Pioneer woman doc was our ‘modern Prometheus’

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story started in one of the participating news publications that run the weekly Offbeat Oregon History newspaper column. If you have found your way here in some other way, the article might not make much sense, as the first 600 or so words will be missing!

She was 18 years old, physically sick, with a 2-year-old baby, and would soon be carrying the stigma of divorce. Plus, she was barely even literate. What could she do with the rest of her life?

If you’d asked her that, she probably would have shot back, “What can’t I do?” And if she knew you well enough, she probably would have told you her plan. Bethenia always had a plan, and she never stopped working it.

After her health returned to her as a result of a balanced diet and decent living conditions, she set about remedying the deficits that her four-year matrimonial adventure had left her. She started leaving George in the care of brothers or sisters while she went to school for remedial studies.

Her studies went well enough that a few years later, she was actually teaching a class of 16 students — two of whom were more advanced than she (“I took their books home with me, and with the help of my brother-in-law, I managed to prepare the lessons beforehand, and they never suspected my incompetence,” she wrote later).

To keep from becoming a burden on her family, she took on piecework jobs as well — sewing, laundry work, nursing, anything that would earn her a paycheck.

But her goal wasn’t a teacher’s desk. Teaching, like the piecework, was a means to an end for Bethenia. By working hard and being very thrifty, she saved up enough money to launch a millinery business (that is, a hat shop) in Roseburg.

This business became very successful, and generated enough money for her to send George to the University of California at Berkeley when he was just 14.

Once he was off to college, so was she. One of the skills she’d picked up in her life was medical — nursing was, in that age, grueling and unappreciated work, easy to get and hard to do, precisely the kind of work a driven person like Bethenia would take to fill an unexpected gap in her schedule of piecework jobs. Along the way, she discovered she liked it a lot.

But she well knew there was no future for her in nursing; to make a career of medicine, she would need her own medical practice.

So in 1870, the same year she sent George off to college, she started looking at options for obtaining a medical degree.

Her friend Dr. Hamilton, when he heard the way her thoughts were trending, was enthusiastic and supportive. He sent her home with copies of his medical textbooks to study and wished her the best.

But her initial inquiries were not encouraging. She was unable to find a mainstream medical college that would admit a woman. She would have to choose the least sketchy among the many non-mainstream medical colleges that were around in the 1800s — the ones that taught homeopathy, hydropathy, Thompsonian medicine, Hygienic medicine, Eclectic medicine, etc.

She settled on a medical school in Philadelphia which taught in  the “eclectic” tradition — emphasizing botanical remedies and physical therapy. She spent a little time grooming her sister to take over the millinery business — she had to be discreet about this, because she had no support at home. Her whole family thought the idea of a woman being a doctor was close to sacrilegious.

Finally, in 1871, she traveled back east and enrolled in the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania. She returned roughly two years later (medical school, in the 1870s, was somewhat less lengthy than it is today — although not necessarily less arduous, as we’ll see later!) and opened a medical practice in Roseburg while working to finalize the handoff of the millinery business.

It was a real inflection point in Bethenia Owens’ life. She had left Roseburg as Mrs. Owens, a spunky young businesswoman who’d demonstrated a willingness to work harder than any three ordinary mortals. She returned as Dr. Owens, a credentialed professional and a bit of a social lightning rod.

What hadn’t changed — what never would — was her self-confidence and the firm conviction that she was in the right, and was smart and decisive enough to carry through what she’d decided was the right thing to do.

That decisiveness was her superpower. It would lead her to the highest peaks of her profession — and then, at her very moment of triumph, stain her legacy for the next half century.

Part Two: The Pioneer “Lady Doctor.”

THE OLD MAN had died penniless, and had left behind no relatives who could claim his corpse and give it proper burial.

But the Roseburg medical community was happy to help.

It was the mid-1870s, and although the practice of medicine was making great strides, things were still relatively primitive. Dr. Robert Koch would not discover pathogenic germs for another decade. And most of the breakthroughs in the medical field came from dissecting cadavers.

