Dr. Lucy Hobbs Taylor

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So in reading an old Ish mid twentie century biographical article for today's subject, it opened with the line quote, the history of most of the major professions reveals that they have been dominated by man, and when woman sought to invade those sacred precincts of masculine activity, great consternation arose, which which is a funny line. Um, funny and aggravating. Right. Uh. That was definitely, at least to some degree true for Lucy Hobbs. Later, Lucy Hobbs Taylor and her desire to have a career in dentistry before that was recognized as an acceptable vocation for a woman. She's interesting and that she was really just tenacious as hell. She got told no a lot, and that did not deter her from her plan, and she just kind of found her way around any obstacles to make her own way to get to where she wanted in life. But to be clear upfront, I want to She often is lauded as the first woman dentist. That's not accurate. We're going to talk about that towards the end of the episode. She's someone if you listen to our two part on the history of dentistry, she came up briefly and she was so interesting that I wanted to do an episode about her. I will also tell you in a comforting way that there is no real talk of any dental scariness here. We talked about fillings a little in one advancement in how they were performed in her kind of being a champion for that, but it's pretty mild, so don't worry if you're squeaming. Lucy was born Lucy Beamon Hobbs on March three. Her place of birth is a little uncertain. We know she was born in New York State. Most biographies say that it was in Franklin County. That's in the state's northeast corner. If you look at her biography on the Kansas Historical Society's website, you'll see Constable, New York listened as her place of birth. That's in Franklin County. But there was another place mentioned in a paper about Lucy that was written in nineteen fifty one. That document says she was born in Ellenburg. That's in Clinton County, New York, immediately to the east of Franklin County, so you can say upstate New York pretty confidently, probably Franklin County, but there's some inconsistency, and we don't know a whole lot about Lucy's childhood. She also had a lot of siblings, nine according to one source, and there is some indication that her mother died when she was still quite young, but we don't really have a lot of details about it. Her story really picks up in eighteen forty nine, when Lucy graduated from the Franklin Academy in Malone, New y Ork, with the intent to become a school teacher, and she did do that for a decade. She started when she was just eighteen, and later told a reporter quote, I had pupils older than myself who knew about as much as I did. But that did not shake my faith in myself, for I knew that little informed as I was, we had no better teacher in our district since I could remember. She was described as laughing when she said this, like I'm as good as any of the others I've had um. But she traveled to her teaching jobs were and as a consequence, she ended up in Brooklyn, Michigan, and she met someone there who changed her life's trajectory. Although I have never found this person's name in any of the things that I read, but the house where she rented a room in Michigan was apparently owned by a doctor, and he and Lucy are said to have talked a lot about his profession because she was deeply interested in it. She's often quoted as saying that she wished quote to enter a profession where she could and her bread, not alone by the sweat of her brow, but by the use of her brains also, and her physician friend encouraged her to take that intellectual curiosity and use it to pursue a career in medicine. So Lucy decided to go to Cincinnati, Ohio to enroll in medical school. This was an eighteen fifty nine She was twenty six at the time, and her plan was to enroll at Eclectic Medical Institute of Cincinnati or e m I. So for a little bit of background on that school. Eclectic medicine was a form of medicine that was popular in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States, and the focus on this type of medicine was based largely on botanicals in herbal medicine. E m I had been founded in eighteen forty two, and for a while, starting in eighteen fifty, it graduated some of the first women with physician credentials in the US. But even though Lucy Hobbs knew she wanted an education at Eclectic, it turned out the school didn't want her. A collectic had stopped taking women's students in eighteen fifty seven, she was refused enrollment. When she spoke to the college president about the situation, he suggested that maybe she could pursue a career in dentistry instead, and Lucy thought about it and ultimately decided that she would take the college president's advice. So her next step was to apply to work with dentists in the Cincinnati area. She needed some degree of learning in the field before she could apply to a formal training program or at dental college, so she began to search for a mentor, and she was told