Boise’s Dr. Mary E. Donaldson: Pioneer in Medicine and Elder Care [otd 01/12]

Dr. Donaldson. H. T. French photo.

Mary Elizabeth Donaldson, M.D., was born Mary Craker on January 12, 1851 in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, about forty miles northwest of Madison. After graduating from high school, she taught grade school for four years. She married at twenty and had a child who died young. The marriage didn’t work out and they were divorced soon afterwards.

In the mid-1870s, she turned to caring for a very sick brother, and they moved to Idaho in search of a more healthful climate. To support them during this period, Mary Elizabeth again found work as a teacher. Although the brother also contracted diphtheria, she succeeded in nursing him back to health.

Mary Elizabeth then married Thomas L. Johnston, an early Idaho pioneer. Her efforts as a nurse strengthen her desire to take a more serious role in medicine. Mary's new husband supported that interest, and she enrolled in the University of Wooster, in Cleveland, Ohio. She received her M.D. degree in 1892, quite an accomplishment at a time when there were hardly any women physicians.

Returning to Boise, she and her husband opened the Idaho Sanitarium, a spa-like institution meant to prevent and cure disease through proper diet and exercise. Although its methods separated them somewhat from traditional medical approaches, the Sanitarium proved very popular. Dr. (then) Johnston provided her own medical services at the Sanitarium free of charge.

From about 1894 to 1898, Dr. Donaldson set up similar institutions in Milton, Oregon (8-10 miles south of Walla Walla, Washington) and then in Portland. After these were going concerns, she returned to Boise and stayed, perhaps because her husband died in 1898. Under her close attention, her practice and the Sanitarium prospered. In fact, her flourishing private practice allowed her to give free or reduced-rate services to those in need.

Idaho Sanitarium, H. T. French photo.

In 1912, Mary Elizabeth married Captain Gilbert Donaldson, a well-known Boise businessman and philanthropist. Attendees at the ceremony included, in the words of historian H. T. French, “some of the most notable men and women of the state and many others whose names are household words in Idaho.”

In 1881, long before she became a doctor, Mary Elizabeth had occasion to travel in the East. In Philadelphia, she visited an institutional home for elderly men and women. With the backing of influential friends of her new husband, such an institution was built in Boise, and called the Donaldson Home for the Aged. It was one of the first, if not the first of its kind in Idaho.

In addition to those accomplishments, Dr. Donaldson found time to promote various service organizations, push the cause of prohibition, and raise five orphaned children. She also helped found and promote a national women’s rights organization, and regularly contributed articles to its publications.

Dr. Donaldson continued in active practice into the 1920s. In the early Thirties, the couple moved to California, where Gilbert died in 1934. Mary Elizabeth passed away in Napa, California in 1941.
                                                                                 
References: [French], [Hawley]