One woman who made her mark in the community as a health care provider was Martha Moore Ballard (1735-1812). She was born in Oxford, Massachusetts, and raised in a family that included physicians (her uncle was a doctor as were two brothers-in-law). What made Martha Ballard's life even more remarkable than it was in fact is that it was recorded for history in her diary-- a diary that covered the last 27 years of her life and included 10,000 entries over a period of 9,965 days.
In sometimes cryptic entries she recorded her actions as a midwife that resulted in the births of 816 children between 1785 and 1812. Although the existence of the diary was known for some time local historians were reluctant to accord it any significance: James North: "brief and with some exceptions not of general interest'" Charles Elventon Nash: "trivial and unimportant...being but a repetition of what has been said many times." But when Laurel Thatcher Ulrich published A Midwife's Tale, The Life of Martha Ballard Based On Her Diary, 1785-1812 a complete picture of Martha Ballard's life emerged:
Martha Ballard was a midwife-and more....In twentieth-century terms, she was simultaneously a midwife, nurse, physician, mortician, pharmacist, and attentive wife. Furthermore, in the very act of recording her work, she became a keeper of vital records, a chronicler of the medical history of her town.
Her diary in 1793 documents the appearance in town of what had to be a truly unusual event, the arrival of an itinerant "Negro woman doctor." Just who this unfortunately unnamed physician was remains a mystery, but the fact that she was identified as a doctor rather than a midwife or caregiver has to be considered significant.
Moore, her in pursuit of what Ulrich describes as "social medicine," traveled in all kinds of weather, including storms and floods. Her diary entries record the many times she fell from her horse, sometimes seriously injuring herself in her efforts to reach a patient in distress. Contrary to what might be expected, she enjoyed the respect of physicians like Samuel Colman, from whom she purchased medicines and compounds to prepare medications, and Benjamin Page. Her diary has 85 entries between 1794 and 1808 that relate to her attendance at autopsies--referred to as "desections."