On a sweltering day in August 1873, Eliza R. Snow stood in the Ogden, Utah, tabernacle and addressed her sisters in the Relief Society of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She recounted that church president Brigham Young had told her that he wanted a “good many” sisters to get a “classical education” and then to go on for further training in medicine. As described in the Woman's Exponent, the Salt Lake City–based newspaper that published on topics of interest to Latter-day Saint women, it is not clear which sentiments were Young's and which were actually Snow's. The article explained that younger women should train in medicine and older ones in nursing and obstetrics. In her concluding remarks, Snow summarized what had become a rallying cry of the 1870s. Women's “first business” was to their home duties but, Snow continued, “by seeking to perform every duty you will find that your capacity will increase, and you will be astonished at what you can accomplish.” Seeking to motivate her listeners Snow observed, “Don't you see that our sphere is increasing? Our sphere of action will continually widen, and no woman in Zion need to mourn because her sphere is too narrow.”1Eliza Snow was not the only Relief Society leader who recalled Young's call to action. That same August, Bathsheba Smith also remarked that Young encouraged women to receive training in medicine. The “President had suggested to her,” the Woman's Exponent explained, “that three women from each Ward in the city be chosen to form a class for studying physiology and obstetrics. Also, that one woman from each settlement be sent to the city to study the same branches, and that the Bishops see that such women be supported.”2 Both Snow and Smith were forceful voices in the Latter-day Saint community. Each had known the prophet Joseph Smith (Snow being secretly sealed as his plural wife) and made the arduous trek across the plains to Salt Lake City. Bathsheba was also one of the seven wives of George A. Smith, who was Young's first counselor in the First Presidency of the church. Within the decade, Latter-day Saint women established Deseret Hospital.Catholic residents of the territory of Utah were also calling on women to expand their traditional roles as healers. About the same time that Eliza Snow delivered her address, a mining foreman became concerned about the mortality rate among his workers.3 The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the improvement of smelters and mills, and the arrival of non-Mormon workers had transformed Utah mining into a vast (and dangerous) commercial enterprise. Marcus Daly contacted Lawrence Scanlan, a fellow Irishman and newly arrived Catholic priest from San Francisco. While ministering in the raucous mining camp of Pioche, Nevada, Father Scanlan had raised funds to construct a small hospital for the injured and sick. Daly and Scanlan believed that something similar could be built for Utah miners. The hospital established by the Episcopal bishop, the six-bed St. Mark's (1872), was no longer adequate for the growing population. In October 1875, two Sisters of the Holy Cross who had recently arrived in Salt Lake City responded to Scanlan's appeal for women to nurse the sick by opening a hospital.Holy Cross Hospital expanded throughout the late nineteenth century and flourished for more than a hundred years. It closed in 1994 when the sisters sold it to a private hospital organization. On the other hand, the hospital established by Latter-day Saint women floundered. Deseret Hospital closed after little over a decade of operation. This article contends that while Deseret Hospital has been presented as an example of Latter-day Saint women's achievement in nondomestic occupations, in reality the care facility only had limited success. Indeed, part of the reason why Latter-day Saint women failed at establishing their hospital was due to the success of Catholic women in establishing theirs.In general, historians shy away from studying failures. However, by studying a short-lived project like Deseret Hospital, we can see the underlying structures that have limited women's achievements. This examination of why it failed (rather than simply celebrating the hospital's establishment) reveals what actually hampered women from widening their sphere of influence in a modernizing America.4 During the 1870s, both Latter-day Saint and Catholic women attempted to respond to the needs of the sick, but only Catholic women were able to effectively negotiate the transformation from home-based to hospital-based medical care. The Sisters of the Holy Cross were successful because they had perfected a system that was well adapted to modern medical care, unlike the women who founded Deseret Hospital. This essay presents a critical history of Deseret Hospital and concludes by briefly comparing Catholic women's efforts to those of the Latter-day Saints.Eliza Snow's 1873 call for women to study medicine paralleled instructions