The "eccentric" doctor, pioneer Elizabeth Edmonston
I was doing some research on a totally unrelated subject and came across this article on a Dr. Elizabeth Edmonston of Hillsboro, Ohio. This article was published in a small quarterly magazine called “Ohio Southland”, dedicated to the history of a few southern counties in the Buckeye State. The subtext within will become immediately apparent.
I would post a link to the full magazine, which is available through the Cincinnati Public Library’s virtual library, but it is so image-heavy I don’t want anyone to have computer problems downloading it (I had to give it a couple of tries myself). However, if you really want to read from the original, pm me and I will send you a link.
A photo of Dr. Edmonston accompanied the article. The profile of the good doctor was but a small portion of this fascinating look at some trail-blazing women.
Ohio Southland
Vol I, Number 4
Fall 1989
“Women Are Here To Stay” by Elouise E. Postle
(excerpt)
But with suffrage, here came the Up-To-Date Woman – and Hillsboro women were not far behind. Ladies dared to venture from the safe haven of their homes to clerk, become typists, secretaries, telephone operators.
The 1920’s woman bobbed her hair, even rouged her cheeks and oh, you kid! She smoked a cigarette in public.
Such a progressive woman was Hillsboro’s first lady doctor, Elizabeth Edmonston. She must have given the establishment fits.
Dr. Edmonston was a native New Yorker; educated and admitted to medical practice in New York. In 1911, she came to Hillsboro to visit a close friend, Grace Gardner, whom she had met while Miss Gardner was studying voice, art and all those cultural things in New York. Elizabeth was so enchanted with Hillsboro and its people that she stayed. She passed the Ohio exams and was licensed to practice medicine in Ohio.
Dr. Edmonston was a plain-looking woman. Her eyebrow-raising manner of dressing lent a masculine, authoritative look to her large-framed, monumentally statuesque figure.
She wore a man’s long, black frock coat over her ankle-length skirts. Her white blouses, with stiffly starched cuffs, were ornamented with a man’s gold cuff links. And she smoked cigars.
Dr. Edmonston claimed that she had discovered a method of removing nicotine from tobacco while experimenting in her New York laboratory, and that several tobacco companies had sought to buy her formula. But she took her secret with her to her grave when she died in 1931.
Dr. Edmonston declined to write down her “recipe”, as she called her formula, “for fear she would leave out some important ingredient.”
Eccentric as the Doctor may have been, she was widely regarded as an above average physician “with a real doctor’s touch.” She paved the way for Hillsboro’s future women to seek careers in professions heretofore considered exclusively male domain.
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