During her lifetime Margaret Abigail Cleaves became a well-known physician and medical researcher in the United States. Today she is largely forgotten, a footnote in medical history. I recently stumbled on a connection to Alabama, so let's investigate.
Cleaves was born on November 25, 1848, in Columbus City, Iowa; she was the third of seven children in the family. Her father John was a physician, and as a child she traveled with him on his rounds. She graduated from a public high school at 16 and taught in public schools until 1870, when she decided to study medicine. She finished her M.D. at the Iowa State University Medical Department in 1873.
In her career she practiced in several states: Iowa, Illinois, Pennsylvania and beginning in 1890 in New York City. In 1883 she left the U.S. to spend almost two years in Scotland, England, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium. Cleaves visited asylums for the insane as well as attending lectures and general hospital clinics.
Cleaves was a prolific researcher, organizer and author in addition to her clinical work. Some 40 of her publications are indexed in the National Library of Medicine's IndexCat database to older medical literature, 1880-1961. They range from 1886 to 1908, with most published in the 1893-1907 period. Those articles describe her work with electrotherapy, phototherapy, radium and conditions in various asylums. Her Wikipedia entry describes her seminal 1903 publication describing the use of radium to treat uterine cervix cancer.
Among her many organizational achievements was the development of the New York Electro-Therapeutic Clinic, Laboratory and Dispensary in New York City. There she did research and treated numerous male and female neurasthenia patients. Her final publication seems to have been the 1910 book noted below.
Various sources agree that Cleaves died in Mobile in early November, 1917. Wikipedia says November 7; the article below based on information from two of her sisters has November 13. The 1920 American Medical Biographies entry on Cleaves has the November 7 date and a further note that she died in a Mobile hospital. "Alabama Deaths & Burials Index 1881-1974" via Ancestry.com gives the date as 13 Nov 1917, her age as 69.
None of the sources I've examined have anything on Cleaves' professional activities after the 1910 book noted below. What did she do in those years, besides remaining in New York, and why did she end up in Mobile? Questions for further research...
In the 1900 U.S. Census, Cleaves appears, renting in what is presumably a boarding house at 79 Madison Avenue with a number of other individuals. According to what I found at Ancestry.com, she appears in various city directories for NYC between 1891 and 1915. Some of the addresses were also along Madison Avenue. That north-south street in Manhattan did not become associated with the advertising industry until the 1920's.
Cleaves has a Find-A-Grave entry, but no burial location is listed. There is a long biographical note from Woman of the Century. Parents and two sisters are buried in Columbus City Cemetery, Columbus City, Iowa. Her sister Jennie, who died in 1919, was the only one of those to outlive Margaret. Apparently Cleaves never married.
Margaret Abigail Cleaves, M.D. [1848-1917]
Source: Willard, Frances Elizabeth (1893) A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life, Moulton via Wikipedia
Source:
Rock Island Argus [Rock Island, Ill.] 16 November 1917 via Chronicling America
This book is available via the Internet Archive.
Also available at the Internet Archive is this 890-page book
