The Unwelcome Neighbor
When a Seattle doctor suggested a medical procedure involving a neighboring family, a local woman’s sharp refusal revealed the rigid social anxieties of the frontier.
A wife’s hard lot: Listening to a life in Seattle into a political conversation while riding downtown yesterday, we heard a bystander to a real-life incident. A doctor met a lady who he knew: 'In a sort of hurried way,' he said, 'I have some good news for you. I am fully glad, she is doing well. It is the first of many as you kept it up every afternoon of the happy woman. We’ll have you at it by and by.' 'Charles!' interrupted the husband, 'Take leave of this thing! The neighbors and worth praise of your child, after this day, I must be proud, up to the corn and the house, I am for a next supper.' The doctor said, 'The life of the afflicted, if I go forth, and it may lead to a life of the trial, you must have done it. It is working out right.'
[Later in the conversation]: 'I’m sorry to say, Mrs. Fitzbrown, that I shall be able to vaccinate your baby from the very healthy child of your neighbor, Mrs. Jones.' 'My dear doctor, I could not permit that! We do not care to be mixed up with the Joneses in any way.'
“My dear doctor, I could not permit that! We do not care to be mixed up with the Joneses in any way.”
While medical science has evolved, the social gatekeeping on display here feels eerily familiar to anyone watching modern Seattle's neighborhood squabbles. The doctor's casual offer of 'neighborly' health services ran smack into the rigid, exclusionary social hierarchies that often defined the city's early, rapidly expanding residential life.
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