March is Women's History Month: Phebe Doughty, MD.

Phebe Van Vlack Doughty (1873-1967), born and raised in Matteawan (now Beacon), became the first female physician in southern Dutchess County when she earned her medical degree from the University of Michigan in 1904. Though medicine ran through the Doughty family's blood, being a doctor was not Miss Doughty's first choice of a career.. Major John Henry Doughty, Phebe's father, had been a surgeon during the Civil War. After the war young Dr. Doughty and his new bride Elizabeth, chose the village of Matteawan to begin his practice and raise a family. With Beacon opening its first hospital (Highland Hospital) at about that time, Dr. Doughty was the chief surgeon there, also carried out autopsies as well as doing duty as a general practitioner, treating every kind of malady. As a young girl, Phebe experienced  some of the medical emergencies brought to their family home on Schenck Avenue: "I remember one man was bitten by a mad dog. Father sucked the wound. We were all frightened, but he took care of himself and was all right. The man recovered, too."

As she grew older, Phebe had plans of becoming a teacher, and first attended Vassar College, graduating in 1895. Meanwhile, her older brother Thomas, had gone to Michigan to get his medical degree, and began to practice with his father in 1896. After Vassar, Phebe went to a Normal School to get her teaching credentials when, in 1898, Thomas died suddenly at the age of 33. Phebe decided at that time to replace Thomas in the family practice, and after the University of Michigan, she joined her father's practice in November of 1904. We can only imagine her dismay when her father died unexpectedly that next January. "A woman physician was a brand new thing then," she recalled in an interview in 1957. "I took over father's practice as much as I could. I began making calls with Debbie, a little brown horse, and a runabout. I had sunny disposition, a pretty good practice, and a pretty good time. In the flu epidemic of 1918, I had more than 100 patients and lost only two--a baby and one old person."

Dr. Doughty had her practice in Beacon until 1926, when she retired after a bad automobile accident. In 1955, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of her class's reunion, she wrote to the alumni of Vassar College: "I haven't achieved greatness through husband, children, travel nor career, but I am living a peaceful, contented life with a friendly school-ma'am [her housemate, Miss Mason, a retired Beacon school teacher]. My medical career stopped after an automobile accident in 1926, and after that I helped my mother as a housekeeper, nurse, and doctor to live to be 99 years old. Since then, although I grow older, not old, I find that 'life is so full of a number of things' that it isn't difficult to keep happy and interested in living."

Phebe Doughty died in 1967, at the age of 93.