Rawlins locomotive painter William Heath in the 1880s often assisted Dr. Thomas Maghee, the Union Pacific physician and surgeon who made frequent stops in the town.
William Heath shared details of Maghee’s work with his teenage daughter, Lillian, sparking her fascination with medicine. She later became Wyoming’s first female physician.
“It was not very long before I was head over heels [about medicine],” she later recalled in an oral interview taped by Helen Hubert for the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.
Dr. Maghee trained her for five years as a nurse and assistant, and with his recommendation and her father’s support, she attended the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Keokuk, Iowa.
She completed the three-year term of study, specializing in obstetrics. She was one of three women in her 1893 graduating class of twenty-two students.
That same year, at age 27, Lillian began her medical practice in her parents’ home in Rawlins. She often delivered babies, but she also amputated limbs and tended bullet wounds.
Sometimes, people came to her house but, when necessary, she rode her sorrel horse or drove a buckboard wagon thirty or forty miles to assist patients.
“Men folks received me cordially. Women were just as catty as they could be,” she recalled in the interview. Her mother had not wanted her to attend medical school and for some people, a prevalent attitude of the time was that women should not be medical doctors. Lillian packed a .32 caliber revolver in a specially made pocket in her jacket when she made night calls, but she never had to use it.
While assisting Dr. Maghee, she learned skills that helped her become “a perfect anesthetist” and gained the respect of other doctors in the area.
When a sheepherder failed at his attempt to commit suicide, Dr. Maghee performed thirty surgeries on him to rebuild his face, inserted silver tubes in his nostrils, and transplanted skin from his face to create a new nose.
Plastic surgery was not yet named as such, and there were no antibiotics, but miraculously, the man suffered no infection and, although he did not like his new nose, his jawbone grew back by itself.
Anesthetics throughout Lillian’s career ranged from whiskey to chloroform and later, ether, which she said was hard to use. She often had to estimate the dosage.
In 1881, after the outlaw Big Nose George Parrot was lynched in Rawlins for the murder of Carbon County Sheriff’s Deputy Robert Widdowfield and Tip Vincent, Dr. Maghee and another Rawlins physician, Dr. John Osborne, claimed Parrot’s body for medical study.
Osborne “pickled his [Parrot’s] body in alcohol and used it for dissection purposes,” Lillian recalled. The doctors studied the man’s brain to try to discern what differences there might be in a criminal’s brain that would cause deviant behavior. They sawed the skullcap in half and gave one half to their young protégé.
“I kept the bandit’s skull top here for a long time as memento of my training days,” she said. She used it as a flower pot. Osborne made shoes from the man’s skin and was said to have worn the shoes when he was inaugurated as Wyoming’s governor in January 1893.
In modern days, the two-tone lace-up shoes became part of the displays at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins.
Lillian practiced for about 15 years but maintained her license for most of her life. She was reportedly the only woman to attend the American Medical Association convention in Denver in 1895. In 1898, she married Lou J. Nelson, and they lived in Rawlins.
Years later, at age 89, she toured the Denver hospitals. She shared her recollections with Hubert in the oral interview in 1961, and died the next year, at age 96.
Lori Van Pelt can be reached at lori.vanpelt@aol.com
