by Adele Woodyard
You can learn a lot when you’re a travel writer, interesting stories about people that don’t get into a guide book that features the places they inhabit. The historic Safford House in Tarpon Springs is a case in point. The house itself, now a museum, is a town attraction mentioned in my book, 100 Florida “freebies” and “cheapies” Vacation fun for $5 or less; the story behind a woman who lived and worked there, is not. March being Womens’ History Month, I’d now like to introduce Dr. Mary Jane Safford, Florida’s first female doctor, as played by Dr. Elizabeth Coachman, during a holiday event.
Dressed in a long black shirtwaist, her dark hair pulled back in a neat bun, “Dr. Safford” stands before a group gathered in her office. An occasional Christmas decoration accents the paneled walls, the few tools of her trade on shelves and a table. Her concern on the effects of a corset on a woman’s body leads her to admit, “Dress reform is one of my major movements at this point. I think it’s so important for women to dress properly,” she says, “and not with 14 pounds of undergarments. Can you imagine? But that’s what it’s been and we are making progress as to what women have been wearing.”
Born in 1834, Safford had volunteered in a military hospital during the Civil War. She was one of 14 female classmates who trained as a homeopathic doctor in the New York Medical College for Women. Following her graduation in 1869, Safford went on to study at the General Hospital of Vienna and at the University of Breslau, Germany. “When I first went over there,” she says,” it was with the ambulance service in Vienna. The Strauses were writing their waltzes, and it was a marvelous place to be at the time.”
Upon her return to the United States, Safford practiced in Chicago and Boston, where she was on the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine. When the northern winters became too much for her health, she gave up teaching and retired to Florida, to live with her brother, Anson P.K. Safford, and his wife, Soledad. Author of several books on women’s health, Safford goes on to say she’d been raising his daughter, Margarita now 8, since her mother died two months after her birth.
“Of course I don’t have as many patients here as I had in Boston,” Safford says, “but I try to get people convinced about proper exercise—we have a much more leisurely life over here.” To her claim that dysentery, typhoid, and some malaria are the major health problems, she adds, “Consumption is a terrible disease. We probably have more of that than any other place.” In fact Anson’s prior wife had died of it when they lived in New York City.
Dress reform was not her only concern. Safford was also active in women’s suffrage, a universal kindergarten, and unfair working conditions. Dr. Mary Jane Safford died of fever in 1891. She was 56.
NOTE: Dr. Elizabeth Coachman, who took the part of Dr. Safford, is a retired pathologist. She served as medical director of the pathology dept. in Tarpon Springs Helen Ellis Memorial Hospital from 1988 to 1998. I’ve based this story on my taped transcript of her heavily researched role, and an article by Jill Ann Perrino in the St. Petersburg Times, Feb. 11, 2006.
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