As Long as Life: The Memoirs of a Frontier Woman Doctor, Mary Canaga Rowland, 1873-1966

This is a great read, and an astonishing tale. Dr. Mary C. Rowland was one of the original pioneers of the west, in more ways than one. A woman who went to medical school when things like that just weren't done, she also went into private practice, got divorced, moved to the wild west, all sorts of things that wouldn't be viewed as unusual at all in today's society, but for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was nothing short of revolutionary. However, Rowland's intention was not revolutionary in the political sense. She was a feminist who had her own sense of feminist rights and identity deeply embedded - hers was her own life, and she was going to lead it, not for political gain or statement, but because it is what she wanted to do.Rowland has been called `the original medicine woman' - born in Nebraska while it was a still a wild territory, she was married to a doctor who was tragically murdered early in their lives (a murder which was never solved). The west was a wild place politically as well, as the issues of dealing with the aftermath of the Civil War, the Native Americans, the Mexican-American tensions, and the growing importation of people from the East and from California made life often far more diverse than one would think of prairie and `uncivilised' western portions would be. From childhood remembrances to medical journaling, Rowland's story is riveting. There is something `Little-House-on-the-Prairie-esque' about the early years. Rowland recounted the hard times when grasshoppers ate all the crops or the rains didn't come; she also told with humour how her mother would always cook a chicken when the preacher came, but the children would have to wait for leftovers until after the adults were finished eating - often only the less appetising portions would be left, `so you can imagine how we felt to see the preacher come,' Rowland related. She also told of the time she collected worms for fishing bait, and came and dropped them in her mother's lap while her mother was sewing; her mother leaped up, screamed, and threw the worms all over the floor. `She didn't have the same idea I had,' regarding the value of the worms.Rowland wrote of dealing with unmarried pregnant girls, poisonings, bad accidents and terrible illnesses. Her doctoring took her all over the regions where she practiced, often without the support of the general (male) medical community, and often with a certain degree of mistrust from men patients or relatives of patients. Her skills made her welcome, however, once she had proven herself. She often took payment in form of barter or labour; in addition to cash payments, she accepted furniture, horses, potatoes, and even manual labour in return for her medical practices.F.A. Loomis, the editor, is also the great-great-nephew of Rowland. His writing comes from sources and stories he knew personally growing up. Some of this memoir is autobiography - Rowland set down on paper many stories at

I gave this book to my sister, who is a doctor, and read it myself when I visited her recently. Mary Canaga Rowland immediately hooked me in the first chapter. I enjoyed her details of early medicine and living on the plains and in the west. Not only was she a pioneer in the field of medicine (as one of the first women doctors), but also she was a single mother after her husband was tragically killed only 2 days after their baby was born. Reading this book made me want to read more memoirs of women in this era.

This book was given to me by a co-worker who mentioned that Dr. Mary Rowland was his great-grandmother. It is a wonderful memoir of a dynamic woman on the frontier of career-oriented women. I was facinated by her first-person accounts of case studies, medical treatments of the day, and especially her insistance of cleanliness, at a time when most in the medical profession knew little to nothing about sterilization. This book is a must read for any one with a layperson's devotion to medical history.