by Mary Grow

In the course of collecting information on the doctors included in last week’s article about the central Kennebec Valley (and other places), your writer reviewed lists in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history and Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore’s Waterville history.

Each book has a chapter on the medical profession in the 19th century. Kingsbury’s includes a list of 200 or more doctors, Whittemore’s almost 50 (with duplicates, of course). All the Waterville doctors named were men.

Kingsbury listed four women (in alphabetical order; your writer has used the same arrangement). Two were from Gardiner, one was from China and one was from Randolph, across the Kennebec from Gardiner. He did not include Martha Ballard, so he was not talking about midwives, though he identified two of his subjects as both midwives and doctors.

Your writer was intrigued enough to seek more information on these women. She succeeded, at least partly, with three of the four, thanks to the resources of the internet, and now shares her findings.

Only Gertrude Heath was identified as a doctor by any source other than Kingsbury. As with last week’s topics, these stories wander outside the central Kennebec Valley. Again, homeopathic medicine is mentioned.

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Gertrude Emma Heath’s information comes from multiple on-line sources, including a genealogy, dated 1909, and a website called buildings of New England, which has an undated photograph of her 1850 Gothic Revival house in Farmingdale.

The writer of the latter site commented: “It is amazing learning stories about such strong women, when at the time, women medical practitioners were almost unheard of and women were decades away from earning the right to vote.”

The genealogy says Heath was the granddaughter of a doctor named Asa Heath. Her father, Alvan M. C. Heath (born in 1828), was “a printer by trade and newspaper editor by principal occupation.”

In the Civil War, Alvan Heath was a corporal in the 16th Maine Infantry. He was killed December 16, 1862, during the battle of Fredericksburg, “leaving his widow Sarah to run the family affairs.” Sarah was the former Sarah H. Philbrook (July 23, 1831 – Aug. 7, 1915).

Alvan and Sarah had three sons and one daughter: Herbert M., born Aug. 27, 1853, a prominent Augusta lawyer and politician; Willis K., born Feb. 12, 1855; Dr. Frederick C., born in 1857 and in 1909 practicing medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana; and Dr. Gertrude E., born Jan. 20, 1859, in Gardiner (or, according to Find a Grave, in Windsor).

Gertrude Heath attended local schools, where she reportedly did well, and, the New England buildings site says, went to Hahnemann Medical College – not in Philadelphia, where so many of the Pulsifers discussed last week were trained in homeopathic medicine, but in Chicago.

(There was indeed another Hahnemann Medical College, in Chicago. It was chartered in 1855, opened in 1860, and began admitting women in 1871. Its website says in 1872, six of 76 students were women; by 1889, 51 women were among 312 students. The college closed around 1921.)

Heath took “special courses” at Hahnemann and got her M. D. degree in 1883 (Kingsbury specified in March) or 1884 (Find a Grave). She started practice in Chicago in 1884, returned to Gardiner the same year, and not long afterwards “accepted a position at the Maine State Hospital, at Augusta, where she specialized in eye and ear conditions.”

(The Maine State Hospital was one of several successive names for the insane asylum on the east bank of the Kennebec River.)

Find a Grave calls Heath the State Hospital’s second assistant physician for seven years. This site says she was also a staff doctor at the Gardiner hospital and for four years Gardiner’s school physician.

Several sources say she continued her private practice while doing her public jobs. In 1892, Kingsbury wrote, she was in practice in Gardiner, with a partner named Huldah Potter (of whom more later).

Another website says Heath headed the local Red Cross branch in the 1910s (“during World War I,” according to Find a Grave). This writer described her as a “respected senior doctor,” who was listed in a 1928 book on important Maine people as widely honored and beloved.

Find a Grave calls her “an active member of the Maine Homeopathic Society.”

Heath’s other career was as a poet, primarily a writer of children’s poems. The Maine State Library held an exhibit of her poetry in the 1920s, “describing her work ‘of special value to Maine people.'”

Titles of Heath’s poetry collections include Rhymes and Jingles for a Good Child (1897) and Sing, Little Birdie and When All the Birds Begin to Sing (both published in 1928). In 1918, Forgotten Books republished her book titled The Madonna and the Christ-Child: Legends and Lyrics, a “collection of poetry and songs” first published in the “late nineteenth century.”

She also edited and arranged what appears to be an autobiography by her older brother, Herbert, titled A Son of Maine: Herbert Milton Heath, published in Augusta in 1916. Herbert died Aug. 18, 1912.

Gertrude Heath died in Gardiner on Nov. 23, 1935, aged 76. She is buried in Gardiner’s Oak Grove cemetery. The eight other Heaths there include her father, her mother and her brother, Willis, who died Oct. 10, 1927, in Farmingdale.

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Dr. Huldah M. Potter, Dr. Heath’s partner for several years, has much less information on line. Find a Grave offers the most your writer found. It does not identify her as a doctor, and, oddly, it lacks information on where she is buried.

