Enduring echoes

Georgia Nursing, Aug-Oct 2000 by Cannon, Rose B

This biography was recently published in Bullough, Vern & Sentz, Lilli. (2000). American Nursing: A Biographical Dictionary Vol. III. Springer Publishing Company.

Hannah D. Mitchell

1907-?

Hannah D. Mitchell's life is an example of ardent faith and conscientious work. She utilized her education to create good for others, while she attributed much of her success to reliance on a higher power. Born and raised in rural Missouri, she later became a nurse on horseback at the Frontier Nursing Service in Hyden, Kentucky, and completed her career as a midwife consultant in the Department of Health for the State of Georgia.

The eldest of six children, Mitchell was born on a farm near Norwood, Missouri. Her father, educated through high school, became a successful printer, carpenter and farmer. Mitchell recalled his love for studying, reading, and writing short stories. Her mother, who completed grade school, was a busy housewife. Because Mitchell's local country school had only ten grades, she was sent to Neosho, Missouri to live with her grandmother where she completed high school.

When her father died tragically in a construction accident, Mitchell and her oldest brother chose a college where they could both study and work, John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. Mitchell earned her money for school by working each summer as a scout and campfire leader for the college summer program, and four hours a day during the school year as house mother to the younger girls. Because the girls were from varying backgrounds and socioeconomic levels, Mitchell was faced with the dilemma of acquiring white graduation dresses for the sharecropper's daughters in the class. She relayed the story of gathering those ten girls together to pray. Exactly two and a half weeks before graduation a large box arrived addressed to Mitchell. When she assembled the girls around her to open the mysterious package from California, there were exactly ten white dresses, with shoes, stockings, and slips; everything they needed for graduation. In a separate box was a new white dress for Mitchell. This experience would always be etched in her memory. In 1932, at the age of twenty-five, Mitchell completed her BA degree at John Brown University.

Mitchell did not start out to become a nurse, but found her work as an accountant prior to college, unrewarding. After graduation from college, she taught history for a time, and in 1935 she entered the nurse training school at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. After three years of training, at the age of thirty-one, she received her diploma. In 1939 she moved to Kentucky, where in 1940 she became the first American nurse to both graduate from the midwifery program at the Frontier Nursing Service and to teach courses in the program. During the next four years she was first assigned to a district called Bull Creek, and later to Red Bird, both accessible only by horseback. With her beloved mare, Lady Ellen, and her collie dog to accompany them, she was often summoned at night to attend at a birth. One night after a hard day on Lady Ellen, she was called to go out again. This time she saddled Traveler, the horse that had previously belonged to Mary Breckinridge, an English midwife and in 1925, the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service. After this, Mitchell rode both horses regularly, as the distances traveled one way might be ten miles or more. Mitchell was well suited for the work in Kentucky, for as a child growing up on a farm her father kept two large plow horses, and one saddle horse which she especially loved to ride.

In 1946 Mitchell was encouraged by Mary Breckinridge to accept a special assignment to Panama to establish a nurse-midwifery school under the auspices of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau in Washington, D.C. At first reluctant to leave the Kentucky hills she had learned to love, she recalled many valuable experiences in Panama. The most memorable was being presented a child by his parents in honor of saving their baby's life. Mitchell very gracefully returned the child telling the parents that God had given her the great privilege of saving his life and she was returning him for their loving care. After two years in Panama, Mitchell flew directly to New York for her next educational adventure.

At Columbia University in New York in 1946 Mitchell earned a BS degree. While still in the program she was actively recruited to come south to establish a demonstration nurse midwife program for the State of Georgia. After several years in this leadership position, she requested an educational leave to complete a Master of Public Health degree at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She graduated on June 11, 1949.

After returning to her position in Georgia, her most famous assignment was as nurse consultant for the film "All My Babies" completed in 1952. The Georgia Department of Public Health, with funds from the United States Children's Bureau, sponsored the making of this film intended to improve the skills of the many granny midwives still delivering the majority of babies in the rural sections of Georgia. George Stoney, the filmmaker, credited Mitchell's contributions in building community relationships, and her special bond with Miss Mary, the black granny midwife featured in the film, for much of the success of the project. Mitchell attributed the success of the film to the fact that she and Miss Mary began each filming day with prayer.