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Highlands Heroine Dr. Lapham
Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: 2020/08 – August
Dr. Mary Lapham broke all kinds of boundaries. She was a tomboy, a sailor, a gunwoman, an equestrian, a doctor, a humanitarian, an inventor, and a precursor to the Women’s Suffrage Movement.
One of her favorite places to rest, nest, and wrestle problems was Highlands, for it was here she found a station of inspiration for all her boundary-crossings.
Born in Northville, Michigan, in 1860 she grew up with the Women’s Suffrage movement which launched 12 years before her birth. She was a natural-born pace-setter. Professions were gender-free in her estimation. She wanted to be a medical doctor – that was that.
But her father had a different mindset. A prominent banker, he insisted she cashier in his bank.
After her father passed in 1893, she traveled south, at the request of friends, one of whom was recovering from tuberculosis. Highlands’ reputation for recuperative mountain air was already circulating. That piqued Lapham’s medical interest, so off they trekked.
By the early 1900s Tuberculosis was rampant worldwide. It was estimated one in seven who had ever lived died from it.
Lapham, now an M.D., was drawn to Europe and Dr. Carlo Forlanini’s work on an experimental TB lung collapse cure. She shadowed him, learned the procedure (freezing part of the lung with an injection of nitrogen, thus shrinking it slowly, creating a kind of vise which forced congestion to be expelled).
She came back to Highlands and opened the Highlands Camp Sanatorium with 60 open air tents and an x-ray machine. Over the next few years an astounding 240 patients near death at admission, recovered. Skeptics took notice. Her techniques caught on. By the 1940s an estimated 80 percent of U.S. TB patients recovered by choosing Dr. Lapham’s treatment.
In 1926 she retired to St. Augustine for the winters and to Highlands for the summers. A decade thereafter she died of heart disease, though that generous heart beat loudly for the health of humankind and the equality of women.
by Donna Rhodes
