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By Pauline Masson –
With one day to go, we celebrate March 2023 Pacific “Women in History Month” with an homage to an icon of womanhood, who enjoyed great accomplishments, but was remembered most of all as a mother.
No one alive today would remember this lady. But Dr. Margaret Vorbeck was a credit to Pacific’s railroad heritage, our family values and our regard for education.
From that day in 1853 when the first train arrived here, Pacific has always been – and still is – a railroad town. But one intrepid lady took cheap rail fare to an historic dimension. At the age of 27 and with twelve children in the household, Margaret Vorbeck made the astonishing decision to join the men passengers at the Pacific depot and take the daily commuter train to St. Louis to attend medical college and join the ranks of early women doctors.
Hidden in American history, all women’s medical schools began to appear in the mid 19th century long before women had the right to vote or own property. The first women doctors, like Margaret, were intrepid, pioneering and diverse women who faced hostility and resistance in their pursuit of medical educations.
I did not find a picture anywhere of Margaret Bleiach Vorbeck but our genealogy society had a copy of an undated biography that her great-grandson John Brockmeyer, Jr. wrote.
Margaret was born Mary Margaret Bleiach on March 7, 1861 in Pacific when residents had been enjoying cheap train rides for only eight years. Her father John Bleiach was a carriage maker and her mother was Mary Westmeier Bleiach.
Margaret’s father died when she was five years old and her mother married Albert Kaegele, a lumberyard owner with four children by a previous marriage. Together with Margaret’s three brothers and sisters and four more children born of this marriage, it made quite a large household of twelve children. This was the beginning of Margaret’s role in absorbing a family of siblings, step-siblings and children of her own.
Her mother died giving birth to her ninth child, leaving 13-year old Margaret in charge of the large houshold.
At age fourteen Margaret eloped with Joseph Vorbeck, a 27 year old Frisco Railroad engineer who met her while waiting around Pacific for his next run. The elopement was not because fourteen-year-old Margaret wanted to get away, or because her family objected to the marriage but because Joseph’s religious Prussian family objected to the fact that Margaret wasn’t Catholic.
Following the elopement, Margaret and John returned to Pacific where they set up a household large enough to accommodate Margaret’s younger brothers and sisters. Over the next fifteen years Margaret and John would have nine children, three of whom died in childirth and one died at age five of measles. The five children who lived full lives were: Joseph Chester, born in 1879; Mary Elvira Estelle (biographer John Brockmeyer’s grandmother), born in 1884; Mary Phyllis, born in 1888; Mary Louise born in 1893; and John L., born in 1894.
Margaret’s great-grandson was unsure of the date, but in about 1888 , in the midst of frequent pregnancy and losing babies, at the age of 27, Margaret made the decision to become a doctor. She took advantage of her engineer husband’s rail pass to commute to St. Louis on week days to study the new trend in health, eclectic medicine.
She attended the American Medical College, a charter member of the National Federation of Eclectic Medical Colleges. These medical colleges were a radical departure from the old guard type of medicine taught in most colleges. The Eclectic doctors believed that only substances which were beneficial to the human body should be administered, and that any treatment should serve as an aid to the body’s own natural healing processes.
Margaret, John and their large household lived in Pacific throughout her college attendance. After Margaret graduated in 1891, the American Medical College she interned at St. Louis City Hospital. The Saturday Evening Post reported that there were 2,400 women doctors in the U.S. that year, less than five percent of the total number of doctors, which put Margaret in an elite group of women who were willing to buck the odds.
Margaret’s school, the American Medical College merged with the Barnes Medical college to become the National University of Arts and Sciences, Medical Department in 1912, and this combined school existed until 1917, bowing out to the newly formed Washington University and St. Louis University medical schools.
After her internship, Margaret and John built a house in St. Louis, moved their family in and Dr. Margaret Vorbeck set up her practice as a physician in her home. She would have two more children after beginning her practice.
In 1898, Joseph Vorbeck was killed in a train wreck, which was caused by the lack of adequate signals.
Three years later Margaret married a man by the name of Huff, who lived in Little Rock, Arkansas and Margaret moved her family there. But the marriage was short as Mr. Huff died shortly of a heart attack. The intrepid Margaret started a new practice in Little Rock and stayed there for several years .
Margaret died in 1924 in Cape Girardeau, Mo. She was 63. She is buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis. Her burial site indicates that perhaps her former Vorbeck in-laws had the last word. An impressive monument near her grave that is adorned with the Catholic Pieta identifies the Vorbeck family plot. Margaret’s tombstone contains no last name and offers a one-word epitaph – Mother.
