(lively music) (tranquil music) (gentle music) - We like to remember Nellie Barsness here at the Pope County Museum as a local rural child who did well, who pursued an education and a career that you don't often associate with country kids.

- In many ways, she just had a life that really was dedicated to helping other people.

And she had a vision of the world that was broader than many people might expect for women of her time.

- She served in the French Army as a doctor because women weren't welcome in the American army to serve as physicians.

- It's the history that we don't know that animates us and excites us.

And it was very interesting.

The more you learned about her, the more compelling her story became.

- So the fact that someone from immigrant parents, a rural school, one-room education can go on to become a leading doctor in St.

Paul and around the world I think is amazing.

We like to tell that story to inspire young people to follow their passions.

(gentle music) (traffic whooshing) We are at the Pope County Historical Society in Glenwood, Minnesota.

Pope County is located about halfway between Minneapolis and Fargo.

(happy music) Nellie Barsness was a product of Pope County.

A number of Pope County places have the name Barsness on them, Barsness Township, Barsness Church.

You know, there are businesses in town that the Barsnesses have had over the years, so lots of that pops up in our history here.

(happy music continues) (water lapping) Nellie's ancestors arrived from Norway.

They came down the St.

Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes.

Their port of entry would've been in Wisconsin, likely Dane County.

They stopped there just briefly and signed up for the Civil War.

So once the Civil War was done, then they decided to move west 'cause Dane County, of course, was crowded with all the other Norwegians who were still arriving.

And when they got here, they were able to name their township.

(pensive music) So Nellie Olea Barsness was born on July 9th, 1873.

She passed away on May 12th, 1966 at the age of 92.

She was a daughter to Nels and Martha Barsness.

She was a sister to eight siblings.

(file drawer whooshing) - Thankfully, Nellie wrote an autobiography and left it for us here in our collection.

"I was third in our family of nine children, first Alfred, then Annie, with me the third.

Christianity was strictly observed.

The children were taught prayers as soon as they could talk, though not plainly.

We were taught self-respect and to respect others and their property."

- She was a student, both at country school, at Glenwood High School where she earned her normal training degree to become a country school teacher.

- She first taught school in South Dakota.

She went to what is now St.

Cloud State University, but was then St.

Cloud Normal School, and got a teaching certificate.

- Nellie taught school in Starbuck, Minnesota at a graded school.

She had two levels, the first and second grade, and a classroom of about 70 students.

She complained bitterly to the principal.

"I got to have help with this.

I can't do 70 students by myself."

And the principal just poo-pooed and said, "Oh, yes, we'll get to you.

We'll find you some help."

And never did.

And I think that might have also influenced Nellie's decision to attend medical school.

Medical school certainly couldn't be any harder than an elementary school of 70 students.

So off she went to medical school.

(lively music) - She was an early woman graduate of the University of Minnesota Medical School.

People claim that she was the first woman from Minnesota, and I think by that they mean born in Minnesota, to earn a medical degree.

- "In the fall of 1898, I entered the Medical School of the University of Minnesota.

I knew that there was a place for women physicians because there were women and girls who neglected their health."

- [Jennifer] She stands out in part because she was confident.

She was very determined, like many women physicians.

- "In June 1902, I received my diploma, Doctor of Medicine.

At that time, some considered being a doctor was a man's job.

If my father was a little embarrassed about my choosing a medical career, he lived to be grateful."

- When she graduated from the University of Minnesota, unlike many women, she was able to secure a hospital internship at Luther Hospital in St.

Paul.

And it was a Norwegian hospital, so it may have been her Norwegian family connections that made this possible.

- [Merlin] She also, for a short time, returned to Pope County and managed the hospital in Starbuck for Dr.

Christiansen.

His clinic in Starbuck was the only surgery center between Minneapolis and Fargo for quite some time.

- She was very interested in technology, and I think it's interesting that she studied X-ray technology, and then she becomes a specialist at a time when there's no clear path to specialty training.

She's an ophthalmologist, and so there are many things about her that are typical for women physicians of her time period but there are other things that really stand out.

- We have lots of different items from Nellie Barsness' medical career in our collection.

This is some of Nellie Barsness' optometry equipment.

The patient would be here with the chin and looking in here, and then she would look in this end and could see into the patient's eyes, probably checking for lens health, glaucoma, diabetes, whatever kinds of things she needed to see within the patient's eyes.

