Page:Woman of the Century.djvu/237

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DAVIS.
DAVIS.

Of the last, Miss Davis was for five years associate editor with Mrs. Sawyer and Mrs. Soulé. MINNIE S. DAVIS. In 1863 she removed with her father's family to Hartford, Conn. A few months after going into her new home she fell down stairs, and that was the beginning of long years of helplessness, suffering and partial blindness. All known means for her restoration had been tried, but with only partial and temporary success. In 1885, when the wave of " Mental Healing " swept over the land and was accepted by those who were ready for the spiritual truth, Miss Davis was one of the first who recognized the reality of the philosophy. A friend visited her and offered to treat her according to the new method of healing. In four months the days of pain and the darkened room were but memories of the past. She then obtained the best teachers and studied with them the philosophy of healing, and went out in her turn to pass on the work, in which she has had unusual success. Teaching is evidently her forte, her lectures being clear, strong and logical. Miss Davis is interested in all the advanced movements of the day, in temperance, equal rights and everything that tends to the amelioration of the ills of humanity.


DAVIS, Miss Minta S. A., physician and surgeon, born in Johnstown, Pa., 31st October, 1864, of Welsh and English parents. Her father died in her twelfth year, leaving her mother, a younger sister and herself dependent upon the exertions of two brothers When seventeen years old she began to teach school, but she broke down physically at the end of the first term. Then followed a weary apprenticeship at anything that promised support, sewing, proof-reading, type-setting by day, and earnest work with her studies and writing at night. Her ill health turned her thoughts to the study of medicine. Her mother, a conservative English woman, looked coldly upon any divergence from the stereotyped work of woman. Her means were limited, but her brothers wished her to enter a profession, and she chose the study of medicine. At the request of two physicians, who had known the family for thirty MINTA S. A. DAVIS. years, her mother gave an unwilling consent In 1887 she disposed of what property she had and put her all into a medical education A few months later she entered the American Medical College in St. Louis, Mo. Shortly before her graduation came the terrible flood of Johnstown, Pa., and she hastened there to find her people and friends homeless. That calamity made serious inroads on her slender capital. The two physicians who were to help her were dead, but she finished her lectures and answered a call fur physicians from the Northwest. She settled in Salem, Ore., in June, 1890. By patience and industry she has established a fine practice, and was elected vice-president of the Oregon State Eclectic Medical Society.


DAVIS, Mrs. Mollie Evelyn Moore, poet and author, was born in Talladega, Ala., in 1852. Her parents emigrating, she grew up on a Texas plantation With her brother she learned not only to read, but to ride, shoot and swim, and received at home, under the supervision of a wise, book-loving mother and a Highly intellectual father, her mental training. Very early she began to write. Her first volume of poems, entitled "Minding the Gap" (Houston, Texas, 1867), was published before she was sixteen, and enlarged and corrected it has passed through five editions. Her later work has attracted critics at home and abroad. "Keren Happuch and I" is a series of sketches contributed to the New Orleans "Picayune." "In War Times at La Hose Blanche" was a collection of delightful stories (Boston, 1888). That mystic and beautiful prose poem. "The Song of the Opal." the already classical "Pere Daepbert," "Throwing the Wanga." "The Center rigger," and "The Elephant's Track." were written for the