people genuinely on whatever level she found them, she could, acting as an equal, hope to effectively make a positive difference in their lives.

In the process, Alice set for herself an impossibly high standard of conduct, and she subjected herself to withering self-rebuke when she couldn’t meet it. All praise made her “feel unutterably blue” because it only reminded her of her shortcomings. When her cousin Agnes wrote her praising the heroic work she was doing at the Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, where she worked after graduating from Ann Arbor, Alice wrote, “And don’t talk about my work in that way again, for it makes me feel like a wretched hypocrite.”

While it may be tempting from today’s perspective to study Alice’s attitude and call it low self-esteem, Alice was in fact holding herself to an exacting standard, one that she could see and aspire to and one she knew was critical to attain if she was to truly accomplish something great. She stood in the fire, trying her soul in the crucible of experience and, in the process, transformed herself into a genuinely empathetic and heroic figure.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.