- So I think Dr.

Nellie certainly had obstacles in her way.

She even, in her own words, talked about that her practice was primarily with women.

Although she said that occasionally women would convince their husbands that yes, they needed to go see Dr.

Nellie and do it now.

(Merlin chuckling) ♪ Over there ♪ Over there ♪ Send the word - [Merlin] The biggest change in Dr.

Nellie's life would've been service in World War I.

(cannon booming) That had to be life changing.

- [Ann] "Then the World War I came and many doctors and nurses went into service.

I went to France and served in the French Army, first in hospital and later in clinics in small towns.

Then for a few days before leaving for home, we visited the clinics in Paris where the mutilated soldiers were rehabilitated."

- When war was declared, the nation openly recruited women to serve in the military.

There were women that served in the YMCA and the Red Cross and the Salvation Army.

They went into the Army Nurse Corps, but that was the limit.

- When the US entered the First World War, women did not have the right to vote in the United States.

The constitutional amendment comes in 1920.

There were huge issues around questions of medical hierarchy.

And the military was seen as a male world, and the expectation was that all of the people in command would be men.

Women physicians were just discounted in a sense, or had to do something like become nurses to be able to participate in the war.

She literally joins a women's overseas hospital and becomes technically part of the French Army in order to serve in World War I when the US Army and Navy refuse to allow women to be physicians.

- I love Dr.

Nellie's quote, "After ceaseless efforts to enter the Medical Reserve Corps of the United States Army, who had not opened its portals to women's physicians, I left St.

Paul on the 28th of September 1918 to enter the French Army under the auspices of the Women's Suffrage Association."

And that group sponsored what was called the Women's Overseas Hospital.

Once she gets to France, there's nobody waiting for her.

She is tasked with finding her unit that she's supposed to report to.

You really have to appreciate her sense of determination because she's on her own.

(train creaking) She knows a little bit of high school German.

She doesn't know French.

Luckily there are people who speak English that help guide her along the way.

Eventually she makes it to that gas hospital.

They had three of 'em, and she is put in charge of number three.

(sad music) The intensity of combat we can't imagine today.

And that's a steep learning curve to go from civilian practice to military medicine to triage.

- 9% of the deaths and 31% of the US Army casualties in World War I were from gas warfare.

(explosions booming) The phosgene gas, which was sort of a green cloud of gas, mostly damaged the lungs.

It burned the lungs.

If it didn't just kill people within a couple of days, they suffered for the rest of their lives from the gas damage to their lungs.

It made them vulnerable to respiratory infections.

And the mustard gas had similar effects on the lungs, but it also burned the skin and the eyes, and could cause blistering, and it soaked into the clothing.

So primitive gas masks were developed pretty quickly.

And I say primitive because if you've seen them, they really are primitive looking, but they would provide some protection for the eyes and they hoped for the lungs.

But the mustard gas would soak into the clothing and burn the skin.

And in fact, many people also ended up blind from their eyes being burned.

And so the gas hospitals were important, first just to wash the patients, to rinse off the remaining gas, and to wash all that clothing and bedding and anything they carried with them.

And that exposure just through the clothing and bedding also could affect the doctors themselves.

I mean, people just suffered tremendously.

And I'm sure she got unbelievable experience in the gas hospital.

As Dr.

Barsness noted herself, the carnage of World War I, the so-called modern warfare for a war that lasted four years is just unbelievable.

And it wiped out huge percentages of young men in the populations of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and many of the other smaller European countries.

(bomb exploding) - Conflict is a shake-the-box moment.

(bomb exploding) You have society before, you've shaken it.

Now you've gotta pick up what's left.

And it's here where the Women's Overseas Hospital really shines because they're there and now instead of doing war work, they're now doing relief work.

And they transition that mission really well.

They become instant celebrities overnight in Paris.

Dr.

Nellie writes of Parisians coming up to her at a cafe and just expressing their heartfelt thanks toward them.

- This is Nellie's medal that she was given by the French government for her wartime service.

So she did a lot of work with American soldiers and local French people suffering the ravages of war.

- So in 1919 then when she comes home, she took a little vacation trip out to see her sister in Idaho.

While she was there, her other sister, Thilda, who was living in Canada, lost her husband to an accident.

So the sisters decided to go visit.

Thilda had just had her son Harry.

And while she was there, Thilda's son Harry was baptized.

