Doc Anner, the Swamp Doctor

Doc Anner was a fascinating woman who lived to help people, never refusing to go where she was needed. Darrow was only the second female doctor in the state of Florida?she passed her medical exam there with a 98 percent, the highest score ever. Darrow practiced medicine until 1949, moving to Ft. Lauderdale, where she died in 1959.

A doctor practicing in the Everglades in the early twentieth century would have to ?know how to change tires quickly at 4 a.m. and in the freezing rain; set a fractured femur with a piece of string and a flatiron . . . ; drive through ten miles of mud to minister to the child of a drunkard; be able to help with a breech birth on the kitchen table of a farmhouse, with grandma giving the anesthetic and the advice; diagnose tonsillitis from diphtheria, with the nearest laboratory forty-eight miles away; pull the three-pronged fish-hook molar of a 250 lb. hired man, aided only by moonshine and faith in G-d.