Literature and Medicine I

by Meredith Eliassen, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, USA

1San Francisco had shed most of its boomtown heritage to become a mercantile hub in the American West and gateway to the Pacific Rim commerce when, in February 1875, Dr. Charlotte B. Brown, Dr. Martha E. Bucknell, and other female community leaders established the Pacific Dispensary Hospital for Women and Children as a public health model of care for indigent children and an urban clinical-training facility for women. The well being of women and children was wrapped within broader economic empires of a few men who dominated the lucrative industries that shaped the California economy during the Progressive Era. Women’s health issues were rarely deemed important until 1911, when California women cast their votes locally for the first time. Dr. Charlotte Blake Brown (1846-1904) and her daughter Dr. Adelaide Brown (1867-1940) were activists for women and children’s health reform in San Francisco. They collectively improved access to health care for poor women and children by fighting for health equity over a fifty-year period. The Pacific Dispensary Hospital became an experiment to see whether female physicians with authority within a specific medical community could establish an enduring institution to educate female medical practitioners to care for women and children.

2Three and a half years after the Pacific Dispensary Hospital was established, kindergartner Kate Douglas Wiggin opened the Silver Street Free Kindergarten in the working-class Tar Flats neighborhood south of Market Street in San Francisco (Issel and Cherny 61, 105-06). Female medical practitioners inadvertently tread in the male medical domain, whereas Wiggin, who later became a best-selling author of children’s books, utilized an acceptable feminine vehicle for acclaim when she promoted the kindergarten movement. Wiggin wrote The Story of Patsy, a brief literary sketch to benefit the Silver Street Free Kindergarten, which was expanded and published in 1889 (Wiggin 12). In the story, Patsy with his “shrunken, somewhat deformed body,” presented Wiggin’s view of the spiritual potential of working-class children in the kindergarten, when Patsy actually personified the symptoms associated with bovine tuberculosis that was passed to humans via contaminated milk products. The Pacific Dispensary Hospital and the Silver Street Kindergarten both competed for support from the same local philanthropists, including Phoebe Apperson Hearst, Adolph Sutro, William Ralston, and Charles Crocker. The Pacific Dispensary Hospital went about the gritty task of educating parents and the city about environmental and industrial health hazards, while the Kindergartner nurtured a romanticized worldview of ethereal child garden in San Francisco’s slums. Dr. Adelaide Brown would address bovine tuberculosis by taking on the California dairy industry during the early twentieth century.

“The Pioneer”

3Charlotte “Lotte” Amanda Blake, the daughter of pioneer medical missionaries, was born in Philadelphia in 1846. Her father Charles Morris Blake studied for the ministry before the excitement of the California Gold Rush led him to travel via the Isthmus route to California in early 1849. His wife, Charlotte Farrington Blake, a nurse, and their three children joined him in California during the fall of 1851. Blake established a boarding school for boys in 1851 that later became the Collegiate Institute in Benicia, California, and evolved into University of California’s Hastings College of Law in San Francisco (History of Solano County 166). The Blake family left California for several years to pursue healing Presbyterian missionary work in South America. Charlotte returned to the United States to attend Elmira College in New York, graduating in 1866. She married Henry Adams Brown and worked as a nurse. The Browns traveled to Arizona in 1867 where Charlotte worked as a nurse. During the 1870s, the Blake and Brown families reunited in California. Charles Blake studied medicine at Toland College in San Francisco, and worked as an Army chaplain until 1883. However, Charles was not alone in his medical studies; his daughter Charlotte also had aspirations to practice medicine.  

4Dr. Charles Blake established his medical practice in Yountville, California, a small coastal community north of San Francisco. The two families soon relocated inland to Napa, California where all of Charlotte’s children were born. Her eldest children, Adelaide and Philip were young when she began to read medicine with Dr. Charles Nichols. Her youngest daughter was born before Charlotte discretely traveled to Philadelphia to study gynecology at Women’s Medical College. Her children remained with their grandparents in Napa. Grandmother Farrington, as she was called, wrote to Charlotte in 1872, asking if she should tell anyone “out of the family of Lotte’s purpose in being on the East Coast” (Children’s Hospital of San Francisco, 1875-1988). Adelaide was seven years old when her mother graduated with her medical degree in 1874. Lotte’s purpose would be revealed upon her return to California when she set about establishing a children’s hospital in San Francisco. 

5Dr. Charlotte Blake Brown, along with Dr. Martha E. Bucknell and ten San Francisco women founded the Pacific Dispensary Hospital for Women and Children in early 1875. Located at 520 Taylor Street in San Francisco, the hospital provided free health care, charging only for medicine. During its first ten months of operation, most of the hospital’s 267 patients were treated for ailments resulting from malnutrition. Aside from support of the men in their families, the founders of the clinic were on their own in this endeavor (Hendricks 61-63). Charlotte’s husband, employed at Wells Fargo Bank, used his influence to get the bank to provide rooms for meetings of the Women’s Medical Society.