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Show CHAPTER 9 THREE ACQUAINTANCES To observe those around her is to see Ellis with added dimension. We have selected one woman from each of three areas of her life: personal, professional, and religious, and will take a brief look at each. MARGARET CURTIS SHIPP ROBERTS Maggie was a personal acquaintance of Ellis when both were single young women, was the first to join the family in plural marriage, and the first to undertake the study of medicine after Ellis plowed the furrow. All of these considerations uniquely fit her for closer scrutiny. If only Maggie had left a diary of her medical school years, as Ellis did, what illumination and added dimension it could have given their story. Or if from Milford there were a written account of those same years. We have little, even from Ellis, of her career or of those years when Maggie, Milford, and Lizzie were making their preparations in medicine. What we do have is mere siftings: fragments of color from which to reconstruct the decade or so that remained for Maggie as a Shipp after Ellis graduated. One such fragment, in late summer of the year that Ellis had received her M.D., links the two sister-wives in a common enterprise: This morning [August 13, 1878] in the Church Historian's office the following sisters were blessed and set apart to |