repeatedly that the dental field was for men, and some dentists flat out told her that it would damage their practice if people found out a woman was being taught on the premises. An article written later in her life reported that quote. She began a tour of dentist offices in Cincinnati for a place to study. On every hand, she was rebuffed, though one man offered to let her clean his office and look on while he worked. Proposition was indignantly refused. She finally got an assist from the dean of the Ohio College of Dental Surgery that was Dr Jonathan Taft, as a temporary arrangement while she kept looking for a formal mentor to take her on. Taft told her she could learn in his office for three months. So finally she found somebody he was willing to work with her. Dr Samuel Wardle had been one of doctor Jonathan Taft students he had graduated in eighteen fifty nine, and he offered her an apprenticeship in his office. This was a break for hops, but it also meant that her days were spent working and learning but not getting paid for it. So in the evenings she would take in sewing to try to keep herself afloat. Yeah, I have so many questions that I never found satisfactory answers to about doctor Wardle because he was fresh out of dental school, and I'm like, was it that he was super progressive or was it that he really needed an assistant for no money because he was just starting his friend? Right? Um, how much did Dr Taft kind of help push that thing together? But at this point in time, there were not a lot of dental programs in the United States. The first had opened in Baltimore in eighteen forty, the second, the Ohio College of Dental Surgery, had opened in eighteen forty five, and the third, Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, had opened in eighteen fifty six. But that was it three options. Lucy, because of proximity, applied to the Ohio College of Dental Surgery in March of eighteen sixty one, but even though she had gotten that help earlier from the dean, this application went exactly as well as her application to Eclectic lose these. Next move, on the advice of Dr Wortle, was to just open up her own practice. At the time, it was beneficial to have a degree, but it wasn't required to practice. She opened an office in Cincinnati on March fourteenth, eighteen sixty one, which was her twenty eight birthday. That year, of course, was monumental. In the United States. The Civil War officially began less than a month after Lucy Hobbs opened her practice, So Lucy closed up her Ohio office almost immediately, and then she moved to Iowa to start over there. Presumably she thought it was safer there farther away from the epicenter of conflict. And although Lucy didn't really know anyone in Iowa when she moved there, she must have been providing something that people really desperately needed in opening a dental office in Bellevue, Iowa that's located in Jackson County on the Illinois border. Because she ended her first year there in the black, having put away a hundred dollars more than it had cost to run the office and pay for her necessities. This modest success of her first year running her own dental practice gave Lucy Hobbs the confidence to move somewhere that had more lucrative potential. This time it was McGregor, Iowa, about eighty two miles north of Bellevue, and her instincts were correct. She finished her second year in her new profession with a profit of three thousand dollars on the books. That was no small sum. In eighteen sixty three, Hobbs kept building up her business. She established a very good reputation as a dentist. For the next three years she stayed in McGregor, and according to a newspaper account written several years after Lucy had arrived in McGregor, Iowa, she had had to work to prove herself to the new community and especially the men of the town. There were definitely some who just did not believe that she, as a woman, would know what she was doing, and so one man decided that he was going to test her by making an appointment in This backfired. According to a write up about it from the Vermont paper, The Burlington Democrat, which came out in eighteen seventy, to quote, a young man once entered her office in McGregor and asked her to examine his teeth, knowing at the time they were perfectly sound. She saw the trick at once, but nevertheless commenced to work at his teeth. She bored a hole in a sound tooth and filled it with gold, urging him the usual price he had to pay well for the experiment. I don't love this story. I don't either, but I also think it's funny. I love it and I don't love it. I'm like, that's malpractice, But I understand where you're coming from. Similar. Yeah, So coming up, we'll talk about a surprising development and Lucy Hobb's career. First, though, we will pause for a quick sponsor break. In July sixty five, Lucy was invited to attend a meeting of the Iowa State Dental Society in Debut, Iowa. The president of the society, Dr Luhman Church Ingersoll, had extended that invitation himself, and while attending, Lucy was asked to join the organization. This was a pretty big