Doctor Nellie
The Autobiography of Dr. Helen MacKnight Doyle

By Helen Doyle
Foreword by Mary Austin

• New Edition Available in Spring, 2008!
• Published by Genny Smith Books
• 250 pp.
• $23.50 paperback, ISBN 0-931095-09-3

A True Story of Pioneer Life in the Old West

Obsessed by tales of gold and silver in the far west, Smith MacKnight abruptly decided to sell his home, send his wife and five-year-old daughter Nellie to live on the family farm in up-state New York, and head for the mines at Bodie in eastern California. That was on Christmas day, 1879--the beginnings of Nellie's story.

Fifty-five years later, Helen MacKnight Doyle, M.D., wrote this autobiography. She was then a respected member of the medical profession, the wife of Dr. Guy Doyle, and the mother of two children. Doctor Nellie, as this new edition is titled, is a story of tragedy and adventure. It tells how Helen Doyle became one of California's first woman physicians, and the beloved Doctor Nellie of the Owens Valley.

An absorbing story of a gallant woman, Doctor Nellie also vividly recreates a portion of early America from the 1870s to the 1920s. It illustrates one family's past in the vast drama of our country's early years, the migration westward. It also brings to life the real people of rural New York, of a New England factory, and of the old west--pioneers, native Americans, drifters, winners, and losers. Here are real stories of the mining booms, the homesteads, San Francisco's gay nineties-- stories of defeat and hardship, stories of joy, stories of love.

About the Author

Dr. Nellie was born to Smith and Olive Peck MacKnight in Petrolia,  Pennsylvania, December 15, 1873. This autobiography follows Nellie from happy days on the farm with Grandmother MacKnight to wretched days in a corset factory, to a Dakota homestead, to Bishop in eastern California to join her father, and then to medical school in San Francisco. Only a young woman of exceptional courage could have endured the insults and professional barriers she encountered while she studies to become a doctor. But endure she did--with grace and humor--and returned to Bishop, barely twenty-one years old, to hang out her shingle. There, among the ranchers and miners of Owens Valley, she practiced medicine for the next twenty-two years. In 1898 she married Dr. Guy Doyle; they had two children, Dorothy and Morris. In 1917 they moved to New York, where Dr. Doyle served in the Army Medical Corps. There Dr. Nellie studied anesthesiology, a specialty she practiced for ten years in Berkeley, after they moved there in 1921. She died in San Francisco in 1957.

An interesting sidelight to this story is Dr. Nellie's friendship, dating from Bishop days, with the noted author Mary Austin. Although Austin's strident personality antagonized most of her Owens Valley neighbors, Dr. Nellie felt compassion for this talented, unconventional woman, who was so plagued with personal problems and driven to write. To Mary Austin, she  turned for the foreword to this book. Dr. Nellie later wrote her biography Mary Austin, Woman of Genius, published by Gotham House in 1939.

Contents

• About this Edition
• Foreword
• Separations
• Aunt Sade and Aunt Mary
• Young Days in the Old West
• A Student in Old San Francisco
• A Doctor in the Land of Little Rain
• Not to be Embittered

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