Mary Carson Breckinridge

Mary Carson Breckinridge was an American nurse midwife who founded the Frontier Nursing Service, which brought family medical care to the isolated mountain communities of Leslie County, Kentucky. Born in Memphis in 1881 to a prominent political family and educated in the United States, Russia and Switzerland, she lost a first husband and two children early, trained as a registered nurse at St. Luke's Hospital in New York, graduating in 1910. She modelled her service on European practice, sending nurse-midwives on horseback to deliver babies and give prenatal care, immunizations and nutrition advice in homes and small clinics. The work greatly reduced infant and maternal deaths in the area at modest cost, though her model of autonomous nurse-midwifery never became widespread in the United States. She died in 1965.