from Brigham Young to the Saints to maintain their frontier independence. As the railroads brought Mormons closer into contact with the nation's goods and services, Young stressed the importance of the autonomous, productive capabilities of the community. Asking women to train in various forms of medicine was only one of the many employments Young hoped Latter-day Saint women might take up.5 During an April 1873 conference talk, President Young asked women not only to be school teachers but also to make their own schoolbooks, starting by collecting the rags to make paper for the texts. Then “the ladies of the Relief Society,” were to compose the content, learn how to set the type, and finally bind and distribute the books. Elsewhere in his address, women were told to master telegraph communication, raise worms to produce silk, make lace, and clerk in the community's stores. While it was “unbecoming” for the sisters to do the hard labor of farm work almost every other “light work” was suitable for women.6Young, however, had mixed feelings about doctoring—no less about women doctors. Midwives and natural healers may have had a place in Zion, but the profession of physician was more suspect. In 1869, Young observed that, “doctors and their medicines I regard as a deadly bane to any community.”7 With their unscientific and harsh attempts at healing, Young correctly concluded that physicians frequently caused more harm than good. The Latter-day Saints, like members of other antebellum utopian communities, stressed that the faithful would be healed by God, and Mormons preferred natural remedies and Thomsonian medicine.8 A month before the Woman's Exponent published Eliza Snow's call for female physicians, it opined that, “The best cure for yellow fever is a castor oil and brandy toddy.”9 Far from the centers of technology and science on the East Coast or in Europe, the Latter-day Saints felt the most comfortable with informal, folk remedies, administered typically by women at home. Such healing paralleled their belief in the unity of the spiritual and the physical orders.By the 1870s, however, the Saints were also consulting with doctors. Young predicted with sarcasm that, “in a little time . . . not a woman in all Israel will dare to have a baby unless she can have a doctor by her.” His community was clamoring for more than blessings and herbs. “Now the cry is, ‘Send for a doctor,’” Young preached in 1872. “If you have a pain in the head, ‘Send for a doctor’ . . . my back aches, and I want a doctor.”10 The Latter-day Saints, like other Americans, were responding positively to the new class of physicians who promoted their scientific knowledge, technical acumen, and healing capabilities. Young had already encouraged a few young men to go east to study medicine, and it would not be surprising that his wife Eliza Snow thought that the same should be done for women.11 Although midwives continued to deliver babies at home well into the twentieth century, men increasingly adopted European methods of medicine that offered a germ theory of disease and congregated the sick in hospitals.12 Frontier healing was giving way to what would become “modern” medicine.Consequently, it would not be until after Young's death in 1877 that women would be blessed to practice medicine and surgery among the Saints. In the summer of 1878, a brief mention in the Church Historian's office journal explained that one morning, John Taylor set apart Romania Bunnell Pratt and Margaret Curtis Shipp while George Q. Cannon set apart Ellis Reynolds Shipp and Martha Hughes Paul.13 Three of the women—the two Shipps and Pratt—had graduated from the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania. Martha Hughes received her Doctoris in Arte Medica from the University of Michigan.14 While many more midwives were probably set apart at other times, these are the only four female doctors who were so ritually acknowledged by Latter-day Saint leaders.The gesture reflected an emerging Latter-day Saint attitude toward health: healing engaged not simply the natural and the spiritual but also the scientific and the religious. The women had graduated from medical schools where they experienced a “modern” healing culture of science, technology, credentials, and hospitals. Their training expected them to master an abstract body of knowledge and function within a male-dominated, hospital-based medical system. At the same time, because their healing profession dealt with the great mysteries of life and death, medicine also entailed the spiritual well-being of the community. These women had chosen a God-given religious vocation, and church leaders acknowledged their religious responsibility by the laying of hands and the saying of a prayer. Ritually “set apart” from other physicians, the women committed themselves to the care of the Saints as a religious duty.It is important not to exaggerate the extent to which Latter-day Saint women entered the male-dominated