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Show FHR-8-300 (11-78) United States Department of the Interior Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form Continuation sheet Item number 8 Page of isolation, the level of economic well-being, and the capacity for cultural acceptance determined the speed with which, and the way in which, health care systems were developed. In Utah the Mormon belief in faith healing and their cultural preference for using Thomsonian herberal remedies substantiated by a strong hostility for non-Mormon physicians, helped delay the arrival of modern medical facilities in Mormon rural areas of Utah until the early 1920s. Those Mormons who had received medical training practiced their skills only part-time because their profession was not considered a legitimate way to earn a living. The doctors who practiced medicine full-time tended to be non-Mormons who catered to the non-Mormon miners or retailers, or to the more urbanized and liberal Mormons of the Salt Lake area. There were in fact no trained doctors outside Salt Lake until the 1870s; in 1890 there still was not a resident doctor in Sevier county. The Mormon suspicion of medicine was also exhibited in their opposition to being vaccinated against communicable diseases and in their opposition to the use of modern medical technology. These beliefs gave way to new ideas as the new generation of Mormons replaced the early settlers, but it took time and improved local economies before medical care was able to penetrate the rural areas of Central Utah. Small pox, typhoid and diptheria epidemics were common in the West before 1900. The latter disease, especially as it affected children, was a constant fear in the settled agricultural communities of Utah. The first outbreak of diptheria in Sevier County occurred near Salina in 1886. It was not to be the last for the disease continued to plague the area into the early 1900s. Quarantining the epidemic was the most important function of local doctors. At first these doctors traveled south from Manti when epidemics threatened, but around 1890 Dr. Christian Madsen settled in Salina. Five years later Dr. Charles Edwin West moved into the new railroad town. In 1899 Margaret Arneson Freece, of Scipio Utah, returned from Northwestern Medical school and began practicing medicine in Salina. Both Dr. West and Dr. Freece became long-time residents and strong supporters for the erection of a local care facility. In general, hospital care in Utah up to 1915 can be characterized as non-Mormon, urban centered and catering to the treatment of mining injuries or illnesses. The first Utah hospital, St. Marks, was built by Episcopalians in 1872. Holy Cross, the second, was erected by Catholics three years later. In 1882 the Mormon Relief Society started the Deseret Hospital but it closed its doors in 1890. The second Mormon attempt was more successful as the Dr. W.H. Grove's/Latter-day Saints Hospital built in 1905 has continued to operate up to the present. |
