The Indomitable Snow Woman

Newswise — Nurse Bertha Louise Bloomer Johnson trudged off from Johns Hopkins in the Forties to the backcountry of Kentucky, where she reached underserved patients by horseback. From there she embarked for an Alaska even more harsh and remote than today’s 49th state and never looked back.

By jeep, small plane, boat, sled, and on foot, Bloomer Johnson traversed the frontier to share her midwifery skills with native Alaskans (often in a gorgeous fur parka with wolverine ruff that remains in lovely shape). “Most of the babies in those days were born in the villages and they had untrained women as their midwives,” Bloomer Johnson notes. So she wrote and hand illustrated a library of nurse/midwife training booklets and pamphlets that were published by the State of Alaska and spread like apple seeds as Bloomer Johnson went from village to village.

Photos show her cheerfully instructing local women on maternal care with mannekins. She was stationed in Naknek, on Bristol Bay, and would travel around to the villages in that area, teaching midwifery and leading general health clinics.

Upon graduating from Johns Hopkins, Bloomer Johnson got her own midwife training through the Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky, providing prenatal and maternal care for women in the state’s backcountry. Hired by the Territory of Alaska as a public health nurse, she worked to slow alarming death rates among mothers and babies.

“She’s one of the most adventurous women I've had the pleasure of knowing,” says granddaughter Elizabeth Morrow, who is working on a book about Bloomer Johnson, now in her 90s, who lives in Sitka with husband Martin, a carpenter she met during a rehab project on her house/clinic in Naknek 60-plus years ago.

“I think about what the village clinics are now … wow! That would've been really something," Bloomer Johnson says. "The village nurses on the Internet can send pictures [to larger health centers] if they have somebody with a bad wound or something like that. If you have a rash, they can send that in and get some help with what's really causing it. We just went by guess and by golly and whatever we could explain in words, you know?”

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