Emily W. Walker
[Age 103] A country doctor, she practiced for more than 50 years in southern Anne Arundel County.

 
 
By Frederick N. Rasmussen
sun reporter

July 14, 2007

Dr. Emily Wilson Walker, a doctor who practiced medicine for more than 50 years in rural southern Anne Arundel County before retiring in her late 70s, died Tuesday of cardiac arrhythmia at Genesis Elder Care Spa Creek Center in Annapolis. She was 103.
Her arrival in the rural crossroads village of Friendship on a warm afternoon in 1929 had an inauspicious beginning, according to a biography, Doc: The Life of Emily Hammond Wilson. written by Therese Magnotti.
 

As she stepped off the bus from Baltimore at the village general store, she was greeted by disappointed townsfolk, who had expected a male physician, not a 25-year-old woman.

Her first patient was a dog that had been hit by a car. After she sewed up the wounded animal, it went home and promptly chewed out the stitches - but survived.

The fact that she had pulled the dog through gave her the necessary medical credibility in the eyes of the villagers.

Dr. Wilson resisted Jim Crow segregation, still prevalent in the area at the time, by welcoming black patients into her waiting room, where they sat next to whites and were seen in order of arrival or medical emergency, not on the basis of color.

Because pregnant black women were not welcome at the hospital in Annapolis and were sent to Johns Hopkins Hospital, Dr. Wilson often delivered their babies.

When she started her practice, there were only two paved roads in the rural southern part of the county. And when winter snows and spring thaws made roads impassable during house calls, she was often forced to abandon her Ford Model A roadster for a horse.

"I had one patient who was dying of tuberculosis. He lived quite a distance from the county road, so reaching him by car was impossible," she told her biographer.

"I borrowed a horse and rode horseback to the house. I often rode horseback into farms to deliver babies. It was a lot easier than walking because I could put the bag in front of the saddle. I borrowed a horse because I had no place to keep a horse of my own until after I was married, and sometimes I wasn't sure that even the horse could get through the mud," she said.

Dr. Wilson charged $1 for an office visit and delivered babies at home for $15. There were times when patients paid her with oysters, turkeys, farm produce, a day's work or bottles of bootleg whiskey.

"There were six generations of some families that I took care of. ... When I went on my rounds, I took a lot of love and sympathy; there wasn't much medicine," she told her biographer. "I had a flashlight and a stethoscope. Back in the 1930s, there were no antibiotics, but there was a lot of pneumonia and other infectious diseases. Of course, most of the houses didn't have electricity ... so you'd have to have a flashlight to look at the patient to see whether he was turning blue or not!"

Emily Cumming Hammond was born July 8, 1904, at Redcliffe Plantation in Beech Island, S.C., which had been built in 1859 by her great-grandfather, James Henry Hammond. Her great-grandfather, a slave owner, was governor of South Carolina from 1840 to 1842, and represented his state in the U.S. Senate from 1857 until it seceded in 1860.

A tomboy in her childhood, she roamed Kathwood, her parent's 1,000-acre estate near the South Carolina-Georgia border, caring for ailing farm animals and accompanying her mother on sick visits to the 20 black families who lived on her family's farm and to neighbors.

"Mother did so much to take care of people on the farm that I was inspired to study medicine. I was about 13 years old when I realized that I could be a doctor, and soon after that, nearly everyone began to call me 'Doc,'" she told Ms. Magnotti.

Dr. Wilson graduated from Goucher College and did premedical studies at the University of Georgia. In 1927, she graduated from the Medical College of Georgia, the only woman in her class and the second to graduate from the Augusta, Ga., college.

After completing her internship at the Central of Georgia Railroad Hospital in Savannah, she came to Baltimore to do medical research at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she worked before taking a leave and the job in Friendship.

In 1932, she married John Fletcher Wilson and moved her medical office to their family farm in Lothian. Fifteen years later, the couple purchased Obligation Farm, a historic Harwood farm that dates to the late 1600s. Mr. Wilson died in 1952.

Initially denied admission to the staff of Anne Arundel Hospital, now Anne Arundel Medical Center, she became chief of its staff in 1951 and later served as president of the Anne Arundel Medical Society.

Dr. Wilson had numerous accomplishments, including diagnosing the first case of Rocky Mountain spotted fever in the state in the late 1940s, as well as establishing syphilis and prenatal clinics in the county.

Being a country doctor, she told The Sun in a 1981 article, is "something I feel at home with. Most of the time, I leave here feeling I have helped someone."

She retired in 1982.

In 1974, she married Albert Tupper Walker, whom she had dated when she was 17, though she continued to use her first husband's last name professionally. Mr. Walker died in 1988.

Dr. Wilson lived alone at Obligation Farm until moving to Spa Creek Center in 2005.

In 1995, she told her biographer, "I'm going to keep on going until I get old."

She was a communicant of Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church in Owensville, where a Mass of Christian burial will be offered at 10 a.m. today.

Surviving are two sons, John F. Wilson Jr. and Christopher H. Wilson, both of Harwood; and two grandchildren.
 
 

fred.rasmussen@baltsun.com
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