Wild West Women by Erin H. Turner

Author:Erin H. Turner [Turner, Erin H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: TwoDot
Published: 2016-04-27T16:47:36+00:00

Eliza Cook

(1856–1947)

Pills and Politics

The dark, foreboding horse and buggy tore down the road, gritty dust devils ascending skyward attempting to avoid the careening carriage. Each passing house seemed to sigh in relief as the buggy lunged forward into the night. The driver, a woman who could barely reach the reins, held no fear of the rough terrain that lay before her.

Clad in black from head to toe, the woman walked into the house that was her destination and surveyed the surroundings. A figure lay motionless on a cot in the far corner. The other occupants of the house watched in silence as the woman leaned over the inert body and reached into her cavernous bag. She smiled at the bedridden soul, and then turned to the anxious family waiting in fearful expectation. Suddenly the shadow of death that had hovered so near the house for days seemed to evaporate into the dusty corners of the room. The doctor had arrived.

Eliza Cook traveled a road few women before her had dared. As one of the first physicians on the Nevada frontier, man or woman, she ministered to the sick and injured, the elderly and the newly born, those who sought her out and those who declared they would never have a “doctress” come near them. Growing up during an era when most men who called themselves doctor had not attended medical school, when the healing art was more a guessing game than a scientific, lifesaving profession, Eliza discovered her calling for medicine at an early age.

One of five children born to John and Margaretta Gratrix Cook, Eliza made her appearance on February 5, 1856, in Salt Lake City, Utah. She later called her birth “an unappropriate blessing.” Her father’s belief in polygamy, plus his stinginess with money (he refused to buy shoes for his two daughters), encouraged Margaretta to leave her husband, taking Eliza and her sister, Rebecca, to Soda Springs, Idaho, then to White Pine County, Nevada. By 1870 the trio finally settled in Sheridan, Nevada, just south of present-day Carson City.

The threesome lived frugally. Margaretta took in laundry and sewed for the local townsfolk. Eliza once told a reporter the first Christmas gifts she remembered receiving were a cracker filled with raisins and a handmade wooden doll.

Few schools existed in Carson Valley when the abbreviated family arrived, and the two girls relied on their mother and a handful of borrowed books for their education. One of the books Eliza came across detailed home medical cures and remedies. This might have been a copy of William Buchan’s book Domestic Medicine, which was first published in Scotland in 1769 and became popular in America about a hundred years later. Or she could have studied John C. Gunn’s medical tome of the 1800s, Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man’s Friend, in which he listed potions and poultices aimed particularly toward the western and southern states. Whatever she read, the book piqued her interest in medicine and she decided to pursue “doctoring” further.

Medicine of the 1800s offered scant cures for the sick and injured.

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