“The Board is Blue”: Kentucky Registers a Woman Pharmacist

Abstract

“The Board is Blue”: Kentucky Registers a Woman Pharmacist Lynn E. Niedermeier (bio) On November 8, 1883, a native of Clay County, Kentucky, applied to the state’s Board of Pharmacy to be licensed as a druggist. The twenty-one-year-old exhibited a diploma from the University of Michigan’s School of Pharmacy and paid the ten-dollar fee, but the board’s Executive Committee unanimously denied the application. The individual, it held, was not a graduate in pharmacy, a rank that would ordinarily guarantee its holder registration as a lawful compounder and dispenser of prescriptions.1 The applicant sued, challenging the board’s methods of regulating pharmacy practice, and in particular its position on what constituted a qualifying pharmaceutical education. Only a decade old, the board had struggled with such questions since its creation, but its assertion of dominion over pharmacy practice was about to encounter a novel complication: the applicant whose credentials it rejected was a woman. The ensuing dispute constituted a unique chapter in the progress of pharmacy in Kentucky. It brought into focus the barriers faced by [End Page 145] women seeking to enter this newly professionalized field and dramatized a wider debate over the sources of pharmaceutical expertise. It invigorated an educational initiative sponsored by some of the state’s leading citizens and drew a response from the state’s highest court. In its aftermath, Kentucky clarified its standards for determining professional competency, but for women, no matter how well educated or resourceful, registration remained a distant goal. The applicant, Elizabeth “Bessie” Woods White, promised to be a formidable plaintiff, for she was not groomed to be a mute casualty of the law. Born on August 5, 1862, she belonged to one of eastern Kentucky’s most powerful and enterprising families. Her grandfather, Hugh Lowry White, was a judge for newly created Clay County, and her uncle, John White, was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1841, Bessie’s father, Daugherty White, defeated Theophilus T. Garrard, grandson of Kentucky’s second governor, for a term in the state House of Representatives. On his return to Clay County, Daugherty rejoined the business with which the Whites and Garrards had been identified since the days of Grandfather Hugh, namely the manufacture of salt from the briny spring waters along Goose Creek near Manchester. By 1860, Daugherty and a network of relatives also controlled some 20,000 acres of farmland in Clay and nearby counties, and more than one hundred enslaved persons. Bessie and her five older siblings were all born at Highland Cottage, the family home near the salt works.2 Clay County’s salt industry suffered irreversible decline during the Civil War, but the Whites remained economically and politically powerful. They also maintained their bitter and complex rivalry with the county’s other first family, the Garrards. Beginning around the [End Page 146] Click for larger view View full resolution Bessie Woods White received her pharmaceutical chemist degree from the University of Michigan’s School of Pharmacy in 1883. Image courtesy of University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library. [End Page 147] time of Daugherty’s election victory, the White-Garrard feud grew to encompass political warfare, bare-knuckled competition in the salt industry, and the taking of opposite sides in disputes, some murderous, between other families.3 Despite his tumultuous public life, Daugherty White evidenced considerable tenderness toward his daughters and showed particular concern for their education. In letters to one who was away at school, he urged her to be diligent in her studies. “I know you are as Smart as any of the Girls and all you need is health and industry to keep up with the foremos [sic] or in fact out Strip any of them.” To twelve-year-old Bessie, attending Hocker College in Lexington, he expressed his wish “to take you in my arms and cress [sic] you as I used to do,” but declared that “you must have an education and for a time Papa must forego the pleasure.”4 Only months later, however, Daugherty drowned himself. After her father’s suicide, two other family members took charge of Bessie. One was her twenty-two-year...