After one of her nursing patients dies, Mary Ellen decides she could do a better job of serving the people in the hill country if she became a doctor.
What made this episode fail to me is this notion that a doctor traveling around on a horse, visiting these poor people, would naturally be able to save lives that a nurse could not.
I believe the man might well have died even if Mary Ellen had been a doctor. It's not like she could take expensive equipment around on her horse, to do tests and heal patients. If a doctor had been with her, the patient would probably have insisted he couldn't pay for a doctor and that he didn't need one--people today still do that. I reject the notion that she could save many lives just because she traveled around with the knowledge of a doctor instead of a nurse.
Furthermore, she was in her mid-20s, widowed, with a small child. The rigors of studying hard college courses and medical school, where demands were, and are, quite extensive, would mean she saw little of her son between the age of 4 and 12. I know she had others to care for him, but how many women in 1945 would want to leave most of the care of their 4-year old to others for the next 8 years? In order to be a good doctor then, she would need some expensive equipment, and would need to pay a laboratory for tests, which would require her to have a successful practice. She would have to realize that lots of potential patients, certainly including most of the males, would simply not choose to have a female doctor, not in those days.
Practically, Mary Ellen could not have developed a practice successful enough to let her do much for those mountain folks. The show just made it sound like all you need is a doctor on hand and people won't die.
The side plots involved the Baldwins being upset to learn that it is illegal to send their recipe through the mail, even though Ike had told them this some time before. Elizabeth worked to send a cake to Jason for his 24th birthday.
Now Jason was supposed to have graduated high school back in 1935 or 1936, which would mean, based on the age stated here, that he finished high school at the age of 14 or 15.
Another side plot saw Corabeth make a birthday cake for a soldier who had told his own mother about the kind, older-woman, who worked at the store.
The several little plots were fine, but nothing all that interesting. The main plot seemed unrealistic. In the mid-1940s, it just wasn't practical for a woman in Mary Ellen's situation to start four years of college, leading to medical school, for the reasons she stated.
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