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Pioneer Doc Urged Girls to Dream
A young Denton County farm girl dreamed large. Born in Little Elm, TX, in 1881, she said, “All my life from early childhood I had said I was going to be a doctor.” At her retirement in 1947, Dr. Claudia Potter encouraged girls: “We women that pioneered in this field like to see the good work go on.” Indeed, she broke paths as both a woman in a “man’s field” and in the technology of her specialty. Graduating as Valedictorian from Denton High School in 1900 and “not discouraged” by her parents, she attended the Medical Branch of the University of Texas, the only woman in a class of 23. “I used all my feminine wiles,” she said, “to overcome the prejudice.” She graduated in 1905 and served an internship at John Sealy Hospital in Galveston, becoming the only physician practicing full time anesthesiology in Texas and the first woman anesthesiologist in the nation. After a year practicing in San Antonio, Dr. Arthur C. Scott hired Dr. Potter as anesthesiologist and the fourth staff physician for Temple Sanitarium. That would become “Scott and White Hospital.” She started at $25 a week and room and board in the nursing students’ dormitory. But, her hiring was conditional on approval by Dr. Scott’s partner, Dr. Raleigh R. White Jr. He wrote Dr. Scott, “I will be home soon, for I know you have lost your mind if you have employed a woman doctor.” Once home, he authorized a one-month probation. “So far as I know this probation lasted until July 31, 1947,” Dr. Potter quipped upon her retirement 41 years later. Her early duties included hauling patients on stretchers, sharpening scalpels and pulling “private duty” nursing tasks for the ill--all after a full day in surgery in the hospital and away. “I had a burning ambition to make good in my work...unlimited energy and I loved humanity and men (in the plural) in particular,” she said. When a medical school classmate came courting in Temple, Dr. White gave her a $300 a year raise to try to discourage “any serious business.” Dr. Potter, who remained single, living in Temple, tended people in rural communities up and down the Santa Fe track. “One cold February morn about 10 a.m. Doctor White and I left Temple in a two-horse buggy... for Lott, Texas. The buggy wheels cut through the mud and ice half hub deep in places.” They would operate in the kitchen. “I then took my mask and ether...took the child to dreamland,” she said Motorcars replaced the horse and buggy, and Dr. Potter bought a roadster, a Hupmobile, in 1909. Called for an emergency, the appendectomy took place on a makeshift table in a field near Rogers one hot July day. She administered the ether. Another time, near Gatesville, “the only possible place (to operate) was in the room...at least 10-12 feet from the open fire...I had large wet towels on the table beside the patient’s head, ready... I expected a flame to come up from the pillow any minute.” Sensitive to her patients who now no longer had to endure surgery without anesthetics, she sought to relieve the vomiting afterward. Dr. Potter continued studies at John Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Mayo Clinic as advances in anesthesia were made. By 1929, aviation had arrived. She described her first flight to Coryell County. “We put the surgical bag on one wing, strapping it on; next, I got in on my stomach on the stretcher and they shut the top of the plane down over me. I could neither turn over or raise up but could hang my head out at the side and look down at the earth as we were flying over it.” Returning at night she said, “I will never forget the thrill ...looking down...one by one the lights came on in the little country homes...car lights began to show up on the Waco highway... reminded you of light posts on a city street. I felt God had let me live in a wonderful age of progress.” Confronted with the danger of landing at night without lights she said, “If we land safely, I wouldn’t take a million dollars for the trip, and if I die, I die happy.” But, she did not tell her mother. Years later, before Dr. Potter died, Feb. 2, 1970 at 89, professional societies feted her, including the UT Medical Branch’s “Golden T” for her 50 years of service to medicine, the first woman so honored. If a woman in your family or community has pioneered in Texas please drop a note to Texas Dames™ ,P. O. Box 70841, Fort Worth, TX 76147; OR, |
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