Meeting Dr. Bradley: On Barbara Barksdale Clowse’s "A Doctor for Rural America"
Barbara Barksdale Clowse | A Doctor for Rural America: The Reforms of Frances Sage Bradley | University Press of Kentucky | 2020 | 262 Pages
In her most recent work, historian Barbara Barksdale Clowse managed a remarkable biographic feat: capturing and contextualizing the bustling life of the commendable Dr. Frances Sage Bradley.
A Doctor for Rural America is the first of its kind: a biographical sketch of the renowned doctor, mother, writer, and reformer. Dr. Bradley, the biography’s subject, is the prolific kind of person who exemplifies what it looks like to live while one is alive. It is a testament to Clowse’s skill as a writer that the biography manages to detail so much of Dr. Bradley’s life in a highly readable two hundred pages.
The result of Clowse’s historical reconstruction is a thoughtful introduction to and commentary on a uniquely inspiring American hero. Like all doctors, Frances Bradley was not born into medical expertise. Instead, she chose the career path out of necessity and loss. At twenty-three, Frances Bradley married her childhood sweetheart, Horace. After the births of their four children, Horace died of tuberculosis, leaving Frances to provide financially (and emotionally, socially, physically, and psychologically) for her four children. In response, Frances enrolled in medical school, joining the first class of graduates from Cornell’s school of medicine in 1899.
Bradley spent her first years as a physician in private practice, paying off loans and building the necessary financial stability to support her four growing children. However, catering to the health needs of wealthy Atlantans was not Doctor Bradley’s ideal work. In 1916, Dr. Bradley began full-time doctoring for the federally funded Children’s Bureau, enacting public health prevention methods across rural America. Her efforts to improve children’s health in the United States were only briefly interrupted by a stint of medical service in France, administering care to refugees.
Dr. Bradley’s service as a field doctor for the Children’s Bureau is the work for which she is most remembered, and for good reason. Long before the advent of quality road systems, Dr. Bradley traversed some of America’s most rugged terrain (Southern Appalachia, Arkansas, and Montana) in a truck stocked with medical supplies and educational pamphlets. On the road, far from a hospital's technologies, Dr. Bradley delivered babies, trained midwives, and examined thousands of children, performing basic medical procedures routinely. Bradley took detailed notes on her travels and utilized her firsthand experience to advocate for the health of rural mothers and children, who Dr. Bradley often saw die from preventable diseases. Dr. Bradley’s advocacy contributed to the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act, an important piece of federal legislation that Bradley would later implement in Arkansas.
Bradley practiced medicine into her seventies and spent her “retirement” teaching and writing (through it all, Bradley remained devoted to her four grown children, who lovingly knew her as “Mud”). Dr. Bradley left behind no shortage of materials for historians; she died before finishing an autobiography, leaving behind hundreds of pages in personal and professional correspondence and a host of short stories that she published in various periodicals. Those wishing to learn more about Dr. Bradley would do well to find many of her writings online, but I would suggest finding a copy of this biography as well. Clowse has distilled Bradley’s remarkable life into a compelling narrative, allowing us to interact with the doctor in her own words. Clowse also manages to provide a careful and respectful contextualization of what is both admirable and regrettable about Dr. Bradley’s surviving writings. Dr. Bradley moved the United States healthcare system towards justice, but she was not immune to the racist ethos of her time. Clowse handles the paradoxes within Bradley’s life with care and clarity, using her skills as a historian and writer to do what all great biographers must: introduce readers to a complicated human being worthy of both admiration and criticism.
I felt especially grateful to “meet” Dr. Bradley at this moment in my life. As I write, I am a medical student at a school whose mission is to train primary care doctors to serve the rural areas of southern Appalachia. I suspect that Dr. Bradley’s professional life has paved the way for my own. Without early pioneers of rural medicine like Dr. Bradley, I wonder if my medical school would ever have come to be. Regardless, I am grateful to have stumbled across this book when I did: amidst the monotony of learning anatomy, Dr. Bradley’s life shone out to me like a beacon, reminding me why I chose this medicine thing in the first place and inspiring me to keep my hands busy and my actions kind. Perhaps you will also find encouragement from the wild, generous life of Dr. Frances Sage Bradley.