Narratives of Class, Gender and Medicine in the American South: The Dr. Annie Alexander Story — Page 4:
16 Annie Alexander has left to posterity two works of fiction. The first is “Doctor Katherine.” All that survives of a second story, which must date from after 1911, are two pages entitled “Chapter II.” This is a love story told from a young heroine’s perspective, of her devotion to and cherishing of a man. The text breaks off abruptly. Immediately after these two pages, a large number of leaves have been ripped out of the volume, and destroyed. This story is written in the unused portion of her father’s last medical casebook.[62]John Alexander Papers, Box 1, Folder 7 (unpaginated).
17 [63]Alexander died at home on 15 October 1929, after a very brief illness, of pneumonia, allegedly contracted from a patient (Dudley; Pendleton 65). In 1890, 410 North Tryon had been situated in a charming residential neighborhood within a short walk of the city center. [64]By the early 1920s she occupied the last private residence, surrounded by car dealerships, a barber shop, dry cleaners, service station, and light manufacturing. The Wall Street Crash, nine days after her death, speedily destroyed the value of hard-won investments. Alexander, who published relatively little and who consciously maintained a high public profile only in her own community, has almost wholly been ignored in modern scholarship. Within public memory in Charlotte, she is “the remarkable Dr. Annie,” with a “rather heroic story,” who sacrificed herself in order to achieve the impossible (Pendleton; Thompson; Blythe; Kratt 12; Anon., “Annie”; Kent 97, 104). What stands out in Alexander’s life is not sacrifice, but duty: the dutiful daughter; the dutiful mainstay of societies, charities, and hospitals; the conscientious physician. The message to adolescent girls of the 1880s in “Doctor Katherine” was that one did not have to be exceptional to succeed in medicine, and perhaps even “have it all,” both career and marriage. [65]It is ironic that Alexander has been cast (after her death) as exceptional, particularly because she strove diligently to fit expectations, and because during her lifetime Charlotte’s male elite generally found it advantageous to view its sole woman physician as a model of the modest, reserved citizen, and southern woman.