Freshly bereaved family members did not care for the idea of a room full of frock-coated medical ghouls slicing up the mortal remains of their loved ones. They very seldom granted permission. So when an unclaimed body appeared, it was not an opportunity to be let slip.

There were six M.D. doctors in Roseburg at that time, and all of them had at one time or another had the old man for a patient. Now they all got together and scheduled an autopsy and dissection.

As they got ready to start, one of their number, a stiff elderly doctor by the name of Dr. Palmer, suggested that they send an invitation to “the new lady doctor” to attend.

A round of chuckles greeted this; the docs thought it was a great idea, as a joke.

The motion was promptly seconded and unanimously approved. A messenger was dispatched to the “lady doctor” with the invitation.

“I knew this meant no honor for me,” Dr. Owens recalled in her memoir, years later; “but I said : ‘Give the doctors my  compliments, and say that I will be there in a few minutes.’ ”

She knew the invitation had been intended as a humiliating reminder that, as a member of “the fair sex,” her feminine sensitivity would prevent her from doing doctor work. The old man would, of course, be naked at the autopsy. The dissection would include elements of the male reproductive system that ladies were expected to be loath to lay hands upon or even look at.

It was, in other words, a bluff. And she intended to call it.

The messenger darted off to deliver the message, and Bethenia discreetly followed as close behind him as she could.

He ran into the building where the body lay, and she stepped up to the door as he went in.

“I heard him say, in excited tones: ‘She said to give you her compliments, and that she'd be here in a minute,’” Dr. Owens recounted in her memoir. “Then came a roar of laughter, after which I quietly opened the door and walked in, went forward, and shook hands with Dr. Hoover.”

“Do you know that the autopsy is on the genital organs?” Dr. Hoover asked her diffidently.

“No,” said Dr. Owens, “but one part of the human body should be as sacred to the physician as another.”

Faced now with the undeniable backfiring of what he’d anticipated would be a delicious little prank, Dr. Palmer drew himself up.

“I object to a woman’s being present at a male autopsy,” he thundered. “If she is allowed to remain, I shall retire!”

For the other doctors, though, this was going a bit too far — it had, after all, been his idea to invite her. Also, they all knew he and Dr. Owens didn’t like each other. Prior to her stint in medical school, Bethenia had been a nurse, and they’d had a little clash of wills at a patient’s bedside once for which he bore her a lasting grudge.

So not only was she allowed to remain, they let her lead the dissection — doubtless hoping she’d make some sort of mistake that they could point to as evidence of a woman’s inadequacy to the task of practicing medicine.

When she didn’t supply them with one, they were all somewhat ungracious in their disappointment. But the people of Roseburg thought it was hilarious.

“When I had at last finished the dissection, the audience (not the doctors) gave me three cheers,” Dr. Owens writes. “As I passed out and down on my way home, the street was lined on both sides with men, women and children, all anxious to get a look at ‘the woman who dared,’ to see what sort of a strange, anomalous being she was.”

It was a remarkable start to an even more remarkable career — the more so as Bethenia was over 30 years old when she launched it. It was also not a “second act” career, but a fourth — she’d been a wife, then a teacher, then a hat-shop entrepreneur, and now a physician. She had seen much of the world, and conquered more than most.

ROSEBURG WAS TOO small a pond for a fish as big as Dr. Owens hoped to become; so as soon as her affairs there were properly in order, she moved to Portland.

Her practice soon thrived. She was one of the earliest adopters of aseptic medicine — this was still the 1870s, before germ theory had been proven, but there were many reasons a wide-awake doctor might suspect an unseen microscopic disease vector. In fact, Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister had pretty much proven as much. But in spite of this evidence, the medical profession was still full of stubborn old bone-saw jockeys who still regarded their bloodstained frock coats the way Navy guys do their coffee cups — taking pride in the crusted-on filth, going out of their way to get them stiff with dried gore, and performing surgery with bare, unwashed hands.

