Estelle Kleiber Betz

Frontier Healer Estelle Kleiber Betz

Estelle Kleiber Betz was a woman ahead of her time. Born in 1899, she grew up in an era before women had the right to vote and when job prospects for women were limited. Like Marie Curie who, 30 years earlier found socially acceptable work to pay for her higher education, Estelle worked her way through an undergraduate degree then Cornell Medical College where she graduated 2nd in a class of predominantly male students. In October 1929, before starting her internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, this young, single, city dweller traveled alone to Kentucky's Appalachian region to spend three months as an itinerant frontier doctor. This book contains a memoir of her early life and her letters home to family and friends during her Kentucky adventure. It paints a vivid picture of the contrast between the increasingly urbanized culture of America at the end of the Roaring Twenties and an isolated region caught in the last vestiges of 19th century rural frontier.