deal, and Ingersoll had prepared a resolution for the occasion, which he gave as a speech. It not only noted that Lucy was welcomed by all of the members, but also entreated the larger dental profession to recognize that women are perfectly suited to work in dentistry. This read quote, whereas the Iowa State Dental Society has, without precedent, elected to membership a lady practitioner of dentistry, and whereas it is due to her to know that the unanimous vote by which she was elected, was not simply a formal vote, And whereas it is due to the profession at large that we make a formal declaration concerning the position, we have assumed in our action. Therefore resolved that we most cordially welcome Miss Lucy be Hobbs of McGregor to our number and to our professional pursuits, trials, aims, and successes. Resolved that the profession of dentistry, involving as it does the vital interest of humanity and the relief of human suffering, and the perpetuation of the comforts and enjoyments of life, and civilized and refined society, has nothing in its pursuits foreign to the instincts of women, and, on the other hand, presents in almost every applicant for operations a subject requiring a kind and benevolent consideration of the most refined and womanly nature. Lucy then made a brief speech to her own thanking the Dental Society and remarking on how truly meaningful it was after having heard quite the opposite sentiment for so long regarding women in dentistry. The society also nominated her to be a representative to attend the American Dental Association meeting that year. There was another benefit to having gone to this meeting for Hobbs. Dr Jonathan Taft, the dean of the Ohio College of Dental Surgery, was also at the meeting, and other members of society put some pressure on him to do whatever he could to finally admit Lucy Hobbes to the dental school, and that worked. Taft got Lucy admitted to the school. Of course, at this point she had and in practice for half a decade, so the school did not make her take the entire load of classes that would normally be required of their dental students. Lucy Hobbs was admitted as a senior. She got credit for all of that work she had been doing. She attended one session and then received the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery on February twenty one, eighteen sixty six. She was, as it is often said, the first woman in the world to receive a dental degree. That same year, Dr Hobbs wrote a paper about one of the advancements in the field of dental medicine, which she read before the Iowa State Dental Society before it was published in a dental journal. And in particular it championed the use of mallets. It read quote, the mallet system has become the prevailing system among the best operators. It needs but a few facts to show everythinking mind that this is the best system yet known to the profession. For all ordinary fillings as very few, but can be better and more easily can dense than by hand pressure. No proof is necessary to show that anyone can do better work when he can give all his attention to placing the gold in the cavity, stand easy and natural, and have an assistant do the condensing. So for clarity, mallets have historically been used to knock out people's teeth, but this was a very different situation. The mallets that Hobbs was writing about were small. They were used to shape and condense filling material for a more thorough restoration of the tooth, and this worked a lot better than a dentists just only being able to use their hands to push gold or amalgam into the filling holes, and they weren't using them to tap, but just to shape. Dr Hobbs described the benefit of mallet use for career longevity as well, writing quote, in the old way the operator was all worn out with a few fillings. The position was such that in most cases the strength could not be applied in the right direction, but at a great disadvantage to the operators, so that after a very few years of practice, an operator was worn out ere he had arrived at any degree of perfection. Anyone that has tried both systems will admit that more gold can be condensed in a cavity, and of course make a better filling, as it is more solid than in any other way. Being driven to place by the mallet, it forms one solid mass. She also notes that it's better for the patient to have a narrow tool in their mouth than a dentist's whole hand writing quote with the mallet, I have known the patient to sleep when the operation was long, this showing that it was not very unpleasant. After officially receiving her degree, doctor Hobbs moved her practice once more, this time to Chicago to an office at nineties three Washington Stream, and while living there she met a man named James Myrtle Taylor, who had fought for the Union in the Civil War and at that point was working as a train car painter for the Northwestern Railway. The two married on April sixty seven. Several months later, on November one, eighteen sixty seven, Lucy Hobbs Taylor sold her practice to another doctor that was Dr. Edmund Noy's, and she and her husband moved to