profession of medicine. An early history of Utah medicine mentioned that twenty women were supported by the Relief Society, trained on the East Coast, and became physicians in the territory—although no evidence is cited for this claim.15 As we will see, not even Pratt, the Shipps, and Hughes consistently practiced so-called regular medicine throughout their lives. I have located twenty-four women who called themselves doctors and practiced in Utah during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but none of them were ritually acknowledged by Latter-day Saint church leaders.16 Their backgrounds are incredibly varied, due to the religious pluralism of 1870s Utah and the diverse nature of medical training of the time. Not all were Latter-day Saints or lived in Salt Lake City. Indeed, the most financially successful of all the female physicians was Margaret Freece who was born in Scipio, Utah, and practiced in Salina. Her father was an excommunicated Mormon, and she was educated in Utah's Presbyterian academies before studying medicine in Chicago.17These female doctors exemplified the growing number of women in medicine throughout the United States prior to the professionalization of the field in the 1920s, when women were squeezed out of that career. Until medicine became regulated by male professionals, women could easily apprentice or study briefly and call themselves physicians. Especially in the sparsely settled frontier, women from a variety of religious backgrounds—not simply Latter-day Saint women— had more opportunities and faced less opposition in pursuing medicine than in other parts of the country.Likewise, it is incorrect to conclude that the four set-apart female physicians had their “expenses met by the Relief Society of the church.”18 Martha Hughes paid for her medical school tuition with her salary saved from setting type for the Woman's Exponent.19 According to one biographer, it was her stepfather who built her a trunk to take her clothes and books to the University of Michigan, and he promised to send her ten dollars every month, even if it was just a loan.20 Reportedly, Relief Society President Eliza R. Snow knit Hughes a purse and “tucked” a twenty-dollar gold piece in it, but no evidence exists that she consistently sent Hughes other funds.21 While at the university, Hughes worked as a student maid in a dormitory, washing dishes and making beds. During her second year she provided secretarial services for a fellow female medical student.22Once Hughes arrived in Salt Lake City, she needed to pay off her accumulated debt. Dr. Romania Pratt scheduled a lecture on the physiology and anatomy of the human system and promised to donate its proceeds to help the young doctor. The Woman's Exponent reported that the “object was a laudable one, and the lecture in every respect as far as the subject, the manner and the facilities for illustration were concerned, was a perfect success.” However, “financially it was not so much so—the fault was perhaps in its not having been sufficiently advertised.” The Exponent chided its female readers, “to avail themselves of the opportunities so often afforded for instruction in these subjects and become better acquainted with the human structure, its needs, and powers.” Pratt also organized a “party of young people” to hold a concert on her behalf in the Social Hall.23 Such local fundraising efforts were not highly successful. Hughes returned to Michigan for a year, practicing medicine in a small town before coming back to Utah.24 For her part, Dr. Ellis Reynolds Shipp made ends meet by delivering babies and setting up her own private school to train midwives and nurses, charging the women tuition. At a later date, the Relief Society funded the training of nurses and even local health care, but it never took on the responsibility of financing the training of female physicians.25 Far from being sponsored by the church, the Shipps, Pratt, and Hughes struggled to find the funds for their tuition, books, lodging, and travel back and forth to Utah.Earlier in the century, Latter-day Saints did not face such struggles. During most of the nineteenth century, doctors, midwives, and nurses typically apprenticed with other caregivers. However, a mark of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the rise of specialized schools for medical training. Hospitals, rather than homes, became the center of education for skilled caregivers and students. A major aspect of the professionalization of medicine was the assumption that effective healing demanded competent doctors and nurses who understood science. Doctors in particular stressed that the complicated nature of medicine and surgery required students to work in well-designed and well-equipped spaces. Students needed to learn how to operate machines and equipment that only hospitals could provide.All of this training cost money, which fell to students to provide. Women found securing funding especially difficult, as in a