Dr. Owens also set up her practice with electrical and chemical bath facilities, a therapeutic practice she’d learned in eclectic school, which nobody else in Portland was doing. The electric baths were especially hard to pull off, as they had to be powered by elaborate battery banks — remember, this was a good 20 years before electric grid power became available.

Word spread and soon her practice was booming.

Meanwhile, “baby George” graduated from Berkeley, enrolled in Willamette Medical School, and graduated with his M.D. Bethenia’s younger sister (most likely she who took over the millinery shop) finished her course of study at Mills College in Oakland, in which Bethenia was supporting her. So in 1877, feeling it was her turn, she started looking back east for a suitable mainstream medical college from which to earn an actual M.D. degree.

She initially had hoped to get into Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia; but after meeting with its top professor, she learned that admission was controlled by a board of directors that was 50 years behind the times and dead set against letting women in. He sent her instead to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where her application was, of course, pounced upon at once by the registrar.

COLLEGE LIFE FOR Dr. Owens was very busy. In her memoir, she gives us a glimpse of what life was like for her ... and it’s quite a regimen!

“It was my custom to rise at 4 a.m., take a cold bath, followed by vigorous exercise,” she writes; “then study till breakfast, at 7. (I allowed myself half an hour for each meal.) After supper came "Quizzes," and then study till 9 p.m., when I retired, to sleep soundly.”

The program was a two-year one, but, as that schedule indicates, it was an intensive two years!

And after it was complete, Dr. Bethenia Owens, M.D., had every credential she would need to take the place she’d earned in the society she had, in a very real sense, conquered.

Already one of Portland’s most well known citizens, Dr. Owens now moved from strength to strength. Not only was she a full-fledged physician, she was a double-doctor, with training and experience in therapeutic techniques from both the mainstream and eclectic medical traditions.

She went on to marry a childhood friend, Colonel John Adair, in 1884, and changed her name to Owens-Adair. He seems to have been a bit of a problem for her, being susceptible to pouring out money on ill-considered and dreamy schemes; but they made it work, and for the next 10 years they lived on a farm near Astoria, where Bethenia practiced as a country doctor. They tried to have another child together, but by now she was in her late 40s; and, after the little tyke died at the age of three days, they apparently decided not to try again.

She retired from regular practice in 1905, at the fairly young age of 65. But her retirement would not be a quiet one. No, Bethenia Owens-Adair intended her retirement to be the commencement of her fourth career, and the one in which she hoped to do the most good in the world of all ... as a political activist. And, of course, this is where it all went horribly wrong.

Part Three: The forced-sterilization advocate.

THE YEARS JUST after the discovery of germ theory were a great time to be a mainstream physician. By understanding, for the first time, the true vectors of disease, doctors suddenly found they were able to make real and undeniable changes in patient outcomes.

But understanding those vectors — microbes — did something else too. It wasn’t much of a leap for an 1890s physician to go from “cure disease” to “prevent disease,” which would of course be done by cleaning things up — hygiene. And hygiene required public participation, which meant doctors more than ever were under pressure to become activists, to use their social standing to advocate for social changes.

No one felt the weight of this change more than prostitutes and sex workers, whose status went from “unfortunate fallen woman” to “filthy disease vector” seemingly overnight. This was the change that would most taint the legacy of another extraordinary Oregon woman, police officer Lola Greene Baldwin. (Here’s a link to her story.)

In Dr. Owens’ case, though, it was the eugenics movement that became her reputational Nemesis.

The modern understanding of genetics developed over about 50 years, starting with Gregor Mendel’s paper in 1865; so it was also happening at the same time Dr. Owens was practicing. Knowing, now, how genetics worked — and going on the assumption that excellent genes, if mixed only with other excellent genes, would make it possible to literally breed a race of superior human beings — 1890s doctors felt they saw a path forward to a golden future.

