Mary Carson Breckinridge was an American nurse-midwife and the founder of the Frontier Service.
Background
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, into a prominent family, Breckinridge was a daughter of Arkansas Congressman Clifton Rodes Breckinridge and a granddaughter of John C. Breckinridge. In 1894, Breckinridge and her family moved to Russia when President Grover Cleveland appointed her father to serve as the United States. minister to that country.
Education
She was educated by private tutors in Washington, District of Columbia, and in Saint St. Petersburg, Russia.
Career
Family and Early They returned to the United States in 1897. was married in 1904 to a lawyer, Henry Ruffner Morrison, of Hot Springs, Arkansas. He died only two years later. The couple had no children.
As a young widow, entered a nursing class at New York City"s Saint Luke"s Hospital.
She remained there three years, taking a degree in nursing in 1910 before returning to the South. The couple had two children.
Their daughter Polly was born prematurely in 1916 and did not survive. Two years later, their beloved four-year-old son, Clifford ("Breckie") Thompson, died of appendicitis.
lieutenant was during this time that she served as volunteer director of Child Hygiene and District While in Europe she met French and British nurse-midwives and realized that people with similar training could meet the health care needs of rural America"s mothers and babies.
Breckinrdige also recognized that the organizational structure of decentralized outposts in France could be mimicked in other rural areas. She would implement these ideas in her later work with the Frontier Service. A deeply religious woman, considered this path to be her life"s calling.
Since no midwifery course was then offered in the United States, returned to England to receive the training she needed at the British Hospital for Mothers and Babies.
She was then certified by the Central Midwives Board. She returned to the United States. in 1925 and on May 28 of that year founded the Kentucky Committee for Mothers and Babies, which soon became the Frontier Service. had a large log house, called the Big House, built in Wendover, Kentucky to serve as her home and the Frontier Service headquarters.
In 1939 she started her own midwifery school. There, conducted Sunday afternoon services using the Episcopal prayer book
In 1952 she completed her memoir "Wide Neighborhoods" which is still available from the University of Kentucky Press.
She continued to lead the Frontier Service until her death on May 16, 1965, at Wendover.