A Good and Noble Thing

I grew up in a wonderful rural area in upstate New York. Where we lived was called “the hilltowns.” We were only about a half hour away from the capital city of Albany, but the difference was significant in terms of lifestyle. Living there meant we always got more snow in the winter than those who lived “off the hill.” And in the early 20th century, there was very limited access in the hilltowns to immediate medical care. This book, A Good and Noble Thing, is such a treasure to read because it’s a marvelous biography about a woman doctor who was the only doctor in the area for many years.

The author, Gerard Finin, actually grew up in the hilltowns, where Dr. Perkins was his family doctor. Her office was in Westerlo, and she traveled a wide radius around the area making house calls. I think Finin was the perfect person to write this book because he well knows the context of the area, knew Dr. Perkins and so many others who knew and loved her during her long life and career.

I was also delighted to read names and places in the book that were familiar to me. He mentions the local bank where Dr. Perkins did some of her banking business, which is also where I worked in my early 20’s. I knew some of the people Finin interviewed for the book, including one high school acquaintance and a few bank customers. It was fun to say, hey, I know that person!

Her life is remarkable for so many reasons. While I would encourage any reader of this post to just read the book for all the details, for my own curiosity, I decided to dive a bit deeper into some data around women physicians. Here’s a very brief summary of some interesting facts within the context of Dr. Perkins’ life.

1917 – Perkins began her undergraduate studies at Radcliffe College, graduating in 1921. Why not Harvard? Oh yeah, Harvard didn’t admit women until much later. It’s a bit complicated, but at least by 1945 Harvard Medical School started admitting women students.

1921 – Since Harvard wasn’t accepting women at this time, Perkins entered medical school at Columbia in New York City, graduating in 1925. Out of Columbia’s 95 graduating physicians that year, 10 were women. Following graduation, she remained in the city to work at Bellevue Hospital, including on the hospital’s ambulance service. Mind you, this was the roaring twenties, but as I understand it, Perkins wasn’t terribly interested in all the dancing, jazzing, and glitz and glitter of the city, which makes it perfectly understandable that she chose to practice medicine in a very different environment. The hilltowns are very rural and scenic, a far cry from the hustle bustle of the city.

1928 – This is the year Dr. Perkins finished her medical residency and moved to Westerlo to open her practice. At that time in the U.S., less than 5% of all physicians were women. It wasn’t until the 1950s that the percentage began to climb beyond that, reaching nearly 28% by the year 2000. She was the only doctor in the hilltowns at the time. Let’s remember that it was only a few years earlier in 1920 when women were allowed to vote in the U.S. because the 19th amendment had finally been ratified. so despite some reluctance of the population to accept a woman doctor, over time she truly became a beloved and valued doctor.

1954 – During the first three decades of Perkins’ doctoring days on the hill, she was the sole doctor in the area that encompassed Westerlo, Rensselaerville, and Berne. The combined population at that time was around 4,000, and the area she covered doing house calls each morning was about 200 square miles! Thankfully, another doctor, Dr. Margery Smith, moved to the area in 1954 and opened her practice in East Berne. This allowed each of them to ensure there was still a doctor nearby if one of them was out of town.

1980’s and beyond – Dr. Perkins was still working in the 1980’s. By this time, she had served the hilltowns for over 6 decades. In the spring of 1993, she was nearly 94 years old when she passed. Dr. Smith was also aging by then and chose to retire a few years later. Dr. Smith passed in 2012. Here is a truly wonderful article about Dr. Smith and her devotion to being a family physician in the hilltowns.

Since that time, medical care in the hilltowns has been provided over the years by a few different doctors and nurse practitioners. There’s now a permanent building in East Berne where the Helderberg Ambulance Squad is based. Also, the new offices for Hilltown Healthcare opened in the town of Berne a few years ago.