My Genealogy Hound

ELIZA R. MORSE, M. D. Among the women who have had the courage and independence to devote their lives to some special line of endeavor, it is no rash prediction to say that the subject of this sketch is destined to hold a useful and honorable place. Born in the town of Metamora, Woodford county, Ill., the daughter of Levi P. and Mary (Parmiter) Morse, she passed her earlier years in that locality and from the schools of her native place received a thorough common and high school training, acquiring her literary education at Eureka and afterwards at Knox College at Galesburg, Ill., which education was supplemented by a special course in the private Normal at Valparaiso, Ind. With a desire to devote her life to one of the liberal professions and having a special taste and aptitude as she believed for the practice of physic, she began to read medicine in 1884 with Dr. W. Mansfield of Metamora, Ill., pursuing her studies assiduously under this gentleman for many months. As she progressed in her knowledge of the profession, she became more and more enamored of it and the more firmly fixed became her determination to master its mysteries and to thouroughly prepare herself for its practice. Entering the Woman’s Medical College at Chicago, Ill., she graduated from that institution in the spring of 1888, and then returned to Metamora, where she began the practice of her chosen profession with her preceptor, and met with the most flattering success from the beginning. Encouraged by this, she determined to enter upon an independent professional career, and with an instinctive confidence in the American sense of honor and fair play — displayed nowhere on this continent to such good advantage as in the great West, where all are absolutely free and equal according to merit. She came hither and in the spring of 1889 cast her fortune with the promising city of Kearney, where she at once took up the practice and has since continued at it. Her venture has not proved disappointing. She has met with as cordial reception from the fraternity as she could have asked and as liberal patronage from the public as she had any reason to expect. She has met the crucial requirements as to honesty and capability and her subsequent career therefore is only a matter of time and patient labor. She has qualified herself for the general practice and she pursues her profession in in all its branches, giving special attention only as time and opportunity afford to the diseases incident to women and children. She is a thorough student and keeps fully abreast of the best thought of the day in her profession. She realizes that in the science of her profession as in all progressive sciences there are but few axioms, the perfection of the known and the discovery of the unknown being the constant ends in view. In the adaptation of the infinite variety of means to these ends, the realm of materia medica unfolds and discovers to the eye of the student, philosopher and humanist an ever widening field of research and labor, so that he or she who has selected this line of endeavor for his life work is not only not privileged to rest his knowledge on the dicta of the curriculum and the teachings of the books, but he commits a grave crime against his race when he does so, and one which soon or late returns in its consequences to plague him in his professional career. Not only is Dr. Morse fully alive to the responsibilities of her profession, but she is admirably fitted by nature for its successful pursuit. Endowed with that subtile sympathy which makes the whole world akin, her presence in the sick room is felt before she begins to prescribe. Cautious in the steps by which she proceeds, her first efforts are always directed to the task of securing the confidence of her patient, then an understanding of the ailment and then an application of the resources of her art to the trouble in hand. With such methods, reinforced by a natural and professional acumen rare even in one of her sex and fraternity, distinguished each alike for their signal intuitiveness, she does not often fail of a cure when called in time, and where, from a neglect of proper precautions at the outset or from a dissolution of the forces of nature, restoration to health and vigor are beyond the reach of her skill, with a frank acknowledgment of this to herself and a discreet intimation of the unpleasant fact to the friends and relatives of her patient, she plies her utmost care to lengthening the feeble span of life for her unhappy sufferer and to robbing the dark and shadowy vale and depriving the death bed of at least its physical agonies.