- My name is Emily Buermann from the Becker County Museum in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, and this is our Artifact Spotlight.

(soft upbeat music) Today, I'm gonna talk about Emma and Emma.

So first, Emma Ogden is the Doctor in Detroit, Minnesota.

So Emma Ogden is born in 1840 in Pennsylvania, and as she grows up and becomes a teenager, she becomes a nurse in the Civil War.

People are dying of infection and disease, and 75% of all surgeries are just amputations.

And it's really brutal and really ugly to be in the medical profession in the Civil War.

So, after the Civil War, Emma Ogden wanted to continue to be a nurse, but she also wanted to be a doctor.

She goes to the Women's College in Philadelphia, and she graduates and becomes a doctor.

So she starts to look around.

She's gonna open up her practice and she's gonna practice medicine as a doctor on the East Coast.

And it's not going great because she's a woman and she's unmarried.

So she heads out West to the wild West of Detroit, Minnesota.

And a lot of what the 1880s doctors are doing is they're going and making house calls.

And she's going out there day and night, making these runs, doing these house calls.

But Emma Ogden is doing okay because she was a nurse in the Civil War and she has seen it all.

So Dr. Emma also is a proponent for using chemical medicines.

And so she's bringing in these medicines that the local folks haven't really caught onto yet and aren't really keen to use.

But she is a good doctor and she's helping people.

And so little by little, people are starting to trust her to take these chemical medicines that she's bringing in.

So since she has to bring them in herself, because there isn't already a druggist or a pharmacist in town, Dr. Emma opens her own pharmacy in her practice.

Meanwhile, Emma Combacker, she was born in 1858 in Wisconsin.

She's a smart gal.

She grows up.

Her family encourages her to go out and get an education.

And she's interested in medicine.

So she grows up, goes to the University of Michigan, and she graduates with a pharmacy degree.

And then she makes her way to Detroit and joins the practice with Dr. Emma.

So we've got Dr. Emma is upstairs in the building, and pharmacist Emma is downstairs running the pharmacy.

So they become kind of a one-stop shop, right?

You can come, you see the doctor on your way out, you grab your medicines, and away you go.

Everything's going fairly well for the two, though there's some whispers about Dr. Emma.

She is still unmarried.

She is still a woman and she refuses to wear dresses, okay?

She's going around in shirts, coats, and pants.

Now, keep in mind, she sometimes has to hop on the horse or hop on the wagon and run off.

And who's gonna do that in a skirt and cute boots, right?

Not Dr. Emma.

And pharmacist Emma is wearing dresses.

She's wearing hats to work every day.

She's in the library circle.

She's in the choir circles.

She's going around town doing all the lovely lady things that are expected of the ladies.

And then, Emma Combacker finds a husband here in Detroit.

She marries William Fagerberg and they adopt a child and things are going wonderful for the two, Dr. Emma and pharmacist Emma.

They are doing well with their pharmacy.

They're helping people out.

Everything's going great.

The community has accepted Dr. Emma Ogden.

They even just call her the doctor, which is kind of fun.

Emma and Emma are two pioneering medical ladies.

Blazing trails through the 1880s and the 1890s and the 1900s.

And they're coming to Detroit and they're helping and they're healing and they're changing minds along the way.

- [Host] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008 and by the members of Prairie Public.