Dr. Anna was a great woman of art, science, and determination. She was born December 1, 1859,and passed away in 1952; aged gracefully at 92 years old. She had ended up practicing 50 years as a doctor, which was quite a feat for anyone back in the day. She had an incredible love for the fauna and flora around the landscape, even going so far as to found the New London Garden Club in 1928, and was its president for a little while.
As she bloomed from a curious young girl to a bright and intelligent woman in the 1880's and 90's when she would have been 20-30 years of age, she learned how to paint beautifully intricate images of flowers and other flora around her area. Her brother, Ira, then a teenager, would go out with her to help her pick flowers to draw. Of course, her artistic skills weren't limited to flora, she completed a book on birds as well and did many paintings of relatives and herself.
Anna had also taught at Colby Academy (now Colby-Sawyer College) when she was young, presumably around the 1880's. She taught art to young students in the main building (what we know today as Colgate) until it managed to catch fire and burn to the ground. No one was hurt since that day happened to be Mountain Day, a day where everyone takes off from the campus to go hike Mt. Kearsarge, but many of her paintings were lost in that fire. Luckily we still have plenty of her artwork saved at her grandson's house, just down the road from the college.
After the building had burned down, Anna decided that this was God's way of telling her to follow her childhood dreams, which was to be a physician. At the time there were no great woman physician role-models but tow of her uncles had been. So she marched straight to Dartmouth where one of her uncles had learned the trade, but was turned away because she was a woman and Dartmouth was a college for men only. She then explained that she knew it was for men only, but frankly, she still wanted to learn the same things that the men were learning. The dean then instructed her to look for the Woman's Medical College in Philadelphia. It wasn't a terrible decision; she ended up learning the trade from 1892 to 1895. After receiving her MD she went to The Philadelphia Polyclinic and College for Graduates in Medicine where she was immediately accepted and had interned earlier.
One year later on May 1, 1896 Dr. Anna had begun her practice in New London. She was officially the first woman doctor in the New London area, and possibly the first woman doctor of New Hampshire completely. She kept her office in the house she grew up in that her grandson and great-great-grandchildren inhabit. As she began her practice, most of her patients were woman and children, a lot of the children came from births as well so she was handing out a lot of birth certificates. She was skilled in many ways as a physician, including being a surgeon. She had to remove a cleft palette from a baby, and when that baby grew up he became a speech therapist and personally credited Dr. Anna for her skillful ways.
Dr. Anna continued to impress and be an amazing doctor, including helping to set up the first New London hospital in 1919 with two other doctors, Dr. Griffon and Dr. Lamson. She continued to be a great help around the community when it needed her. Even in the winter she would trudge through snow on snow shoes that her brother had made her. She would also travel by sleigh in the winter if possible, and even trudging through all the mud roads since paved roads hadn't come to New London just yet. Stan Spiller, a writer for The Speaker in 1939 remarked that "There are still families in town and in the vicinity who can recall the days when Dr. Anna came trudging over waist-high snow drifts or through knee-deep mud to make her calls." Truly, Dr. Anna was a woman who cared deeply about those around her and all her patients.