Dr. Stone's Journey to Cuba City

When Dr. Mildred Stone began practicing medicine in Cuba City in 1961, she became, as far as I am aware, the community's first female physician. Dr. Stone's story began many years earlier, however, and she recorded it all in her autobiography, Hen Medic, published after her retirement. Working in a profession that was still very much dominated by men, Mildred Stone's career spanned six decades of great change in medicine.

Dr. Mildred Stone, as she appears on the back cover of her autobiography, Hen Medic.

Mildred Mary-Anne Simon was born in 1911 in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Whether she was stitching up an injured neighborhood cat, training her chickens to perform on demand, or driving her family around town in their new automobile (she had her driver's license at ten years old), it was clear from an early age that Mildred Simon was far from average.

Things could have been very different. Mildred had close calls with illness, suffering two bouts of measles and encephalitis, the last which left her in a coma for two weeks at age four. The medical scare resulted in a learning setback, and Mildred struggled with reading until, with her sister's help, she made such rapid improvements that she skipped the third grade.

Perhaps her early academic struggles made her more determined. Young Mildred was constantly challenging herself to learn new things, and there seemed to be no skill she could not master. She read all of the books in the local library, and with directions from Scientific American magazine, built her own telescope and telephone.

Mildred Simon would go on to graduate as valedictorian of her class at the Sturgeon Bay High School. In addition to academics, she was involved in many extracurricular activities. She competed on the basketball team, played the flute and piccolo, and was a member of her school's award-winning debate team, among other things. The ambitious student also wrote pieces for the local newspaper that offered insight into high school life in the 1920s.

Newspaper article written by Mildred Simon while a student at Sturgeon Bay High School. Published in the Door County Advocate (February 22, 1926).

Despite her academic promise, Mildred knew that education beyond high school would only be possible if she earned enough money to cover her tuition and living expenses. She worked many jobs to pay for college, from picking cherries, staffing a nearby resort, caring for children, and even occasionally filling in as a piano player at the local theater, where she provided musical accompaniment for silent films.

Mildred Simon entered the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1928 but had the misfortune of attending college, and later medical school, during the Great Depression, when money and sometimes even food was scarce. Not one, but two, bank failures in Sturgeon Bay decimated her hard-earned savings, and she worked several jobs and took a full course-load year round to finish her degree as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. Despite that, she found some time for entertainment and adored hiking or canoeing around Lake Mendota (roughly 27 miles!), an achievement she recalled fondly in her autobiography.

The local newspaper celebrated Mildred Simon's academic accomplishments while a student at the University of Wisconsin. Published in the Door County Advocate (December 12, 1930).

The determined young woman graduated in three years with a journalism degree, which makes sense considering her curiosity and high school newspaper contributions, but seems an unusual choice for a future physician. In her autobiography, Mildred explained that a medical degree seemed unattainable considering the burn-out pace required to afford her education. After spending some time employed at the Wisconsin State Journal, however, she realized journalism was not for her and enrolled once more at the University of Wisconsin, this time intent on studying medicine.

In 1933, Mildred Simon married fellow medical student Grant Stone. The couple soon had a child while she was in school and, out of necessity, Mildred would sometimes bring both her baby and her dog to lectures, parking them outside the lecture hall where she could keep an eye on them. Her first child, Kathy, also accompanied Mildred to work and even helped with her entrepreneurial venture of churning out course notes on a makeshift printing press.

While she experienced instances of sexual harassment at the university and noticed fellow female students receiving unwanted attention from male professors, Mildred denied that medical school was made more difficult for her as a woman. She acknowledged that she was treated differently but felt that some professors were harder on her, and some graded her more leniently. In the end, in her mind, it all balanced out.

After her medical training in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Crandon (Wis.), Mildred interned at the Wisconsin General Hospital in Madison. She received her medical degree in 1938 and entered into private practice with her husband in Berlin, Wisconsin.

Dr. Mildred Stone submitted this photograph with her Wisconsin medical license application in 1938, available on Ancestry.com.

 

Dr. Mildred Stone's medical school diploma, 1938. Image from her Wisconsin medical license application, available on Ancestry.com.

The private practice in Berlin would bring all kinds of new experiences, both exciting and challenging. Dr. Stone experienced cases of polio and also treated patients with penicillin when it first became available in the United States. Prescribing antibiotics at that time was far from simple as supply was limited and physicians had to apply to a commission in Boston, receiving the drugs via air mail if their proposed usage was approved.

During World War Two, Mildred was left with an enormous workload as male doctors in the region, including her husband, entered the service and were no longer available to care for patients. One particularly trying incident left Dr. Stone to handle, with no assistance, nine individuals severely injured in a car accident. One of the victims required brain surgery and, not being a neurosurgeon and having her requests for help denied, she had to perform the operation while studying diagrams from her anatomy books. (The patient survived with no complications.) 

Photograph published in the February 1945 issue of the Ladies Home Journal.

