Reaching the Unreachable: How Mary Breckinridge Changed Rural Kentucky Forever

We may be at the end of National Nurses Month, but I think we all know they deserve our respect and tribute every month of the year. So although May is wrapping up, let's recognize a woman who brought medical care deep into eastern Kentucky at a time when folks in that region wouldn't have had access to it otherwise. Her name was Mary Breckinridge and she was a quite a lady.

Mary Breckinridge

My mother was a nurse, but I never heard her mention this woman's name. However, she must have known about this nurse and midwife who, essentially, gave thousands of people who lived in Appalachia the hope that they may have long given up on.

A native of Memphis, Mary Carson Breckinridge graduated from New York's St. Luke's Hospital of Nursing in 1910. Working in Europe after World War I, she got to know nurse-midwives throughout France and Great Britain. In fact, it was in London where she studied midwifery.

Frontier Nursing Service

After returning to the U.S. to continue her studies, she made it her life's goal to improve children's health and to bring healthcare into rural areas, like the Appalachians. In 1925, Mary Breckinridge founded the Frontier Nursing Service in southeastern Kentucky. At the core of the organization was an actual hospital, with an outpost and nursing clinics about five miles away on horseback.

Each outpost served about 250 families, and when the time came, the FNS midwives would attend births. The rest of the time, as nurses do, they made their rounds on horseback. One-room schoolhouses were also used as makeshift immunization clinics.

Frontier Nursing University

In 1939, the FNS branched out and formed the Frontier Graduate School of Midwifery. The institution graduated its first class in 1940.

Located in Versailles, Kentucky, Frontier Nursing University, as it's known today, specializes in offers a Master of Science in Nursing, as well as a doctorate program in nursing practice that can lead to certifications in a number of specialties.

Focusing exclusively on distance nursing education, Frontier Nursing University currently has an enrollment of upwards of 2,700 students and is a monument to a visionary nurse who rose above a seemingly impossible task and changed the lives of rural Kentuckians forever.