Life on the Frontier

I just returned from a week-long orientation at my midwifery graduate school in the rugged hills of western Kentucky.  Frontier School of Midwifery was the first graduate school of nursing to train nurse-midwives in the United States.  Founded in 1925 by a revolutionary woman of her times, Mary Breckinridge, Frontier midwives lived in outpost clinics throughout the Kentucky appalachia and serviced women and families by horseback.  Barring leather saddlebags and their own two hands, Frontier midwives assisted mothers in childbirth, immunized children, educated families about hygiene, and occasionally checked livestock for disease.  Each clinic had a cow and chickens to keep the midwives nourished for long hours on horseback and 24 hour on call shifts.  

Just imagine.... it is 1935. you are a young nurse from an urban location who decides to join the Frontier Nursing Service.  You arrive by train into the Kentucky mountains and suddenly you are transported to a world untouched by modernity.  Poverty, bluegrass, coal-mining and molasses become your world.  The mothers you tend to have 8,9,10 children.  They teach you how to keep such a large brood alive on so little.  You teach them proper sanitation and nutrition.  

Frontier continues to have a large influence on rural care in the Kentucky area as well as on the entire birth scene.  Today, my classmates come from Brooklyn, Minnesota, Alaska, Oregon, and Georgia.  We gather online and study in our home offices.  We become agents of change in our communities and then share our ideas, inspirations, and frustrations with each other.  We meet at conferences and back in Kentucky once a year.  Life on the Frontier has changed since Mary Breckinridge's day, but her spirit remains.  Care for the mother and her children.  Do not take no for an answer.  Work on your knees and help heal.

Its such a beautiful thing when one finds a family she has been searching for.  To check out more on my Frontier family: http://www.midwives.org/home.html