Mis Bashi 

 & the La Jig Doctor 



R ii Tin 11 r A 



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V vhene 1 



J? j David Cecelski 



'henever I visit North 

 Carolina's older coastal cemeteries, I am 

 always moved by the small gravestones 

 etched with little lambs and baby angels. 

 Often I find them clustered together — 

 three, four or even more children from a 

 single family. And it's not unusual to 

 discover a young mother buried nearby. 

 At the Harlowe United Methodist 

 Church, between Beaufort and Have- 

 lock, is a typical cluster of graves, all 

 children of Craven and M.T. Taylor: 

 Vernon, age 2; Earl, 9 months; Lila, 4 

 months; Nina, 12 days; and Daisy, who 

 was born and died the same day. You'll 

 find similar heart-wrenching scenes in 

 nearly every graveyard established 

 before World War II. 



These gravestones bear witness to 

 the dangers of childbearing and 

 childhood diseases before the advent of 

 modern obstetrics and vaccines. Even as 

 late as 1910, one mother out of 30 died 

 during childbirth (compared to fewer 

 than 1 in 5,000 today). Every pregnancy 

 forced a woman to contemplate the 

 possibility of her own death even as she 

 readied herself to bring life into the 

 world. And, as if childbirth weren't 

 perilous enough, a host of infectious 

 diseases — from typhoid fever to 

 diphtheria — posed a lethal threat to 

 every mother's child. 



Though the far lower death rate in 

 childbirth and infancy is one way that 

 our day differs profoundly from that of 

 our grandparents, we rarely find 



historical records that illustrate how the 

 "shadow of maternity" shaped coastal 

 women's lives. Childbirth and children 

 were considered part of women's sphere 

 and, as such, a private affair not really a 

 part of history. Even midwives and 

 physicians rarely left written accounts of 

 their experiences delivering babies and 

 caring for young children. 



One important exception was an 

 Outer Banks midwife named Bathsheba 

 Foster and a woman physician named 

 Blanche Nettle ton Epler. They were an 

 unlikely pair: an illiterate, self-taught 

 midwife who had delivered babies for 45 

 years and a worldly Midwestern doctor 

 who was one of the first women to 

 graduate from the Johns Hopkins School 

 of Medicine and the first woman 

 appointed to the U.S. Coast Guard. Their 

 story, which unfolds in an article Epler 

 wrote for National Geographic in 1933, 

 offers at least a glimpse of the shadow of 

 maternity and the women healers who 

 struggled to dispel it. 



Epler had cared for women and 

 children many years before she met 

 "Mis' Bashi" at Hatteras Island in 1923. 

 Nearly 60 years old then, she had grown 

 up in an upper-class family in the small 

 town of Jacksonville, 111. She was one of 

 only two women in the Johns Hopkins 

 class of 1899. (Hopkins was the first 

 mainstream U.S. medical school to admit 

 women, stipulated by a group of women 

 patrons who donated $500,000 to found 

 the medical school in 1893.) She interned 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 21 