The following letter, submitted to the Ladies Home Journal and published in their February 1945 issue, provides an outsider's opinion of Dr. Stone's life at this time, and the challenges she faced during the war. Written by Milwaukee Journal writer and popular advice columnist Ione Quinby Griggs, it describes how hard Dr. Stone worked as she covered for absent male physicians while tending to her children and home.

Dear Editor: Here is the story of a woman country doctor who has not only carried on her husband's medical practice during the three years that he has been in service, but has cared for her two children and bought and developed an attractive house and grounds in which to welcome her husband home.

She is Dr. Mildred Stone of Berlin, Wisconsin, known as "Doctor Mildred" to countless families in small towns and rural districts. She has averaged between seventy-five and one hundred obstetrical cases a year since her husband, Capt. Grant Stone, left (he is now believed to be in German territory), and last winter during the flu and pneumonia epidemic her patients averaged seventy a day.

On her forty-acre grounds (besides a lake and lake cottage), Doctor Stone has the best Victory garden in that section, and a flower garden with prize gladiolus and roses. She attended them last year with no help except that of her ten-year-old daughter, Kathleen. Her other daughter, Karen, is three. The doctor puts on overalls far into the night, and digs and plants by floodlight. The house is old, but she has managed with a little help here and there to get it remodeled, painted and papered.

The Doctors Stone have dreamed of a 'town farm' with lake since they worked their way through the University of Wisconsin medical school together, and it will be a reality when the captain comes home. In the back yard, fantail pigeons and Muscovy ducks live in prefabricated houses, and ducks, Siberian silkies (chickens) and others are raised for eggs and meat. There is a freezing unit in the basement. Also the doctor has put up untold numbers of quarts of vegetables, fruits and berries.

On top of her other duties, Doctor Stone was health officer until this year--she averages three hours of sleep a night. She had a very good housekeeper until a few months ago, when the woman left town, and the doctor appealed to me to help her find someone, through my problem column in the Milwaukee Journal. She wrote that it was increasingly difficult to minister to the sick because her own three-year-old was having nightmares when mamma went calling at night. Her letter got eighty-five replies, and she found a very good young woman to help her.

Dr. Grant Stone returned safely from the war but, after working together for over ten years, the "Doctors Stone" separated in 1951, and the couple later divorced. Mildred moved with her five daughters to Madison, where she spent one year at the American Red Cross blood bank, followed by nine years at the Madison VA Hospital. At the veterans' hospital, Dr. Stone delighted long-term tuberculosis patients by remembering their birthdays with gifts and poems and by writing and producing humorous holiday skits. Even the grumpiest of patients were touched by her thoughtfulness.

Dr. Stone at work for the American Red Cross. Image published in the Capital Times (December 29, 1951).

While she worked at the veterans' hospital, Dr. Stone also served as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Medical School and was elected to the American Academy of Allergy. Allergy research was personal to the physician, as she and her daughters were very allergic to many drugs and foods.

Though she was well liked and successful at her work in Madison, by 1961, Dr. Stone had grown frustrated with aspects of the job and returned to private practice in a small town in southwestern Wisconsin called Cuba City. She joined the Cuba City Medical Center, where she served as a general practitioner specializing in allergies and pulmonary disease. At that time, the Cuba City facility, opened by Dr. Cedric S. King in 1953, was still relatively new.

Dr. Stone had this to say about her new home:

Cuba City is a friendly little town of 2,000 in southwestern Wisconsin in the middle of a rich agricultural area. Many of the men are employed in Dubuque, Iowa, about twenty miles away. The town had a good elementary and high school and a parochial (Catholic) grade school. There are four churches. There is a country club, complete with a pool where swimming lessons are held. The merchants are friendly and reliable and the car dealers and repairers are honest. The hospital was rated at 55 beds, connected to a clinic with a total of five doctors and a nursing home of 100 beds. The proximity of the clinic and the hospital was one of my reasons for settling there.

And settle she did. Dr. Stone put down roots, building a home at 507 East Webster Street. In her more than twenty years practicing in Cuba City, she saw several interesting cases, including delivering the largest (14 pounds) and smallest (12 ounces) babies of her career--a career in which she delivered over 2,000 babies.

Dr. Stone's newly built home in Cuba City at 507 East Webster Street.

In 1984, still in Cuba City, Dr. Stone retired from medical practice. The paperwork and interactions with insurance companies, still a bane of practitioners today, had dogged her since her time at the VA Hospital and had only gotten worse as her career progressed. It was time to hang up the stethoscope.

Despite the frustrations, Dr. Stone remained dedicated to fighting for patients throughout her career. One particular recollection in her autobiography perfectly captures the doctor's persistence, as well as her frankness and sense of humor. When Medicare refused to cover a custom-made bra required by a patient, "I wrote to the gentleman who had written to me and suggested that if his organs of reproduction hung down to his ankles, he would want some support. She got her bra."

Cuba City was lucky to have Dr. Stone caring for its residents for so many years. Dr. Mildred Stone passed away in 1998.

Cover of Hen Medic, Dr. Mildred Stone's autobiography, published in 1989. If you haven't read it, the book might be available through your local library (the Cuba City Public Library has a copy!).

Dr. Stone's inscription inside one copy of her autobiography.