Esther Clayson was born in Seabeck, Washington Territory at her father’s logging camp on the Puget Sound on November 16, 1870. After graduating from the University of Oregon Medical Shool in 1894, she joined her husband Dr. Emil Pohl in Alaska for the gold rush. While fighting a meningitis epidemic she persuaded a notorious bandit to give her money to begin a hospital in a barn. Emil died of encephalitis in 1909. Her brother Fred was murdered on the Dawson trail and she lost her only child Frederick at the age of eight to an ulcer of the bowel. Despite these difficulties she practiced medicine in Portland, Oregon where she became the first female to hold the post of chairman of the Health Department (1907-1909) in a city of that size. She installed the city’s first school nurse, wrote it’s first milk ordinance and demanded sweeping reforms in food handling. She was an outspoken advocate for women and joined women’s suffrage groups and eventually ran as representative to Congress. When she left the Health Department she became head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the Portland medical group of Coffey, Sears, Jones and Joyce. During this period she married Portland businessman George Lovejoy.
Dr. Lovejoy served during the 1st World War with the American Red Cross and in 1919 became the president of the American Women’s Hospital Service. In this capacity she traveled widely to alleviate suffering from war, disaster, famine, revolution and poverty. She organized the relief services of the AWHS throughout the Near East and especially in Greece. A bust of Dr. Lovejoy stands in the town square of Nikea, Piraeus, Greece. “When the Turks burned the port of Smyrna, which they’d just wrested from the Greeks, Dr. Lovejoy was the only American woman on the scene. Mistaken for a Greek she was beaten with a rifle by a Turkish soldier. Several times, armed only with a terrible look of anger, she stared down Turkish soldiers about to abduct young girls. She rescued others by strapping them down on stretchers.” Esther also was the first president of the Medical Women’s International Association of which she helped to found in 1919. A mural with a portrait of Dr. Lovejoy is displayed in the Esther Pohl Lovejoy Hall at the Philippine Medical Women’s Association building in Manila.
In 1938, she authored Women Physicians and Surgeons, a monumental task completed by researching archives and searching in attics all over the world. Twenty years later she published Women Doctors of the World , a work that reached back into Biblical times. Her next book, Certain Samaritans, documented the complex work of the AWHS.
She lived without extravagance and worked endless hours. In 1963, four years before her death she traveled to Alaska, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Manila. She revisited the University of Oregon Medical School where she had established the Pohl Memorial Scholarship Fund in memory of her first husband and son, saying that she was glad to have had “the chance to remind the trustees that one third of the scholarships should go to girls”. Esther Pohl Lovejoy died at 97 years of age and was buried at the Lone Fir Cemetery in 1967 after a very long and successful career.
From the guide to the Esther Pohl Lovejoy Papers, 1890-1967, (Oregon Health & Science University Historical Collections & Archives)
