Topic: Health
Marilyn Ward (1929-2012), a volunteer lobbyist for a wide range of liberal social issues in the 1960s and 1970s, was an early member of the Citizens' Abortion Study Group, later renamed Washington Cit...
On November 3, 1970, Washington voters approved Referendum 20, which legalized abortion in the early months of pregnancy. Fifteen other states had liberalized their abortion laws by that time, but Was...
Lee Minto (b. 1927), executive director of Planned Parenthood of Seattle-King County from 1967 until her retirement in 1993, played a key role in the campaign for Referendum 20, which legalized aborti...
Washington's first World's Fair -- the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition -- was held in Seattle on the grounds of the University of Washington campus between June 1 and October 16, 1909, and drew more t...
George H. "Mike" Allison, M.D., a Seattle psychiatrist who specialized in psychoanalysis, was a member of the original Northwest Clinic of Psychiatry and Neurology with Douglass Orr, M.D. (1905-1990),...
The Ballard Private Hospital, located in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, began in 1907 and continued until 1935. The hospital originally served mill workers and their families, but b...
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was formally established in the summer of 1999. The new organization consolidated previous activities dating back to 1994, including family giving, the William ...
Kate Kanim Borst was a Native American woman who was the third wife of Snoqualmie Valley settler Jeremiah Borst. During her lifetime, she witnessed the transformation of the valley from prairies and I...
The Viennese-born psychoanalyst Edith Buxbaum, author of Your Child Makes Sense (1949) and Troubled Children in a Troubled World (1970), arrived in Seattle on January 1, 1947. She was a leading psycho...
Mother Francesca Xavier Cabrini, Saint Cabrini was the first American citizen to be declared a saint by the Catholic Church. In her journeys around the country, she came to Seattle three times: in 190...
This is an excerpt from a HistoryLink interview by Heather MacIntosh with Dotty DeCoster in April 2000. DeCoster was an outspoken member of the Women's Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s in Seattle....
Perhaps no one in the early twentieth century brought more innovation and wide-ranging interests to the San Juan Islands than Dr. Victor J. Capron, who in his time there was a physician, farm owner, b...
Care for the indigent poor, infirm, disabled, and mentally ill has been a controversial subject in Washington since long before statehood was achieved in 1889. Prior to 1854, most mentally ill pe...
In early 1907, Anna Herr Clise (1866-1936) called together 23 affluent Seattle women friends to address a health care crisis -- namely the lack of a facility to treat crippled and malnourished childre...
The first Washington state elected official to make national history in a crusade against cigarettes was not Attorney General Christine Gregoire, who brokered a settlement between the tobacco industry...
Community Health Care is a network of medical clinics providing comprehensive primary medical, dental, pharmacy, and behavioral healthcare. Inspired in the late 1960s by physicians and concerned citiz...
Health care reformer, public transportation advocate, politician, civil servant, businessman, inventor, environmentalist -- Aubrey Davis affected the lives of Northwesterners for more than half-a-cent...
This is an oral history of Aubrey Davis (1917-2013), a member of Group Health Cooperative's Board of Trustees for 38 years, President of the Cooperative for seven terms (1953, 1963, 1964, 1968, 1969, ...
In this People's History, Dorothea (Pfister) Nordstrand (1916-2011) recalls what "family medicine" meant at a time when professional health care was often not available.The Pfister family homesteaded ...
Dr. Samuel Goldenberg (1921-2011), a Seattle psychologist, organized the Citizens' Abortion Study Group after being unable to help two of his patients obtain legal abortions in 1967. The group, later ...
The writer of this article on Daniel Drumheller was Norman Bolker, a retired physician in Spokane who was interested in Western history. This story of one immigrant's battle with disease originally ap...
Seattle-born actress Frances Farmer, a rising star in the 1930s, is remembered today more for her unfortunate life story than for her once promising career. Talented and beautiful, Farmer was also wil...
Steven Farmer, a Seattle airline steward often praised for his leading-man good looks, found himself unwittingly cast as villain and victim in a real-life legal, moral, and medical drama in 1988, when...
Firland Sanatorium, Seattle's municipal tuberculosis hospital, opened on May 2, 1911, to help combat what was at the time Seattle's leading cause of death. Firland was located on 34 acres in the Richm...