Find a Grave says she was born Huldah McArthur in March 1838, in Parsonsfield, in York County. Her parents were John and Huldah (Dalton) McArthur. Educational records are in Augusta, then at Congregational Academy (wherever that was) and Gorham Academy.

The McArthur family might have been in Augusta by 1850. In 1868, Find a Grave says, Huldah McArthur married Charles F. Potter; he left her a widow in less than a year.

A brief genealogical entry in James North’s Augusta history says Charles Fox Potter was born Jan. 29, 1821 (Find a Grave says Jan. 25, 1821). North wrote that he was an Augusta druggist and for some years a “Pension Agent.”

(A pension agent was probably a local representative of the federal Bureau of Pensions, created in 1832, first as part of the War Department and after 1849 as part of the Department of the Interior. Its responsibilities were to determine veterans’ eligibility for pensions and to distribute them.

(Wikipedia says, “In 1896, pensions accounted for 40% of all federal spending as the Bureau of Pensions provided monthly funds that averaged $12 to 750,000 veterans, and 222,000 dependents, especially widows.” As Civil War veterans died in the 20th century, the bureau became smaller. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover integrated it into the Veterans Administration.)

Charles E. Nash, in his chapters on Augusta in Kingsbury’s history, named Charles F. Potter as the fifth proprietor of the Craig drug store, founded in January 1828, on Augusta’s Market Square. In May 1865, Nash said, a former clerk bought part of Potter’s interest; “shortly before the fire of 1865,” he bought the rest.

(The fire, on Sept. 17, 1865, destroyed about 100 buildings, wiping out most of downtown.)

Also, North said, Fox was the “first subscriber in Augusta to the first seven-thirty loan of the government.”

(The federal 7-30 loan program was a bond sale in 1864 and 1865, to raise funds to continue the Civil War. An on-line summary of a promotion for the bonds cites their interest rate, tax-exempt status and support for Union soldiers as reasons patriotic Northerners should buy them.)

According to North, Charles and Huldah married in 1867 (not 1868) and Charles died March 23 of that year (as previous research has shown, a year’s discrepancy in dates is not unusual).

Charles is buried in Augusta’s Forest Grove cemetery. Find a Grave lists his parents and siblings, but no spouse.

Kingsbury’s brief account of Dr. Huldah Potter’s life says she got her medical degree from Boston University in 1877 and was back in Gardiner by 1879, where she partnered with Heath, perhaps for the rest of the century.

An on-line photo of selected pages from an undated history of homeopathy (apparently related to Boston University, since it identifies subjects by graduation year) lists Huldah McArthur Potter’s death date as Oct. 16, 1904. Find a Grave says she died of diabetes.

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The third female doctor on Kingsbury’s list was “Mrs. Ward.” He identified her as a midwife and physician in China, Maine, before 1808, when, he said, the first (male) doctor settled in the town.

Numerous men and women named Ward lived in China in the 19th century. A review of the Ward genealogy in the China history found no woman identified as a medical practitioner of any sort.

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Anna (Huston) Winslow (Mrs. James Winslow), of Randolph, was a very early “physician and midwife,” according to Kingsbury, who wrote that the family settled there in 1763. (Randolph was part of Pittston until March 1887.)

“She was widely known as ‘Granny Winslow,’ and practiced from Bath to Augusta” Kingsbury said. As with Huldah Potter, your writer found no other source that called Winslow a doctor.

FamilySearch provides a summary of the life of Anna McCausland Huston, daughter of James and Mary McCausland, born in 1734 in Falmouth (near Portland). An on-line genealogy explains “Huston”; she was first married to, and left a widow, by a man named Isaac Huston.

Ancestry.com lists Isaac Huston, born in 1730, in Falmouth, whose wife was Anna McCausland Huston (1734 – 1827). Isaac Huston died in Falmouth, Oct. 26, 1756, according to this source.

FamilySearch says it was on July 5, 1753 (another not unusual discrepancy in dates), that Anna McCausland Huston married James Winslow (born Aug. 6, 1725, in Freetown, Massachusetts), in Falmouth. The couple had at least six sons and three daughters between 1754 and 1785.

This source says the couple’s first two children were born in Broadbay (or Broad Bay), Maine (an old name for Waldoboro, which is about 25 miles east of Pittston), in 1754 (twins?).

The genealogy says “Indian troubles” led the Winslows to move to Pittston in the fall of 1760. They were among the earliest settlers: “Anna and daughter Sarah were the first white females in Pittston,” and son Jonathan, born March 23, 1761, was the first white child born in the town.

Jonathan was the first of six children born between 1761 and 1774 in Pittston, according to FamilySearch. The youngest son was born in Kingfield (about 70 miles north of Pittston), around 1785 (his mother was 52 and his father 61, FamilySearch says).

FamilySearch says Anna died in Farmington (about 20 miles south of Kingfield) on Feb. 15, 1827, aged 93. Her husband had died Nov. 16, 1802, also in Farmington.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)

Websites, miscellaneous.