The
real value of an individual to his community or to his country is
determined by his serviceableness — the extent of his activity as a
direct or indirect factor in the world’s progress and benefit. Judged by
this standard Dr. Lucinda H. Corr well deserves to be numbered among the
prominent and representative people of Macoupin county where in the
practice of her profession her work has been of great benefit to her
fellowmen while in other connections, too, the high standards of life
which she has ever maintained in relation to the home and to
intellectual and moral progress have had their direct effect upon the
public welfare.
Dr. Corr was born in Carlinville, Illinois,
March 9, 1844, a daughter of Oliver Wiley and Deborah (Redman) Hall, the
former a native of North Carolina and the latter of Virginia. Her
paternal grandparents were James and Mary (Walker) Hall, natives of
North Carolina, and her great-grandfather was William Hall, a soldier of
the Revolutionary war, who married a Miss Holland. The maternal
grandparents of Mrs. Lucinda Corr were John and Elizabeth (Fourth)
Redman, the latter of German descent. Both Mr. and Mrs. Redman, however,
were natives of Virginia and in that state their daughter, Mrs. Hall,
was also born. She became the mother of Lucinda Hall Corr, who was
reared in Carlinville and was educated in the public schools, after
which she taught in the country and city schools. All through her
student days she manifested special aptitude in her work so that she was
able to take up the profession of teaching when but seventeen years of
age, being first employed at Honey Point and afterward in Carlinville
and other places. She was assistant principal in Carlinville when there
were but three schools there, with a principal for each school, and at
one time she taught in the Central Seminary in a building that,
destroyed by fire, was the predecessor of the present brick structure.
On the 20th of April, 1865, she gave her hand in marriage to Dr. A. C.
Corr, who was then a medical student. She continued teaching school near
her home that she might look after the interests of and care for the
aged mother of her husband while he was completing his medical studies.
After her graduation she formed a partnership with her husband and
opened an office in her native town. With characteristic unselfishness
and a noble lack of jealousy, Dr. A. C. Corr, her husband, entered into
all her plans and it was his sympathy that upheld her in her work as,
step by step, she climbed the ladder of success, bravely and heroically
winning her way, until today she stands triumphant among the best
physicians and surgeons in the state. A radical in medicine as in
everything else, Dr. Corr keeps well abreast of the times and in her
house poor, sick humanity can find all the modern inventions and
discoveries for its relief and the skill and courage to us them. "Have
your plans been successful?” a friend asked not long ago when meeting
Dr. Corr after a few years’ absence. “Plans,” said the doctor; “plans, I
never had any plans. These things just grew upon me. You know I love my
home and to have my own family in it, but the need seemed so great for a
place where sick women and children could come for treatment and care
that gradually the house has been enlarged and patients have come and we
have really a hospital without intending it.” Dr. Corr is an enthusiast
in her profession and though a delicate woman, has strength and courage
to perform surgical operations, if the case demand, that would try the
strength and nerve of the strongest man. It was not for ease that she
chose this most laborious of the professions, but because in her
generous sympathetic heart she thought she could do the most good in it;
and the long list of those whom her care and skill have raised from beds
of hopeless invalidism to health and strength proves her belief to be
well founded. In her well-ordered hospital home everything runs smoothly
under her guiding hands, while her Christian faith comforts and upholds
“those who tarry for the coming of the angel who opens the way to the
world whose portals we call death.” Her cheery smile and sympathetic
words bring strength and courage to those who await the slower coming of
“One Who hath healing in His wings.”
"While it is true,” as the
Book says, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine,” it is also true
that “lightest hearts have often heaviest mourning,” but whatever Dr.
Corr’s personal sorrows may be they are closely locked in her own breast
with the secrets and sins of her weaker sisters, and that she “hath
learned of sorrow sorrow’s cure,” hosts of care-sick, sorrowing women
can testify. The loving heart that underlies her terse words, either
quizzical or severe as the case may be, is too plainly apparent to allow
even the disordered imagination of an invalid to be wounded thereby. Of
the tender motherliness that is a strong trait in her character, though,
alas to her has come no mother’s crown, but few who know only of her
busy life as author and doctor would have the least idea; but the troop
of wide-awake nieces and nephews who at different times have found a
home under her roof can bear most loving witness to her maternal love
and care. A younger sister found a mother in her, so also an orphaned
girl and boy, the children of strangers. Both these girls are now happy
wives and are mothers of children who are at once the torment and pride
of their little foster grandmother. Of the ideal home life of the Drs.
Corr how shall we speak? The tender companionship and mutual helpfulness
that like pursuits have engendered between them is as unusual as it is
beautiful. Few men are capable of such living. A gray turbaned son of
Arabia would call Dr. A. C. Corr “a brother of girls,” a title purer and
sweeter far than any that graced a knight of the round table. To an
on-looker there would seem to be so many and diverging interests in Dr.
