Seagrave, Mabel A. (Mabel Alexandria), 1882-1935

<p>Mabel Seagrave (January 3, 1882 – November 10, 1935) was an American doctor who directed a hospital in France during World War I, and was decorated by the French government for her service.</p>

<p>Seagrave was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming and raised in Seattle, Washington, the daughter of Arthur Amasa Seagrave and Selina Stone Glass Seagrave. Her father built and operated a hotel in Seattle. She was valedictorian at Seattle High School in 1900. She attended Wellesley College, graduating in 1905, and Johns Hopkins University, where she earned her medical degree in 1912.</p>

<p>Immediately after medical school, Seagrave focused on oral surgery, especially in children, at the Municipal Clinic of Seattle.</p>

<p>Seagrave joined the staff of Women's Oversea Hospitals (W. O. H.) in 1918, and was first posted to a refugee hospital in the south of France. After the armistice, she worked at a Red Cross hospital at Foug, and headed the Hopital Jeanne D'Arc at Nancy, France. She was presented with a medal from the French government in 1919.</p>

<p>Seagrave was sent to France by the National American Woman Suffrage Association to staff a refugee hospital. She was awarded the Merit of Honor award for her medical service in France by the National American Woman Suffrage Association.</p>

<p>After the war, Seagrave concentrated on obstetric and gynecological surgery. She was elected to the American College of Surgeons in 1928. She was active in the Women's Overseas Service League and the Women's University Club of Seattle. At the time of her death in 1935, she was Chief of Staff at Seattle General Hospital.</p>

<p>Mabel Seagrave died suddenly from apoplexy in 1935, aged 53 years, at her home in Seattle. Seagrave's papers are archived at the University of Washington Libraries.</p>

<p>MABEL ALEXANDRIA SEAGRAVE was born in Cheyenne, the cattle-town capital of Wyoming, in 1882. Her father, Arthur, was a construction engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad. After a stint as a Wells Fargo agent in Portland, he arrived in Seattle in 1885 and dabbled in real estate. The following year, Mabel’s mother, Selina Seagrave, died of an illness, only 38 years old. Mabel was motherless at the vulnerable age of 4 but gained a stepmother two years later, when her father married a Seattle woman, Sarah Chatham.</p>

<p>Shortly after Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889, Mabel’s father built the Seagrave Hotel, followed by a bigger and better one near Pioneer Square. It was the fourth Seattle hotel named the Occidental. The Seagraves lived in the five-story hotel throughout Mabel’s childhood. She was an inquisitive girl who loved talking with hotel guests from far-flung places.</p>

<p>Mabel spent her grade-school years at Denny School, an impressive new two-story building that opened in 1884 on Battery Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues in Belltown. She was an exceptional student, excelling in math, biology and chemistry. She loved acting in school plays.</p>

<p>In 1900, at the outset of her senior year at Seattle High School, Seagrave’s skill as a horsewoman was reported in a newspaper feature on the growth of the Seattle Riding Club. She was co-valedictorian of the 65-member Seattle High School Class of 1901. Her address on the role of 20th-century women was warmly applauded by a standing-room-only crowd of 2,000 at the city’s Grand Opera House.</p>

<p>When an illness claimed her stepmother in 1903, Seagrave withdrew from Wellesley for a semester to return to Seattle and comfort her father. She was back on campus in the fall of 1904 and an enthusiastic member of the Republican Club, boosting the candidacy of President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who had risen from vice president to president when William McKinley was assassinated in 1901, was handily elected and returned to office. Seagrave’s impersonation of the “Rough Rider,” complete with bushy mustache and nose-pinching pince-nez spectacles, would delight friends for decades.</p>

<p>AFTER GRADUATING FROM Wellesley in 1905, Seagrave taught math at Seattle’s new high school on Broadway for two years before matriculating at Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1907. In order to meet the Baltimore school’s stringent entrance requirements, she took an intensive physics laboratory course at the University of Washington.</p>

<p>A pioneer in clinical training, Johns Hopkins was also a gender-equality pioneer. Seagrave was one of seven women in Hopkins’ 89-member Class of 1911.</p>

<p>Female physicians in her era stuck together. Seagrave wrote her father in 1910 that the female physicians of New York offered her $1,000 as an inducement to locate in Manhattan after she received her medical degree and studied abroad.</p>

<p>Though she loved the work, after 18 months at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, Seagrave headed home to rapidly growing Seattle. She was impressed that Washington women had won the right to vote two years earlier, in 1910.</p>

<p>Seagrave was warmly welcomed by Seattle’s established female physicians. After arriving in Seattle, she became a member of the Medical Women’s Club, which had been organized in 1906.</p>

<p>SEAGRAVE WAS KNOWN as “Dr. Mabel” to her friends. Her patients, especially children, loved her gentle, reassuring smile. To have “a little chat with her was to get a sunnier slant on life,” the King County Medical Bulletin wrote.</p>

<p>After returning from France, she volunteered with the Children’s Welfare Division of the Seattle Health Department, overseeing dental clinics for underprivileged children. Her Wellesley and Soroptimist Club friend, Heliker, was now a probation officer with the county Juvenile Court. Seagrave volunteered to help there, too, as well as at Seattle’s new Children’s Orthopedic Hospital. Her OB-GYN practice thrived. Her lectures on infant care drew crowds of women to the Bon Marché department store. She reported on child-care facilities in Seattle.</p>

<p>Seagrave was accorded privileges at all of Seattle’s hospitals and became chief of staff at Seattle General Hospital. The hospital’s internship program for nurses and physicians was one of her abiding interests.</p>

<p>In 1921-22, Seagrave headed the committee that oversaw construction of the impressive new home of the Women’s University Club.</p>

<p>She was a patron of the Cornish School of Music and the Seattle Art Museum, as well as regional director of the Soroptimist Clubs, dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls around the world.</p>

<p>She died at age 53 on Nov. 10, 1935. It was the day before the 17th anniversary of the armistice that ended the suffering “she had worked to alleviate with skill and valor,” one eulogy said.</p>