By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 12, 2007; B07
 
 

She was a country doctor when people were still reluctant to go to a female physician, but she won them over by treating an injured dog. Her waiting room was integrated, even though most of Southern Maryland wasn't. For a long time, she was paid in oysters and chickens.

Emily Hammond Wilson Walker, 103, a physician in Anne Arundel County since 1929 who delivered thousands of babies, set untold numbers of bones and diagnosed the first case of tick fever in Maryland, died of cardiac arrhythmia July 10 at the Spa Creek Center in Annapolis.

Dr. Wilson, as she was known, arrived by bus at the crossroads town of Friendship in 1929, on a leave of absence from postgraduate medical research at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

As she entered the general store, the proprietor asked whether anyone had seen the new doctor get off the bus. "I'm the doctor," she quickly said. His reaction was immediate and disapproving, according to a 1952 article in The Washington Post. "I've never seen a woman doctor before" was all he said.

Outright hostility greeted her as she sought a room to rent. But she broke through with her first patient -- a dog that had been hit by a car. She sewed up the dog's shoulder gash, and although the animal chewed out the stitches at home, it survived and thrived, and so did the young doctor's reputation.

She made house calls on horseback or tractor when the roads were too muddy for her Ford. Charging $1 for an office visit or $15 for delivery of babies at home, she was often paid with bushels of oysters, dozens of eggs or farm produce.

"There was nobody she would not see," said Therese Magnotti, who wrote "Doc: The Life of Emily Hammond Wilson" (1995). "She never refused to go out on a call, no matter the time, no matter the weather. She never played favorites."

Dr. Wilson's waiting room was open to whites and blacks, with patients served in the order of arrival or according to the seriousness of their ailment. "This was somewhat unusual for the times, but this is how I practiced," she told Magnotti.

The Annapolis hospital would not deliver African American babies at that time, so pregnant women who were black had to trek to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. If the women's labor pains began before the ambulance crossed the old bridge to the city, a routine occurrence, the ambulance would turn around and Dr. Wilson would "finish the job," Magnotti said.

"Don't paint my life as being grim," Dr. Wilson told The Post in 1952. "It's really very pleasant. You get to know members of all generations. Here I've known two generations -- and I'm almost ready to start on the third! That is an advantage doctors don't have in most places."

She was born Emily Cumming Hammond on July 8, 1904, at Redcliffe Plantation, Beech Island, S.C., to an impoverished aristocratic family. As a child, she often accompanied her mother to visit and offer home remedies to the former slaves who remained on the plantation after the Civil War.

She graduated from Goucher College in Baltimore and did premed studies at the University of Georgia. She graduated from the Medical College of Georgia in 1927, the only woman in her class and the second female graduate of the institution.

She interned at the Central of Georgia Railway Hospital in Savannah, then accepted a position to do medical research at Johns Hopkins. But when she heard that the country doctor in southern Anne Arundel County had died, she took a bus to her future.

She married John Fletcher Wilson in 1932 and moved her office to her husband's family farm in Lothian. They later rented a property known as the Etowah farm near Harwood and, in 1947, purchased the adjoining Obligation Farm. In what must have been a grand procession, the couple moved their household and farm across the field, "every wagon, every horse, every tractor loaded to the gills," Magnotti said.

Dr. Wilson had been denied admission into the Annapolis hospital and turned down when she first applied to the local medical society, but later she became chief of staff at what is now Anne Arundel Medical Center and president of its medical society.

Dr. Wilson established clinics to treat syphilis and enlisted the county's help to set up clinics for general medical and prenatal care. She diagnosed the first case of Rocky Mountain spotted fever in Maryland shortly after World War II, identifying the telltale rash on a child's palm and the soles of his feet after she learned he had been bitten by a tick. The potentially fatal disease was so unusual in the eastern United States that physicians from Baltimore came to her office to observe.

The community threw a party to celebrate her 50 years of medical practice. She worked three more years and retired in 1982.

Throughout her life, "she was so gentle-spoken, persistent, stubborn, determined but so genteel. She was a lady," Magnotti said. "But on the other hand, she loved to go to cocktail parties. You'd look around and there'd be this knot of men in the corner and there'd be little Emily."

Her husband died in 1952. Twenty-two years later, she married A.T. Walker, a childhood friend. He died in 1988.

Survivors include two sons from her first marriage, John F. Wilson Jr. and Christopher H. Wilson, both of Harwood; a brother; a sister; and two grandchildren.
 

© 2007 The Washington Post Company