Corr’s home that no one but a general could keep them separate and make
all run smoothly, but the bright-faced little woman who sits at her ease
in her rocking-chair, talking on all sorts of subjects between office
calls, has them well in hand and finds time besides by word of tongue or
pen to aid the nine different societies to which she belongs. Some are
for the further advancement of women, others for the elevation of the
world at large, but all for the bettering of poor humanity and all dear
to the doctor’s heart. This is a tame picture of the first woman doctor
in Macoupin county. To the true woman, tender wife and faithful friend
this little sketch is but a feeble offering faintly portraying the love
and veneration of her character that fills the hearts of
Frances
P. Kimball, St. Paul, Minnesota,
Virginia D. Pearce, Meridian,
Mississippi.”
Throughout their married life Dr. Corr was the
able assistant and ofttimes the inspiration of her husband in his
labors. It has been said of them: “The home life of the doctor and his
wife has had a golden thread reaching out from it to many families in
this city. * * * Being deprived of children of their own, they were
always reaching out to help the orphans and homeless, believing that the
childless home and the homeless child should be brought together.
It was her husband’s wish that she should study medicine that she
might be still more closely associated with him in all of his interests,
and after reading with him for a time in 1871 she entered the Woman’s
Hospital and Medical College of Chicago, from which she was graduated in
1874 with valedictorian honors. She afterward pursued post-graduate work
in New York and Chicago hospitals and in 1874 began practicing in
Carlinville, her native town, where she has followed her profession
continuously since. Her husband, then practicing in Chesterville, joined
her in Carlinville in March, 1875. Dr. Lucinda Corr continued in general
practice until 1878, when the demand for her services in special lines
made it necessary that she concentrate her entire attention upon the
diseases of women, at which time she opened her home to receive
invalids. She further prepared herself for this work at Bellevue
Hospital and at the DeMilt Dispensary of New York city and has been very
successful in the treatment of many difficult-cases. She is the only
physician in the county that has operated successfully for vesicle
calculus, vesicovaginal fistula, trachelorrhaphy and perinaeorrhaphy.
Dr. Corr is the first woman of Macoupin county to graduate from
a regular medical college. In attaining her present high professional
standing she had many obstacles to contend against that would have
discouraged and embittered a woman of less firm character and heroic
mold. The chief of these was the prejudice against a woman’s entering
the professions, particularly that of medicine, as it was thought
especially unfit for a lady, and none in this section of the state had
ever before thought of defying public opinion on that point by preparing
herself for its arduous duties. Her success has vindicated her right to
choose her own walk in life and has done much to modify the sentiment
that a woman is unsexed or less womanly because she enters a field of
labor that in times past was considered man’s exclusive dominion, if she
attempted to practice the healing art in any other capacity than that of
nurse or of wife, mother or sister in the privacy of home.
Dr.
Corr has represented the county in state and national medical
associations and was twice president of the Macoupin Medical Society of
which she became a member in 1874 and of which she and her husband
prepared a history called “Twenty Years of Medicine in Macoupin County,
Illinois.” She is serving her second year as vice president of the
Carlinville Women’s Club and has just dosed eighteen months’ service as
president of the Carlinville chapter of the American Women’s League. She
also belongs to Springfield Chapter, D. A. R.
Two warm friends
of Dr. Lucinda Corr once wrote the following character sketch: “In
personal appearance Dr. Corr is not at all the ideal strong-minded
woman. Five feet tall, straight as an arrow, with plump girlish figure,
notwithstanding her forty-seven years, with round, fair face, large,
deep-set blue eyes overshadowed by heavy brows, a full forehead and a
magnificent head of nutbrown hair four and a half feet long. Dr. Corr’s
mother was a woman of unusual strength of character, a Virginian by
birth, conservative in her views, inflexible in principle, exclusive in
habit, but sympathizing deeply with her girls in all their efforts
towards intellectual advancement. From her the doctor inherited her
sunny disposition and the courage that has enabled her always to stand
bravely for her convictions. A typical western woman, Dr. Corr had
advanced ideas on all subjects, even when a girl in years, and like many
other girls in southern families rebelled against the advice of that
clog to womanly progress, the Apostle Paul, and determined to know
things for herself. Accordingly she fitted herself for teaching and when
only seventeen years old taught her first country school. It was while
teaching this school that she first met Albert C. Corr and began a
friendship that ripened into a life-long love and resulted in an almost
ideal married life. Dr. Albert C. Corr was then a student of medicine
and together they read and discussed subjects beyond the range of most
young people. The close of the school brought separation to the lovers.
He went to Chicago to win his diploma, she home to teach and study and
prepare herself for the keeping of the home they two should build. When
Dr. A. C. Corr graduated from the medical department of Northwestern
University in 1868 the young couple at once set up housekeeping in the
Congregational parsonage at Chesterfield and the little home was
furnished and the bright young bride settled down to sew on the doctor’s
buttons, listen to long stories from half-sick, often hysterical women
and to make one dollar do the work of five. But in listening to these
sad stories of sickness and discouragement the listener’s tender heart
was wrung and in thinking them over “the times seemed sadly out of
joint.’’ Was there nothing to be done to remedy the evils so constantly
before her? Could not woman’s insight and intuition better reach and
help her sisters? So her thoughts turned to the study of medicine.
Extracted 20 Oct 2018 by Norma Hass from History of Macoupin County, Illinois: Biographical and Pictorial, by Charles A. Walker, published in 1911, Volume 2, pages 204-209.
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