Lawrence, Kansas to open a practice there. This practice was housed at ninety eight Massachusetts Street in Lawrence, and there were two dentists because Lucy taught James the dentistry trade, and as a pair they did really well. Their practice was very popular and well respected, and they stayed busy. They had built the office on land that they purchased, and the building they put there also included their residence. After several years in that location, the Taylors decided to build a new home, this time on Ohio Street, and this time it was not a combination home in business. Instead, they moved the dental office to a new and separate location at the corner of eight in Massachusetts. Lucy's time in Kansas was marked by heavy participation in community activities. Lucy joined the Fraternal Order in Service organization Rebecca Lodge, known more formally as the Women's Associate Lodges of the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows. She joined that in June of eighteen seventy one. In eighteen seventy six, the eighth Chapter of the Eastern Star Lodge was founded, and Lucy was a charter member. She really loved Kansas and once said of it quote, I am a New Yorker by birth, but I love my adopted country the West. To it belongs the credit of making it possible for women to be recognized in the dentil profession on equal terms with men. We will talk a bit about Lucy's life after she had become a well known figure in dentistry, but first we will hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going. There was a certain degree of celebrity that came with being the first woman in the US with a dental degree. When Lucy traveled, her mere presents sometimes made the papers. For example, when she went to see family in Ellenburg, New York, in eighteen seventy two. You'll remember that's one of the places she might have been born. But that visit got a right up. That is the account that we quoted from earlier that recounted the man in McGregor, Iowa, who had decided to test her and That article opens with Mrs Lucy Hobbs Taylor, d d S and her husband have been visiting relatives in town for several weeks, and then it continues with the brief biography of Lucy's accomplishments. James M. Taylor died in eighteen eight six. It's usually reported that at that point Lucy retired, but that doesn't seem to be entirely accurate. She did step away from the practice for a bit, but then reopened the offices and kept the practice open for quite a while, although with significantly reduced hours that she kept there. Part of this seems to be just a matter of her patients, who called her doctor Lucy. They would not let her retire. To pick up paper reported quote, for years she had the largest dental practice in the city of Lawrence. And regardless of the fact that she has retired from active business, there are many who will let no one do their work. But her I knew a number of people, more doctors than dentists really, who like retire but still maintain like some level of patient engagement. When another dentist from Lawrence, Dr. C. E. Esterley, died suddenly in nineteen o one, Dr Taylor and five other dentists in the area placed a note in the Lawrence Daily Journal to honor him. They included a description of him as fostering friendships among the various dentists of the area, writing quote, the cordiality of his relations to each of us has taught us much of what one practitioner should be to another, and we feel that our intercourse with him and his friendship toward us has been a moral as well as a professional blessing. When she wasn't kindly continuing to see patients who felt that no other dentist would do, Lucy spent most of her time working with civic groups and her fraternal organizations. As an example of some of the charitable work that she did in her later years. In eighteen nineties three, a new home for orphans was being built in nearby Ottawa, Kansas. The board of trustees managing the project reached out to the various Rebecca Lodges of the state to help the project along in whatever ways they could. A lot sent donations. Dr Lucy Hobbs Taylor encouraged her local lodge to help, which it did, but in addition to that, Lucy also selected one of the rooms in this orphan home and provided all the furnishings from it from her own money. This was in line with a lot of her charity work both before and after her husband's death, which was often done for the benefit of mothers and children's causes. In the Chicago Tribune ran an article about women dentists which opened with quote, ten years ago, a woman dentist was a rarity, even in novelty. In Chicago today, the city claims at least fifteen fair devotees of the profession who are making their way in the most approved American girl fashion. This article is mostly about the women that are practicing in the city at the time, including one named Mrs Hattie E. Lawrence, who the paper called a quote pioneer woman dentist, whatever that means. Um. The article gets quotes from a handful of women in the field and share some of the things that they were dealing with on the day to day basis, including