at the New York Infirmary for Women 

 and Children, then was a general 

 practitioner, college teacher and public 

 health pioneer in Kalamazoo, Mich., 

 from 1901 to 1923. 



I don't know why Epler left 

 Kalamazoo to accept a U.S. Public 

 Health Service posting to the Coast 

 Guard station at Hatteras. She never 

 married or had 

 children, and 

 she gave up 

 both many 

 personal 

 comforts and 

 access to the 

 latest medical 

 technologies 

 to come to the 

 Outer Banks. 

 Moreover, she 

 had built a 

 successful 

 career in 

 Kalamazoo. 

 She had 

 cofounded a 

 Methodist 

 hospital, 

 two nursing 

 homes and 

 the local Girl 

 Scouts, and 

 she had served 

 as the city's bacteriologist. 



Certainly, Epler had an adventurous 

 spirit. Women physicians of that day 

 tended to be daring or they would never 

 have broken into medicine in the first 

 place. At the same time, Epler had a 

 deep commitment to public health that 

 may have inspired her to serve at 

 Hatteras. She seems to have found the 

 Outer Banks an exciting opportunity to 

 prevent needless deaths from childbear- 

 ing as well as from infectious diseases 

 such as tuberculosis that had proven 

 treatable with improved public health 

 practices. She had earlier been involved in 

 public health campaigns in Michigan and 

 in the hookworm crusade in the South. 



Beyond her spirit of adventure and 

 her commitment to public health, Epler 

 also may have left Kalamazoo to find a 



more meaningful way to pursue her 

 calling at a time when the status of 

 women physicians was declining. The 

 percentage of women among all U.S. 

 physicians had peaked at about 6 

 percent in 1900, when women were 

 enrolled at a large number of all-female 

 medical schools and a few coed medical 

 schools. As medicine grew more 



Dr. Blanche Nettleton Epler, #14 in the photo (second row, second from left), 

 poses with her classmates in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine class of 1899, 

 She was one of the first women to graduate from the school. 



professional and scientific after 1910, 

 the all-women's medical schools were 

 forced to close and coed medical 

 schools allowed only small numbers of 

 women to enroll, a policy that lasted 

 until the 1970s. 



Increasingly, women physicians 

 like Epler practiced in remote locales 

 such as Hatteras. Outlying communities 

 found recruiting male physicians 

 difficult, and their less rigid, almost 

 frontier-style society usually left more 

 room for women to emerge as leaders. 

 Also, these communities often showed 

 greater tolerance of nonconformist 

 women in general. Indeed, the Outer 

 Banks itself had long been renowned for 

 strong women who could handle a 

 fishing boat as well as a frying pan. 



As the only physician on Hatteras 



Island, Epler served both the Coast 

 Guard and the broader community from 

 1923 to 1925. When Epler arrived aboard 

 the mailboat from Roanoke Island, Mis' 

 Bashi welcomed the doctor into her 

 cottage by Pamlico Sound. They lived 

 together until Epler had her own house 

 built, and Epler believed that she had 

 found a kindred spirit from their first 



meeting. She 

 described the 

 78-year-old 

 midwife as 

 "comely and 

 agile, her 

 visage one of 

 strength and 

 thought." 



Sharing 

 cornbread and 

 coconut cake, 

 Mis' Bashi 

 told the lady 

 physician her 

 life story that 

 first night. 

 She was 

 descended 

 from a 

 Devonshire, 

 England, 

 castaway and 

 had gone to 

 school for 



only five weeks as a girl. Epler noted that 

 "she had never learned to read, but had 

 been taught to work indoors and out and 

 to spin." Mis' Bashi was known, Epler said, 

 as a "couthy woman," an Outer Banks term 

 for a capable, self-reliant woman. 



Mis' Bashi had taken care of others 

 all her life. She nursed her chronically ill 

 mother for years, and she raised her 

 younger siblings, her own six children 

 and her brother's children. "Then for 45 

 years," Epler wrote, "she ministered to 

 all the sick of the region, a local doctor 

 coming only at rare intervals." 



Midwifery was a demanding craft. 

 When a pregnant woman needed her, 

 Mis' Bashi traveled for hours through the 

 hottest summer days and stormiest winter 

 nights. Her sand pony, Napoleon, pulled 

 her in a two-wheeled cart. "She was 



22 HIGH SEASON 1998 