cash-based economy their labor was rarely compensated with a salary. Even if women had family and community moral support for their medical training, it was difficult for them to access tuition money and to fund themselves away from home.All four of the set-apart female physicians trained in medical colleges that staffed hospitals. Consequently, it is not surprising that in 1879, two years after she returned from her medical training, Pratt published an article in the Woman's Exponent calling for the establishment of a hospital. The institution she imagined looked not unlike the one she studied in: it would be devoted to treating women and children, training nurses, and be organized and carried out “under the auspices of the Latter-day Saint ladies of Utah.” Her article also made it clear that she believed practicing medicine was not for those with “a smattering knowledge picked up promiscuously” or that faith made medical expertise irrelevant. Pratt understood scientific, professional training to be another one of God's gifts to humanity.26 Salt Lake City already had two hospitals but neither of those had been founded or run by Mormons.It would take three years before Pratt's ideas materialized. In 1882, Deseret Hospital began housing patients in a small, rented adobe building. Over its life of eleven years, the hospital moved once in 1884 to slightly larger quarters.27 The one surviving patient register begins in September 1886 and ends on June 17, 1893.28 Although a recent documentary history of Latter-day Saint women cites a Deseret News article that claimed by 1886 the staff treated 334 patients, this surely is incorrect, for the register only lists twenty-nine entries for that year.29 An early promotional article, written by hospital board officers Eliza Snow and Emmeline Wells, described the monthly attendance as between twelve and twenty with the total capacity of between thirty and thirty-five.30 The medical register indicates that a number of patients stayed over thirty days, pointing to the possibility that poor patients whose families could not support long-term treatment lived at Deseret Hospital. Families who could afford private doctors often continued to care for their relatives at home, yet increasingly a hospital was understood to be a public place where men of science practiced their art.While Romania Pratt initially conceived of the hospital as specializing in the care of women and children, the surviving patient register indicates that Deseret Hospital served men and women; native and non-native born; those in and outside of the LDS church. Shortly after it opened in July, 1882, Deseret Hospital contained an operating room, separate wards for men and women, one private room, and a room where the resident physician lived.31 Patients’ medical complaints were wide ranging and included typhoid, lead poisoning, pregnancy, and accidents. Promoters for the hospital explained that Latter-day Saints would feel more comfortable in an environment where elders could bless and anoint the sick, safe from the questioning eyes of those not of their religion.32As with the training of the Shipps, Hughes, and Pratt, Deseret Hospital was not financed directly by Relief Society dues, Latter-day Saint ward contributions, or centralized church tithing. While Relief Society leaders sat on its Board of Directors, Latter-day Saints financed Deseret Hospital in multiple ways: by patient fees, fundraising activities, mining company donations, and membership in the Deseret Hospital Association. In July 1882, on the day of the hospital's dedication, church leaders greatly praised the women's endeavor—but a newspaper mentioned that it was Salt Lake City mayor William Jennings who handed over a check for $500 to treasurer Matilda M. Barratt.33 In 1883, the Deseret Hospital Association thanked a gentleman for his donation of ten tons of coal and acknowledged the money raised by the Unity Club as well as by the women and girls of the Fourteenth Ward.34 The Woman's Exponent noted how concerts and lectures were held to raise money for Deseret Hospital. Occasionally, tithing money was contributed.35Yet while the Latter-day Saint community found the hospital admirable, the women struggled to fund it. A year after Deseret Hospital opened, Eliza Snow, president of the association, had to remind her fellow Saints that the hospital was a benevolent one—not a charitable one—and that patients had to pay.36 Once the initial enthusiasm about the new hospital dwindled, the Woman's Exponent contained notice after notice asking readers to pay the yearly dollar membership fee to the association.37 The association then broadened its appeal to men, since individual women and ward Relief Societies were not sending in their dues, and advertisements noted that President Taylor was a Deseret Hospital Association member.38 In 1884, after the hospital moved into a larger building, the Deseret News reported that while the institution could “hold its