Bethenia Angelina Owens-Adair

Bethenia A. Owens-Adair
Born Bethenia Angelina Owens
(1840-02-08)February 8, 1840
Van Buren County, Missouri
Died September 11, 1926(1926-09-11) (aged 86)
Clatsop County, Oregon
Nationality American
Alma mater University of Michigan
Occupation physician
Spouse(s) LeGrand Henderson Hill
John Adair

Bethenia Angelina Owens-Adair (February 8, 1840 – September 11, 1926) was an American social reformer and one of the first female physicians in Oregon.[1][2]

Biography

Bethenia Owens was born on February 8, 1840, in Van Buren County, Missouri.[1] She was the third of eleven children born to Tom and Sarah Damron Owens.[1] The family traveled to the Oregon Country via the Oregon Trail in 1843 with the Jesse Applegate wagon train.[1][3] The family settled in the Clatsop Plains and later moved to Roseburg in the Umpqua Valley.[1][4]

At the age of 14, Owens married LeGrand Henderson Hill, one of her father's farmhands.[4][5] Their son George was born when Owens was 16.[1] She and Hill moved to Yreka, California so Hill could join the California Gold Rush.[5] She left Hill, and graduated from the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1874 (writing her thesis on Metritis)[6] and the University of Michigan.[1]

She practiced medicine in Roseburg, Portland, and Clatsop County, Oregon, and in Yakima, Washington.[1]

She married Col. John Adair, in 1884. They divorced in 1907.[1]

She worked in the temperance movement, and promoted the eugenics movement. She died on September 11, 1926, in Clatsop County.[1]

Further reading

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Ward, Jean M. "Bethenia Owens-Adair (1840-1926)". The Oregon Encyclopedia. Retrieved March 17, 2012.
  2. ↑ "Bethenia Angelina Owens-Adair". Find a grave memorial. Retrieved 14 August 2012.
  3. ↑ Flora, Stephenie. "Emigrants to Oregon in 1843". oregonpioneers.com.
  4. 1 2 "Bethenia Owens-Adair (1840-1926)". Oregon Historical Society. Retrieved March 17, 2012.
  5. 1 2 Guardino, M. Constance, III; Rev. Marilyn A. Riedel (August 2010). "Sovereigns of Themselves: A Liberating History of Oregon and Its Coast, Volume I". Archived from the original on February 5, 2012. Retrieved March 17, 2012.
  6. ↑ Abrahams, Harold J. (1966). Extinct medical schools of nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. p. 317.
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