So Nellie became his godmother, and invited Thilda and Harry to join her in St.

Paul at her St.

Paul home.

Harry grew up in Nellie's house.

And then when his mother died, when Thilda died, Harry was 18 years old and Dr.

Nellie chose to adopt him officially.

- She spent 15 months overseas.

And when she came home in 1919, she got a position as a physician at the State Reformatory for Women in Shakopee, as it was called then.

And this was also a very typical career path for women physicians.

They couldn't necessarily get these hospital internships or what later sort of become hospital residencies.

Often they were limited to women's hospitals, of which Minneapolis had two, Northwestern and the Maternity Hospital, - "Minnesota State Women's Clubs were instrumental to the building of a women's reformatory at Shakopee, Minnesota.

Before that time, they were kept at the same prison as men in Stillwater.

I was a part-time physician, averaging one visit a week.

The inmates had good care and were taught to work on the farm.

All were examined on admittance and prescribed the proper treatment.

I attended one of their dances and enjoyed it.

They live a clean life.

All they miss is their freedom."

(pensive music) - Having a name like Dr.

Nellie implies that you're always serious, and that you're working all the time, and doing all these things in medicine.

But yet there are a couple of artifacts here in the collection that tell us that that was not the whole Nellie.

There are a couple of party dresses, one of them very heavily beaded, very formal kind of looking dress that certainly would not have been worn to the office.

And another very light, springy summertime dress that's quite beautiful.

So yes, I think Nellie had a life outside of medicine as well, and certainly with family.

I think family was important.

There're lots of references to her returning home for vacations or to visit siblings, parties with cousins, the things that they were doing while she was away from the city.

Part of Dr.

Nellie's activities outside of medicine in St.

Paul, she was a charter member of the YWCA.

She was a member of the Independent Order of Good Templars.

The Good Templars started in the 1850s as part of the Temperance movement against alcohol.

And I think she could probably see that even in her own community, that alcohol had a devastating effect on certain families.

So they organized a chapter of the Independent Order of Good Templars in Barsness Township.

They met at the country school.

And when the local pastor found out about it, he was not pleased.

The Templars were a secret society.

You needed the secret password to get into the meeting.

And secret societies were not acceptable to this Lutheran pastor.

So the Barsness family was basically expelled from the church for about 20 some years.

So it wasn't until that pastor left, and maybe a couple more, that the Barsness family rejoined White Bear Lake Lutheran Church and changed the name to Barsness Lutheran Church.

The Independent Order of Good Templars branched into the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which was a little bit more broad and not a secret society, so a little easier to access.

And certainly Nellie would've been supportive of that, just as much as she was the Templars.

- So each of these cabinets contains files on people, everybody who's lived in Pope County.

This entire drawer is Barsness.

And we continue to clip files today.

Oh, here's Nellie's.

She's got a good thick file.

(lively music) (fan whirring) So all of the items here that are related to Nellie Barsness were donated by her adopted son, Harry Simmonds.

(box whooshing) There was a large collection that he gave after her death, and then there was another large collection that came in after his death as part of his estate.

(lively music continues) (lively music continues) We have lots of different items from Nellie Barsness' medical career in our collection.

This is kind of a fun one.

It has little vials of medicine that she would've carried with her on house calls.

And there's a lot of different things, but one that caught my eye is the Pitocin, so she could induce labor if she was doing a house call.

- We are in St.

Paul at Dr.

Nellie Barsness' home that she built back in 1918.

We found out when we were closing on the house, talking to the previous owners, they had collected a lot of history on Nellie and her nephew and had a lot to share, and wanted us to know the significance.

When we were doing a tour with the previous owners, they pointed out that she most likely had an office in the basement.

There's still a name plate, a sink where she probably would wash her hands before seeing the patient.

And so yeah, we kind of feel her presence here a little bit, knowing that that is where she practiced out of and had that connection with the house as well.

With a medical background myself, I'm a pharmacist, it was really cool to hear and find out how she was the first woman to graduate from the U of M Medical School.

(door creaking) - For many that don't know Dr.

Nellie historically, you still know her whenever you go into a public restroom.

She is the inventor of and received a US patent for the toilet seat cover that you see in all the public restrooms across the United States.

Even though she's long gone, her legacy exists today in that regard.