own through the donations of the Relief Society and Young Ladies’ Associations in several counties,” the staff was “rather hard pressed just now for funds to carry out improvements urgently needed in the building.” The Deseret Hospital Board told the reporter that “the Hospital cannot support itself.”39 In 1889, the Woman's Exponent noted that “there are about 900 names on the book of memberships though but very few have paid regularly since the first year.”40 Without cash coming into the hospital, the board became creative in its solicitations. A year before the hospital closed, the Woman's Exponent acknowledged one woman's donation of a bedroom set complete with linen and towels.41 In-kind contributions made sense in a community where agrarian barter had once been common place. A hospital, however, could not survive in an urban setting without consistent funding. As with paying for medical training, Relief Society women had good intentions. But they could not rely on a steady income—especially from church sources—to fund the hospital.That the institutional church did not fund Deseret Hospital is not surprising. Throughout the nineteenth-century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a decentralized organization supported by member labor and goods. Unlike urban Protestant and Catholic congregations that assumed operation within a cash economy, Zion had been built by human industry. The women's Relief Society was a voluntary organization and, while its leaders certainly asserted more independence than they would in the next century, it relied solely on women's membership dues and charitable donations to fund activities. In addition, during the 1880s the federal government continually threatened the church, leaving Latter-day Saint leaders with little financial stability.The difficulty in securing patient fees and donations was compounded by a problematic leadership structure. A variety of individuals ran Deseret Hospital at various times. In 1882, the Executive Board's initial three officers were President Eliza R. Snow, Vice President Zina D. H. Young, and Secretary Emmeline Wells. These women were Relief Society leaders, suffrage activists, members of women's clubs, and advisors to civic organizations that ranged from public libraries to the kindergarten association. Once a week, a member of the board of directors joined with other Relief Society women and toured the hospital to make sure that everything was in proper order.42 The hospital's first medical superintendent, Dr. Seymour B. Young, was a nephew of Brigham Young and a church leader. Young seems to have had little hands-on responsibility at the hospital, as its resident physician at that time was Dr. Ellen Ferguson.The idea of a female-run Latter-day Saint hospital may have been the brainchild of Romania Pratt, but when Deseret Hospital opened, Ellen Ferguson served as its first resident physician. As resident physician, Ferguson lived in or nearby the hospital and provided day-to-day medical care.43 Born in 1844 in Cambridge, England, and privately educated, Ferguson possessed the eclectic background of many healing women and may not have held a medical degree. She and her husband—also a doctor—arrived in Utah in 1876 and were baptized that year in St. George. Upon moving to Salt Lake City, she established a music conservatory. When Ferguson's husband died four years later in 1880, she decided to devote herself exclusively to the practice of medicine. Traveling east, she studied at clinics in New York—although she may have spent more time delivering lectures on suffrage than watching dissections.44 Ferguson's linking of medicine, the humanities, and suffrage paralleled that of Dr. Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919) who also was British, a physician, an ordained Methodist minister, and president of the National American Women's Suffrage Association.Shortly after the founding of Deseret Hospital, a dispute arose between the female board of directors, headed by Eliza R. Snow, and it resident physician, Dr. Ellen Ferguson.45 Medical Superintendent Seymour Young seems not to have been involved. In February 1884, the problem was brought before the High Council of the Salt Lake Stake. A year later, the Deseret News published a summary of the conflict, along with remarks by church President John Taylor. Those remarks eventually were included in the Journal of Discourses.46The report of the dispute provides an unusually candid glimpse of the difficulties of running a hospital. According to Taylor, the executive board of Deseret Hospital had accused Ferguson of being “austere and dictatorial.” They believed she was “incompetent . . . an opium eater, a drunkard and a thief.” The board not only fired the doctor, the women had gossiped about her to the point that Ferguson felt her reputation had been injured. Ferguson, in response, accused the Board of “insubordination and plotting against her.” President Taylor surmised that the