History

Frontier Medicine and the Evolution of Doctoring

The wind filtered in through the cracks around the windows. Nurses were busy working from patient to patient. There were moans and coughing from the young and the old. Every inch of the Community Hospital on the top of Fir Street (now the Telluride Museum) was filled with the sick and the dying. The year was 1918 and the entire world was in the grips of the Spanish Flu epidemic. In Telluride, 1 in 10 people died in a two-month period that year. The hospital was overflowing and local saloons, such as the one where Honga’s Lotus Petal now stands, were used as make shift hospitals for the ill.

This was not the first epidemic to strike Telluride. With a human population to rival current day numbers, an equal amount of livestock and a rudimentary sewage and sanitation system, outbreaks of diphtheria, cholera, scarlet fever and tuberculosis were commonplace.  At one point there was a large house in Butcher Creek, in which those with communicable diseases were quarantined.  Locals called it “The Pest House”.

Our town health officer at the time and one of Telluride’s leading doctor’s was our own, “unsinkable” Dr Anna Brown. She practiced in Telluride for 27 years, longer than any other doctor in this town to date, and she did it in the early 1900s, only 50 years after women were accepted into medical schools and a good 10 years before women gained the right to vote.

Her hospital beds would have been filled with miners, their families, her friends and loved ones, suffering form contagious diseases, chronic illnesses, mining accidents and pulmonary ailments.  In an age of open immigration, many of her patients hailed from Europe and did not speak English. Finns and Italians, Irish and Germans populated this valley and created language barriers we can only just imagine in our modern day scenarios.

In 1928, Telluride’s first ski club was formed.  For the following 15 years, Doctor Joseph Parker, sole practitioner in town and his wife and dedicated nurse, labored day and night, attending to mining accidents and illnesses along with a unique set of injuries attributable to our newfound love of skiing.  One day, while skiing a sweet powder day on Dallas Divide, nurse Parker waited kindly at the bottom of the hill while Dr Parker skied one last run before whisking her off to the hospital to set her broken leg.

Skip ahead twenty years, and meet the extroverted Dr Balderston, whose 15 minutes of fame were predicated on his removing his own appendix, trapped in the Telluride valley in a paralyzing blizzard, his nurses and a mirror to guide him as he manipulated his surgical instruments around a hole in his right lower abdomen.  There are pictures and a listing in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not to prove it.  This, my friends, is Frontier Medicine.

The history of medicine in Telluride is tied to the history of our mines, our boom/bust economy and eventually to the history of our ski area.  The lure of precious metals has transformed into an attraction for deep snow, steep hills and a premier real estate market.  The broken bones resulting from falls down mineshafts and cave-ins have been replaced by the ACL tears and wrist fractures of skiers and snowboarders in the new millennium.

Notwithstanding the shift in economic trends, today there remain moments, mostly due to weather, that we are left with only one doctor in town, one nurse and no way out of the Valley.  This remains Frontier Medicine. From our geographic isolation to our small population, from our weather-related inconveniences to our economic and linguistic barriers, we continue to face unique challenges in medicine as did our predecessors Dr Brown, Dr Parker and Dr Balderston.

One of the greatest of these challenges is an economic one.  In this spectacular yet isolated environment, where winter reigns nine months a year, it’s difficult to keep a clinic well staffed on a limited budget.  If we had to go it alone, it would never work.  But throughout our history, since 1896 when the Telluride Community Hospital was built, Telluride has chosen to support its medical facilities through government programs, mine subsidies and mil levies.  Without these subsidies, the 24 hour a day care we provide today, with ER doctors, nurses and radiology technologists would not exist.  Skiing, biking, hiking, working and living in this place would be a much riskier business, preclusive to all but the most adventuresome of guests and residents.  And though we Telluridians pride ourselves on our daring, isn’t nice to know that when something breaks, there’s someone here to fix it?  Even on the Frontier?

History: Frontier Medicine and the Evolution of Doctoring

The Doctors

Staff