people always asking if they were strong enough to pull teeth. But then it traces all of that back to Lucy Hobbs as the forerunner and mentions the quote bitter opposition and foolish objection that she had to endure in her early dental career. She finally officially closed her office in the early nineteen hundreds. According to a real estate transfer announcement and Lawrence's Jeffersonian Gazette, she sold the house on Ohio Street to a woman named to Kate M. Spalding for one thousand, five hundred ten dollars. She had already moved into a new home at eight o nine Vermont Street a few years before that. Yeah, that was both her home and her office because she was still occasionally letting people come over to have worked. In the late summer or early autumn of nineteen ten, Dr Taylor had a stroke and this left her with some degree of paralysis. UM. I read about it in papers. They did not describe it anymore detailed than that. A little more than a month later, she died of a three real hemorridge at three thirty am on October three, nineteen ten, in her home in Lawrence, Kansas. The local paper referred to her as quote one of the best known residents of this city in the death announcement, and Arkansas Paper reported her death by saying, quote, Lawrence, Kansas has lost its most widely known and most prominent professional woman in Mrs Lucy Hobbs Taylor. She was buried in o Khill sem Arry on Thirteenth Street, alongside her husband. Before her death, she almost certainly understood her significance as the first woman to earn a degree in dentistry. Allegedly, in seven she gave her diploma to a friend that was Dr Edward bum Gartner. At least that's one version of the story. The Jeffersonian Gazette reported it as the bum Gardener received the diploma when Lucy died. The announcement reads quote valued as a keepsake, the diploma of the late Dr Lucy Hobbs Tailor, whose death took place a week ago, issued to her from the Ohio College of Dental Surgery in February eighteen sixty six as the first woman dentist in America, has been given to Dr Edward bum Gartner, who has a hobby as a collector. He values the parchment very highly. Yeah, it's unclear since they don't mention when it was given to him. They kind of make it sound like it was when he died. But then I'm like, well, then who gave it to him? Like who was the executor that was like, you can have this. We know they were friends. They had both co signed that placement that they had had put in the paper about their colleague that had died. They knew each other before that. Bum Gardner was a fellow dentist who had moved to Lawrence, Kansas in after he received his dental degree. And though you would think that technically they were competitors, at that point, Lucy had largely stepped back from dentistry, and so she and bum Gardner became friends, and she was something of a mentor to him. And in any case, he kept Lucy's diploma for some period of time, and then he gave it to the Kansas State Historical Society, where it remains in the organization's archives. In an obituary in the Lawrence Daily Journal, the following was written about Lucy Hobbs Taylor quote. Dr Lucy Taylor was one of the most striking figures in Lawrence. She occupied a position of honor and ability for years. She occupied a place high in the ranks of her profession. Dr Taylor was a great chair double worker and did much good in a quiet, unobtrusive manner. By nine hundred less than forty years after Lucy Hobbs opened her first practice, and while she was still alive, there were almost one thousand women dentists in the United States. Today, there is an award named for Lucy Hobbs Taylor, which is given by the American Association of Women Dentists. It is their highest honor and is given in recognition of outstanding women in dentistry. So we've talked a bunch about Dr Lucy Hobbs Taylor, who really was an impressive woman, but it's also important to talk about the way she's almost always framed in write ups about her. She was absolutely the first woman in the US to receive a dental degree, and the US was the first country with formal dental schools, so it's fair to say that she was the first woman in the world with a dental degree. She wasn't the first woman to practice dentistry, not even in the US. Some of this leaving out of other practitioners may come down a little bit to semantics. If you only consider someone with a dental degree of dentist, then yes, she would technically be the first woman. But we know lots of people were working as dentists with that job title, including Lucy Hobbs without the degree. While researching, Holly found a newspaper syndicated article from eighteen seventy two was in the Frostburg Mining Journal of Maryland. It opens with quote alluding to lady dentists. The Cincinnati commercial does not want the honor of being the first lady graduate with the dental college to be carried off by a Russian countess, but claims that honor for a Cincinnati lady, Mrs Lucy B. Hobbs, who graduated in eighteen sixty five. So Russia is not ahead of America after all. An enterprising women. So this is just a tiny little