As soon as she stepped off the bus, young Emily Hammond knew she wasn't rural Anne Arundel County's idea of a family doctor.
The old country physician who served southern Anne Arundel had died, and the community was eagerly awaiting his replacement. Fresh out of medical school, Hammond was eager to begin.
But she quickly found that in 1929, people weren't quite ready totrust their lives to an attractive young girl.
The general-store owner who met Hammond at the bus was shocked to find that the new doctor was a woman. "He was horrified. He didn't open his mouth for fivemiles," recalls Dr. Emily Hammond Wilson, now 86.
Wilson was AnneArundel's first female physician. In the 53 years she practiced in South County, she delivered countless babies, removed fishhooks from thumbs and herring bones from throats, treated common colds and calamitous diseases.
Wilson, who grew up on a South Carolina cotton plantation and has lived since 1946 on historic Obligation Farm in Harwood, treated blacks as equals in an era when hospitals confined them to a separate ward. Answered calls any hour of the day or night. Did just about anything to get to a sick patient, including riding on a tractor axle while hanging onto a hired hand as he drove through roads too muddy for a car to manage.
She saw medical science move from the days of mustard plasters to laser technology. She can remember when all you could do for tuberculosis patients was hold their hands andwait for them to die.
Wilson remembers, too, the dean of the Medical College of Georgia, who in the mid-1920s accused her of applying to the school because "I just wanted to flirt with the boys."
"ButI made it through."
By the 1950s, Wilson was president of the Anne Arundel County Medical Society and chief of staff at Anne Arundel General Hospital. Today, she is "enormously admired" by everyone she ever treated, says Harwood's Sally Whall, 70, a former patient.
"She's a very remarkable woman," says her son, John F. Wilson Jr. of Harwood. "She sets out to do something, and nothing is going to stop her."
Wilson grew up at Red Cliff, a cotton plantation built in 1850 by her great-grandfather, James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina senator who, she claims, coined the phrase, "Cotton is king."
The eldest of eight children, Wilson became a doctor "partly because nobody wanted me to. They wanted me to be a lady." Only her mother encouraged her.
"She said, 'You don't have to wear a derby hat and smoke a cigar to be a doctor. You can still be a woman.' She was quite a gal. My mother had taken care of all the little black children on the plantation because there were no doctors there. That started me on the idea."
In 1927, she became the second woman to graduate from the Medical College of Georgia. After an intership at the Central Georgia Railroad Hospital, she got a job at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
The following summer -- the summer of 1929 -- an uncle in Upper Marlboro told her the country doctor in southern Anne Arundel had died, and why shouldn't she apply?
She did, and despite an initially cold reception-- one prominent woman refused to let her a room because she figuredWilson wasn't going to make it -- set up practice in a rented summerkitchen.
She borrowed $1,000 from her uncle to buy a Ford automobile and furnish the summer kitchen, which served as both home and office.
"I slept on a cot at night and used that as my examining table," she says. "It was very unsanitary."
Wilson's first patient showed up after a week. He wasn't exactly what she expected. He was a dog.
"I had got dressed up in my best outfit to go to a church party. I thought that would be a way to meet people. As I was ready to leave I saw a car rushing up and said, 'Oh goody! I have a patient!' Then they brought in a big shepherd dog that had been hit by an automobile."
After a while, "People began to be pretty desperate, so they sent for me. One lady said, 'My cook fainted in the kitchen.' She came to the door and said, 'Well, you are not as bad-looking as I thought you'd be.' "
Wilson charged $1 for an office visit, $2 for a home visit and $15 for home delivery. But people along the waterfront often bartered with oysters. "During the Depression that was all they had. Oysters got to be anathema."
One of Wilson's biggest problems were the roads. Routes 2 and 408 were the only paved highways, and her car was always getting stuck in the mud. "I used to get the horses to pull me out every other day in the winter," she recalls.
After six months, she met John Wilson, a deputy state controller, at a dance. They dated for 2 1/2 years before marrying in 1932. Their first son, John, was born nine months after they wed, following a difficult pregnancy. Wilson delivered a baby the day before she had her own by Caesarean section. She went back to work a month later.
By this time, Wilson had a decent practice. "People didn't have much choice," she says. Even one man who "swore he'd never let a woman touch him" atehis words when he developed acute appendicitis.
That man recovered, but many patients didn't.
Wilson has bad memories of a young mother who died after her uterus ruptured.
And she remembers a diphtheria epidemic in which a 3-year-old girl "literally choked to death.I did a primitive tracheotomy with a piece of stomach tube. Her father had fainted while he held her. She lasted 24 hours, but she was too far gone.
"It was very rough. She was a pretty little blonde."
Many of Wilson's patients were black. During the 1930s, medical options for blacks were few; Anne Arundel General Hospital in Annapolis had one separate ward for black patients, but few could afford it. Some doctors segregated their offices.
But in Dr. Wilson's office, "There were one or two rooms where everybody set there together," recalls 63-year-old Louvenia Green of Harwood.
During World War II, the Wilsons moved their home and office to Davidsonville. By the late 1940s, the doctor finally got a separate office in an old tea room at Routes 2 and 255. "I got so fed up with coming home and finding people sitting out in the yard," Wilson says.
Though she retired in 1982, Dr. Charles Worth, who worked with Wilson beginning in the 1960s,still maintains that office.
Wilson claims credit for several "firsts" in the local medical community. She says she was the first person to diagnose tick fever in this area. She discovered doctors could help patients with pneumonia -- one of the biggest killers of the era-- by getting cylinders of oxygen and setting up an oxygen tent.
In 1933, Wilson started working with the local health department to set up hygiene clinics at polling houses, where she offered the first local treatment of syphilis, then a rampant problem in Anne Arundel.
Other than her medical accomplishments, Wilson perhaps is best-known locally as the owner of Obligation, a 300-acre farm dating back to1671, when King Charles II granted the property to a Thomas Stockett, who supported the king during the English Civil War. The grant was given literally to fulfill the king's "obligation" to Stockett.
Today, the house -- surrounded by huge boxwoods and dogwoods and daffodils planted by Wilson herself -- is one of the showplaces on an upcoming House and Garden pilgrimage.
Wilson lives there by herself. Her first husband died in 1952 and her second husband, Albert T. Walker, a childhood sweetheart she married in 1974, died in 1989. She has since transferred ownership and operation of the farm to her two sons, John and Christopher.
The farm was falling apart when she bought it in 1946 for $20,000.
The former owner had used it as a tenant farm, and the tenants had raised chickens and pigs and stripped tobacco inside. "Up on the third floor they had a still. We smelled the mash," Wilson says.
Her family came up from South Carolina once, while she was renovating the place. "They thought I had lost my mind," she says.
She paid them no heed. She had learned long before not to listen when people told her there was something she couldn't do.