- Her experience in France during World War I, she saw what the total destruction of the health and hygiene and sanitation infrastructure really meant to people's health and their vulnerability to disease.

But she also grew up in an era where public health was very concerned about things like the common drinking cup.

And so at a rural one-room school or two-room school, there would be a bucket of water and a common drinking cup instead of a water fountain.

And as public bathrooms develop, there would be those cloth roller towels, but they weren't necessarily changed that often.

People would be using a section that had been used before.

And public health authorities were very afraid that the common drinking cup, the public hand towels were the ways that germs were being spread.

And so they advocated water fountains, paper drinking cups, disposable paper towels.

And so it's a natural extension you might think to toilet seats and toilet seat covers.

And so I wouldn't be surprised that Barsness was influenced by that era of public health campaigns and public health education.

- In the mid-1950s, she receives the Minnesota Women Doctor of the Year, and that's decided by her male contemporaries.

However, her status is even elevated more two years later when she receives the Minnesota AME Doctor of the Year.

The awards that she won, she didn't win them.

There's a military culture that says, you know, "You don't win an award, they don't grab into the hat and go pull your name off, you earn them."

And I think that that's something that's often lost in the civilian world.

You earn these awards.

- One of the things I came across in a set of notes about the American Medical Women's Association's Minnesota Branch was that they didn't even have a list of all the women physicians in Minnesota from year to year.

And they had to work in the 1950s to put together that list.

And Barsness was one of the people who really did strive to recover the history of women physicians in Minnesota.

But other than through women physicians' own medical publications or occasional biographies in like "Who's Who of American Women" or something, there are many women physicians we don't know anything about.

- It couldn't have been easy.

I think even her father discouraged her from becoming a doctor because that was not women's work.

So I think Dr.

Nellie Barsness is well regarded in the profession, certainly having a long career, over 50 years in the same town, in the same office, doing the work that she was doing, having the respect of her peers, winning awards.

All of these things point to someone who knew what they were doing and was well regarded, both by patients and her peers.

(pensive music) (film whirring) - I think we have a lot of sort of simplified views of history.

And I think understanding that things were not that universal, that homogeneous, that simple is an important part of having perspective on our own lives and our own decisions.

And Dr.

Barsness' career really represents a kind of resistance against what our view is that women dominated the domestic sphere, that they were expected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to get married, have children.

They might teach school for a few years or they might be in a feminine profession, like nursing or teaching, but we don't have a good view of who were the people who had a different perspective, both for their own lives, but also for what they thought should happen in the world and how to make the world a better place.

(inspirational music) (keys clinking) (cupboard banging) - When Harry passed away, he was left with the estate of both Dr.

Nellie and his own.

He left lots of gifts.

He left money to the St.

Paul Humane Society and to the University of Minnesota to a named scholarship for Dr.

Nellie to encourage other female physicians.

And even that percentage left to the university amounted to a million dollars.

It's really a tremendous gift.

(sad music) We are at Nellie Barsness' final resting place, the Lake Ben Cemetery.

This is a private family cemetery for the Barsness family.

And Nellie's monument is one of the most prominent here at the cemetery.

(pensive music) It's interesting that the three Barsness brothers, Ole, Erick and Nels walked here from St.

Cloud in the early 1860s and camped on this site exactly.

And when they woke up in the morning, they decided that, you know, this should be our final resting place as well.

And Harry Simmonds took it upon himself to revive it.

So he cleaned it up.

He commissioned a big wrought iron gate patterned after the Simmonds family of London where his father was from.

He commissioned a large monument for Dr.

Nellie.

She also had probably a long genealogy of cats at her house.

Two of them are buried at the Lake Ben Cemetery with her.

He even went so far as to have a working water fountain.

And you have to know that this location is remote.

There's no electricity here, there's no other services.

So he had, you know, a private pump down at the lake, at Lake Ben pumping water up to a fountain within the cemetery.

It's a very park-like setting, a marvelous little place and out of the way, very rarely visited unless you know it's there.

(pensive music continues) I think one of the big legacies that Nellie leaves to our local community is her passion for education, her perseverance.

I'm impressed that she didn't give up, that she didn't back down.

- If Nellie was here today, this is what I would tell her: you are an incredible individual.

Your life service to the community, to the nation.

I don't know how you did it, but you did it.

(pensive music continues) (bell ringing) (pensive music continues) (pensive music continues) (pensive music continues) (no audio)