blurb in a paper, and it probably wasn't intended to be especially serious, but it does kind of show how easy it is for facts to get a bit distorted. It comes to national pride. I actually tried to hunt down the Russian woman who was apparently being put forth as the first woman dentist the avenues. I went down all kind of dead ended. There are some possible candidates, but it was never very clear to me. This reminds me of when everyone on Twitter is responding to something and you can't find what it is that people are responding to. It's very much that, and like, well, there's this woman who might have been practicing in the early eighteen hundreds, but and maybe was certified but didn't go to a dental school, Like there's it's a lot of guesswork. Yeah, yeah, And the real kicker there is that there were definitely women practicing some sort of dentistry way before any of these folks, before Lucy B. Hobbs, before this Russian countess whoever that might have been the first women to practice dentistry in the US that we know of was Emmiline Roberts and Jones, who would have been a contemporary of Lucy's, but she started working with her husband several years before miss Hobbs went from teaching to dentistry. A woman named Madeline Francoise Calais was practicing dentistry in France back in the seventeen forties, and centuries before any of them. There were women treating people for dental issues all over the world. Much of it is likely undocumented, some of it is probably documented and just has not made its way to availability for English speakers, but we know that there were people like prior podcast subject Hildegarden of being in writing about oral health all the way back to the eleventh century, and a woman named Tokajima worked with an entire set of dental tools and made dentures in Japan in the fourteenth century, and women were in various medical roles in ancient Greece and Rome. So though we definitely honor Lucy Hobbs Taylor as a trailblazer, it's important just to remember that she was making her strides in the context of many others having gone before her. I just want to be very clear they were not a racing any of the other history of women in dentistry, because there's plenty. I do have listener mail, and it is about dentistry. I don't know why I'm on a dentistry kick. I just am right now. Uh, it's important your oral health, it's important to your overall health. That's my p s A for the day. But since from our listener Julia, who writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, after listening to your episode on the history of dentistry, I thought you would appreciate this funny dental story from my childhood, when I was somewhere between the ages of four and six, I was at the dentist's office and the dentist politely asked me if I would like to open my mouth for him. Being a small child, I did not realize what the dentist was really saying was that he needed me to open my mouth. I thought I was being asked my preference for having someone poke around in my mouth, So of course I told the dentist no, though I would have responded with a yes that the dentists had just asked, will you open your mouth? My mother had been away with another one of my siblings during this incident was very upset to come back and be informed that I needed to be sent away to a special pediatric dentist because I wouldn't open my mouth for this dentist. And so I went to a different pediatric dentist's office for a few years, and was the recipient of many stern lectures from my mother on the importance of opening my mouth for the dentist. Close out the email. Here are a few pictures of my cat Kai. He was born towards the beginning of the pandemic and has the adorable habit of immediately trilling and crawling all over me for pets when he hears me clothes out my daily yoga practice with NAMA's day. He's very cute, he's got tummy, sent us a tummy picture, and he's very beautiful. Um little little buffin orange baby, Julia, thank you for this. You gave me a flashback to my youth. When I know this will be hard for listeners to believe because I'm obviously a talkative person, but when I was a kid and I got in the office of anyone official, I completely shut down and would not even speak, to the point that one doctor thought like I had like I was a delayed speech um patient, and my parents were like, no, she talks all the time at home. I don't know what's going on. And I caused much consternation. UM. So I thought about it when I read your thing, because I was similarly just didn't didn't quite get the program. Thank you so much, Julia for sharing your your childhood. Whoops, I didn't mean to cause the problem situation with us. Uh. If you would like to write to us and tell us about how you were maybe not a great patient or were perhaps as a child, you can do that at History Podcast at iHeart Radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History And if you have not subscribed to the podcast and you would like to, that is the easiest thing in the world. You can do it on the I heart Radio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.