Woman of the Century/Loretta Mann Hammond

HAMMOND, Mrs. Loretta Mann, physician, born in Rome, Mich., 4th April, 1842. Her LORETTA MANN HAMMOND. parents were Daniel and Anna Stoddard Mann. Her mother came from the Stoddards, of Litchfield, Conn., a family of preachers, teachers and editors. Her father is descended from the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, and from the same Plymouth progenitor came the Hon. Horace Mann Early in life Loretta showed tendencies towards her later study. At the age of nine she decided to study medicine, but in that she received no sympathy. Her father, though intelligent and valuing education in a man, was prejudiced against the education of women. When she was fourteen, she walked three miles, went before the school board, and on examination received a first-grade certificate. The first intimation her parents had of her ambition in that direction was when she walked in with the document in her hand. After that she had an hour a day for study, and her father began to say that they might as well let Loretta got an education, as she was so queer no man would ever want to marry her. At sixteen she was sent to Hillsdale College, and she never heard any more laments that she was a girl. After finishing the preparatory and junior years, she decided to study medicine. To be self-supporting, she learned printing, in Peru, Ind., and was an object of curiosity and remark for doing work out of woman's sphere. She began to set type in Hillsdale, Mich., at the sum of twelve cents per thousand, but her wages increased until, as compositor and reporter in Kalamazoo, she received the same wages as a man. While there, on invitation, she joined the State Typographical Union, the only woman in that body. Later she was the only female compositor in Philadelphia, Pa. The Typographical Union there did not admit women, hut, being national, her card from Michigan had to be recognized. The book firm of Carey it Baird employed her at men's wages, despite the protests of their employe's. There she earned the money for her medical course, graduating in 1872 from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. She soon after went to California and, during her eight years of practice, introduced to the profession a new remedy, California laurel. She wrote copious articles for the "Therapeutic Gazette," of Detroit, which were copied into the London journals, and the medicine was sampled all over America and England, before the manufacturers knew they were dealing with a woman. While in California she became the wife of Dr. W. M. Hammond, of Kansas City, Mo. Removing thence, they became proprietors and physicians of the "Fountain of Health," a mineral spring resort, where they now reside. One child, a daughter, Pansy, blesses their home. As a physician Dr. Hammond is hopeful, cheerful, painstaking and foreseeing. She believes stimulants are neither curative nor nutrient, but benumbing to the nerve centers, which is incipient death. She never gives morphine as a sedative. She was always an advocate of physical culture and while in college often walked twelve miles before breakfast, without fatigue As a child, as soon as she knew the inequalities of human conditions, she was an active abolitionist and a woman suffragist. She has allied herself with the Socialist Labor Party movement and, although a capitalist, sympathizes with the laboring classes. With all her positiveness, she never antagonizes.