Biographies

The strongest sources of evidence of what a woman in medicine was like during the Revolutionary War are journals and diaries from the women themselves. Get to know two women who preserved their legacies by reading their biographies below.

Margaret was born near Annapolis, Maryland to a medical and commercial Quaker family. In her early childhood, her parents, Deborah and Richard Hill, fled their creditors after her father’s company, credit, and masculinity shattered when his commercial partnership failed. Margaret’s parents fled to the island of Madeira to start a wine business, leaving Margaret and her three siblings in the care of their eldest daughter, Hannah, who had just married a Quaker merchant-physician, Samuel Preston Moore in Philadelphia. Hannah and Samuel served parental roles for the Hill children by raising them to overcome their father’s humiliation and providing proper schooling for them. Margaret followed her mother’s and sister’s footsteps by learning their skills in healing. Due to Quaker beliefs on gender, her generous and elite physician kin, and her location in the city of medicine and science, Margaret was able to participate in literary networks and medical societies. By enveloping herself in such environments at a young age, Margaret became comfortable interacting on an equal basis with her physician-kin and their colleagues, which translated to a robust confidence in her medical career.

Among the networks and societies that Margaret participated in was her inner circle of Quakers. She traded knowledge, books, herbs, and such with these women. When the 1765 Stamp Act crisis took a foothold in the importation business, Margaret suffered from the economic consequences. Although she provided her medical services for free at first, she could no longer support this practice if importation taxes were so high. She participated in activism against the Act while maintaining a pacifist position, as many Quakers did in the British-American conflict.

Within a year of the repeal of the Stamp Act, Margaret’s husband died after only 8 years of marriage. Margaret and her four children moved to Burlington, New Jersey with her sister Sarah. In a time of political and civil strife, along with the grief Margaret felt, she coped by avowing to her pacifist beliefs and using her gift of healing to help those involved in conflict. Those she gave medical services to began to send her gifts to thank her. Before long, a war was starting and Margaret noticed that she was being paid for her services whether she asked for payment or not, due to her benevolence to everyone no matter which side they fought for. Margaret opened a modest medical practice in her home in 1779, through which she made enough money to provide for her and her children. She worked as a doctress, nurse, and apothecary, and she was very popular and successful in each occupation. Male physicians who saw her as a threatening competition to their business allowed her to take over their patients’ care when they saw how intelligent and well-liked she was. She had many friends in many places who supported her work and made trades with her that other healers did not have access to. She helped to create a collaborative network of physicians by forming relationships, offering trades, and prioritizing correct diagnoses over anyone’s pride. After practicing for pay over many years, Margaret eventually returned to offering her services for free when she had no more need for the money. Her work in advancing the female role in the medical labor force, as well as providing historical documentation of it, is an important part of the history and origins of commercialized medicine.

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With her husband Ephraim Ballard, Martha had nine children in all, but three of them died in the summer of 1769 after an epidemic of diphtheria swept over Hallowell, Maine. Her medical duties were not limited to midwifery; she also nursed patients suffering from scarlet fever and other illnesses. Her first time performing midwifery was in 1778. At the time, her husband worked as a surveyor to support their five remaining children (and one more on the way). Hallowell, Maine was a small township in which Martha walked from home to home as she saw her patients. One such patient was the mother of Martha’s grandson, Jonathan, Jr. Sally Pierce became pregnant with Martha’s son’s child while Sally worked with her in her practice. Martha details her perspective on premarital pregnancy in her diary, as well as features the customs of the time to gain child support. When delivering Sally’s child, at the height of her labor, Martha was to ask who the father of the child was because it was believed a woman could not lie at the height of travail. Martha’s son ended up marrying Sally after the child was born. However, Martha writes of 20 other out-of-wedlock births she delivered and shows that marriage was not always the fix. If a woman did not marry the father of her child, she returned to her own family and eventually married someone else, without ruin to her reputation. Martha’s diary entries shine a light on political and religious customs through the lens of a midwife.

In Martha’s family, everybody worked. Her husband surveyed land and collected taxes, her sons farmed and helped at the mills, and her daughters spun yarn and wove for income. Money was difficult to come by in Hallowell, but Martha kept a detailed record of hers. She made an average of six shillings per birth. A standard physician’s fee in her town would have been one pound or even one guinea. When currency was unavailable (or unaccepted, as it changed from shillings and pence to dollars and cents after the Revolution), Martha used credit or bartering to make up for her finances.

Martha expanded her medical education by attending four dissections, as she wrote in her diary. Female midwifes were not permitted to conduct dissections, but Martha watched along with other physicians as doctors performed them on cadavers of patients she had treated. When dissections were moved into hospitals as part of formal medical training, women like Martha lost access to view and learn from them.

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