The great problem, of course, was how to encourage such positive matches, to breed this superior race. The most effective plan would be to directly control who married whom, the way dog breeders do with their litters of puppies; but that didn’t seem compatible with human dignity in any way. (Of course, that wouldn’t stop the most prominent eugenicist of the 20th century from trying it in Nazi Germany decades later; but that’s a story for another time.)

Dr. Owens thought she had a good, humane solution to the problem, one that would neither threaten anyone’s liberty nor attempt to tell them who they could mate with:

Forcible human sterilization.

“What is (sterilization)?” she wrote, in the introduction to her 1922 book, Human Sterilization. “Simply a remedy for degeneracy. Heredity, to my belief, is the directing force of all life. The purity of this source makes for good, impurity makes for evil. ... Eugenics is the science of the improvement of the human race, of which Heredity is the determining factor.”

“My life’s desire,” she concluded, “is to improve the human race by cutting off the vicious sources of degeneracy by the greatest humane remedy known today — Sterilization.”

Whew. In the immortal words of St. Ron of Burgundy, that did indeed escalate quickly!

Fully aware that a stated desire to surgically mutilate anyone she deemed unworthy to reproduce was probably bad public relations for an active medical practitioner, Dr. Owens waited till after her retirement to launch this phase of her career.

Then, having safely exited from the marketplace and made herself safe from the judgment of public opinion, she turned all her considerable talents and energies on this new career, as the eugenics movement’s most active and effective activist.

She started by writing copious letters to the editors of newspapers, and publishing opinion pieces. Then, starting in 1907, she started lobbying in Salem for legislation that would authorize forcible sterilization of anyone deemed mentally ill or otherwise unfit — of which there was quite a list in the bill: “Habitual criminals, moral degenerates, sexual perverts,” and so on.

That would be bad enough today, but remember, this was the age when Sigmund Freud’s musings were still considered solid scientific insights. Mental-illness diagnoses were much easier to come by in 1907, especially for women.

And, for obvious biological and cultural reasons, the weight of this forced-sterilization policy would fall harder on women than men.

Except among physicians, eugenic sterilization was still a very new and somewhat disreputable idea in 1907. The bill Dr. Owens promoted in 1907 didn’t make it out of the Legislature. Undaunted, she tried again, and again, and again — every session until 1913, when the law finally passed.

It was, however, referred to the voters through the efforts of the Anti-Sterilization League, and especially Lora C. Little of the Little School of Health in Portland (here’s a link to that story); and it went down in flames at the ballot box.

“Their chief argument,” historian Robert Johnson writes, “was that under the proposed law the assent of only two persons was needed to authorize surgical mutilation of the most helpless members of society. History demonstrated, the opponents asserted, that people with this kind of power tend to abuse it.”

Undaunted, Dr. Owens tried again, and in 1917 got her law passed.

It was repealed in 1921; but two years later, again with her backing and support, a revised version was back on the books, and it stayed in place as state law until 1983. A total of 2,648 Oregonians were forcibly neutered or spayed over the following half century as a direct result.

AT HER DEATH at age 86, in 1926, Dr. Owens-Adair could and did look back on her long life as a great triumph. She had, she believed, left the world far better than she had found it — raised a son to be a strong and good man, contributed to overthrowing the old prejudices against women, and battled other old prejudices to get the human race on track to stamp out “degeneracy” and breed itself to excellence.

Alas for Bethenia, and for the thousands of Oregonians her legacy left physically mutilated, it turned out that not all old prejudices are equally worthy of being overthrown.

(Sources: Dr. Owens-Adair: Some of Her Life Experiences, a book by Bethenia Owens-Adair published in 1906 by Mann & Beach Printers; “Bethenia Owens-Adair,” an un-by-lined article published in July 2014 on WomenHistoryBlog.com; “The Myth of the Harmonious City,” an article by Robert D. Johnson published in the Fall 1998 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House last year. To contact him or suggest a topic: finn@offbeatoregon.com or 541-357-2222.