Olive Oatman, The Mormon Girl Who Was Raised By The Mohave Tribe
Born in Illinois in 1837, Olive Oatman was one of seven siblings all raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But before she even reached adulthood, she found herself at the center of one of the most interesting stories of the American West.
In 1850, when Olive was just 13 years old, her parents joined a Mormon wagon train traveling to Arizona. During the journey, the Oatman family split away from the rest of the group and continued west alone. About 85 miles east of present-day Yuma, they were attacked by Native Americans, likely members of the Yavapai tribe.
Public DomainOlive Oatman, pictured here circa 1863, was tattooed by the Mohave people while living with the tribe in the 1850s.
Everyone was killed except for Olive, her younger sister Mary Ann, and their brother Lorenzo, who was left for dead. The two girls were taken captive by the Yavapai and enslaved at a nearby village. There, they were forced to forage for food and carry firewood and water.
About a year later, Olive and Mary Ann were traded to the Mohave tribe, who treated them more compassionately. When a drought struck the region and people began dying of starvation — including Mary Ann — one woman saved Olive’s life by feeding her gruel.
The Mohave people tattooed Olive’s chin, suggesting that they accepted her as part of their tribe rather than viewing her as a slave. And when a messenger arrived in 1856 with a request from authorities at a nearby fort that Olive be freed, the Mohave let her go.
She reintegrated into American society and traveled around the country telling interesting stories from her time with the Mohave.
Ignaz Semmelweis, The Doctor Who Was Ridiculed For Revolutionizing Medicine
In the mid-19th century, Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis made a medical breakthrough that has saved countless lives in the decades since — and he was shunned for it.
While working in a Vienna obstetrics clinic in 1847, Dr. Semmelweis noticed a disturbing trend: New mothers were dying in droves due to a mysterious ailment known as “childbed fever.” He resolved to figure out what was behind this sickness, and he started by trying to determine why there was a significant discrepancy in the number of deaths between the hospital’s two maternity wards.
Public DomainDr. Ignaz Semmelweis just a few years before he was admitted to an asylum and died.
Semmelweis discovered that women treated in the doctors’ ward were dying at much higher rates than the women who gave birth in the midwives’ clinic. After testing several hypotheses, he realized that the doctors, who performed autopsies in addition to delivering babies, often went straight from the morgue to the birthing rooms without washing their hands.
The physician had doctors at the hospital clean their hands in a solution of chlorinated lime before delivering babies — and the mortality rate plummeted from 18.3 percent in April 1847 to less than two percent by July.
Semmelweis’ work could have been one of the most heroic and interesting stories in medical history — but his theories were rejected. Despite proving that disinfection procedures reduced cases of childbed fever, Semmelweis’ technique was spurned by many doctors of his time because they felt that it was insulting to require them to wash their hands.
This criticism and mocking from the medical community led Semmelweis to have a nervous breakdown, and he was committed to an asylum in 1865. There, he was beaten by the guards and developed a gangrenous wound on his hand, leading to his death from sepsis at age 47.
