Frontier Healer (Paperback)

Estelle Kleiber Betz was a woman ahead of her time. Born in 1899, she grew up in an era before women had the right to vote and when job prospects for women were limited. Like Marie Curie who, 30 years earlier found socially acceptable work to pay for her higher education, Estelle worked her way through an undergraduate degree then Cornell Medical College where she graduated 2nd in a class of predominantly male students. In October 1929, before starting her internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, this young, single, city dweller traveled alone to Kentucky’s Appalachian region to spend three months as an itinerant frontier doctor. This book contains a memoir of her early life and her letters home to family and friends during her Kentucky adventure. It paints a vivid picture of the contrast between the increasingly urbanized culture of America at the end of the Roaring Twenties and an isolated region caught in the last vestiges of 19th century rural frontier.

Born in 1899, Estelle Kleiber Betz, M.D. was a pioneer in the male-dominated world of medicine. She graduated 2nd in her class from Cornell University Medical College in 1929, where she was one of eight women in a class of 68 students. After spending three months in the Appalachian Mountains as an itinerant doctor, and completing her internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, she opened a private practice in New Brunswick, NJ, where she practiced for over 30 years. In the 1960s, she scaled back her professional activities to focus on consulting and performing cardiac catheterizations, a procedure which she had pioneered early in her career. While consulting at Johnson & Johnson, she met Robert W. (General) Johnson II, son of the company co-founder, and became his personal cardiologist for several years. In 1979, she received the Golden Merit Award from The Medical Society of New Jersey for 50 years of distinguished service as a practicing physician. Estelle was an avid traveler, nature lover and gifted writer. She married George Betz in 1938, and the following year, at the age of 39, gave birth to their only child, Charles. After retiring in 1970, she lived most of the rest of her life at her beloved home on Mt. Kemble Lake in New Jersey and died peacefully at the age of 95.