Board resented the authority of the doctor. According to Taylor, when the board interfered with her work, Ferguson quipped: “I do not know that this is any of your business. I think that it is mine.”47 Taylor did not simply summarize the dispute. He used the occasion to instruct the Saints about navigating authority within institutions. His musings raise the possibility that the conflict between the Deseret Hospital Board and Dr. Ferguson had much to do with who would control healing: those supposedly scientifically trained on the East Coast with new-fangled ideas about using opium for pain management or the leading sisters of Zion—in particular, the highly influential Eliza Snow.Another explanation for the imbroglio (although a less plausible one) was that only the hospital's pharmacist was upset with Ferguson. Snow had simply accepted the complaint and fired the doctor, but never investigated the charges. The text reads: The question had been asked, did Sister Snow prompt the sisters to write those charges. The reply was elicited that Sister Van Schoonhoven made a draft of the complaints and that Sister McLean copied it. Sister Snow took it for granted that the charges were true, not thinking, probably, the damaging effect they would have upon the character of Sister Ferguson.48Whatever the true situation, the female leadership of Deseret Hospital was unsettled, and the male church leadership had to intervene to end the tensions.The published remarks by President Taylor also included Salt Lake Stake President Angus M. Cannon's investigation of the charges against Ferguson. Cannon concluded that in every case leveled against the resident physician, there was no evidence to support the allegations of the Deseret Hospital Board. Cannon speculated that Ferguson may have appeared arbitrary and commanding because she desired to have respect and obedience from those under her. Others may have been jealous, watched for faults, and then magnified them.In spite of his investigation, Cannon did not overturn the Deseret Hospital Board's decision to expel Ferguson. Cannon did not seek to reinstate Ferguson, but rather he asked the board to “take hold of Sister Ferguson by the hand and help her to sustain her reputation and practice before this people.”49 To the doctor he asked that she live humbly, take what happened as good, and listen to counsel. At the end of the text, Angus Cannon directed the women to promote unity and fellowship.The Deseret Hospital controversy provides a glimpse of the tensions that occurred within a community of women as they tried to negotiate how medicine would be practiced in a modernizing Utah. Taylor and Cannon, in spite of their clear understanding of the innocence of Ferguson, sided with the established and powerful Relief Society women rather than the hired medical professional. The male church leaders probably understood Ferguson's perspective. As businessmen, they were well aware of standards of professionalism and certainly accepted hierarchical authority. Still, Taylor and Cannon respected long-established circles of female authority. Ellen Ferguson was a strong woman, but she also was a widow, a recent convert, and not from a well-positioned family. Her medical acumen may have given her scientific ability, but her place within the society of the Saints was weak. Male church leaders did not try to rework the existing female power structure, even though they chided unnamed individuals for acting rashly. The pioneer elite women, who birthed and blessed, continued to assert power in the one Latter-day Saint hospital. Just as women controlled the care of the sick in their homes, so would they in hospitals. In the 1880s female professional accomplishments did not take precedence over an entrenched female culture. The independent Ferguson probably was not what Eliza Snow had in mind when she imagined women studying medicine.Perhaps the men's lukewarm condemnation of Ferguson motivated Snow to resign as the president of the Deseret Hospital Association. In April 1884, Hyrum B. Clawson, a businessman and bishop of the ward where the hospital was located, became the new president of the Deseret Hospital Association.50 A Deseret News article published that same year, still has Dr. Young as Medical Superintendent.51 The ideal of female-directed medicine, which led to the establishment of Deseret Hospital, was much easier imagined than enacted.In spite of the lengthy description of the Deseret Hospital dispute in the Journal of Discourses and Dr. Ellen Ferguson's continual involvement in women's issues, the struggles between Ferguson and the Deseret Hospital Board are absent from Utah women's history. The one master's thesis on Deseret Hospital confines Ferguson to a footnote, briefly mentioning she “resigned and later left the territory.”52 Significantly, Ferguson did not voluntarily resign her position, and she did not immediately leave Utah. Both Zina Young and Emmeline Wells continued their friends