Rachel Witmyer, member of a committees that founded the forerunner to Memorial Hospital is seen in this 2005 photo with Ruth Kammer, left, and Memorial CEO Sally Dixon. Witmyer died this week at the age of 97. Background posts: York's Memorial Hospital eyes site at different compass point, Well-known doctor, York, Pa.'s Edmund Meisenhelder, beat back flu and East side Memorial Hospital formerly on west side.
Dr. Rachel Witmyer was part of the team responsible for opening West Side Osteopathic Hospital in 1945.
That hospital was a successor to Edmund Meisenhelder's West Side Sanitarium and a forerunner of Memorial Hospital.
She had opened her own practice seven years before. And other female doctors had preceded her in York County.
Dr. Martha Bailey of Dillsburg was one.
Ruth Kammer's "Inside West Side" names at least two other early 20th-century female osteopaths: Emma E. Donnelly and Rachel E. Walker.
Florence La Rose Ames' "That Sovereign Knowledge," a history of York Hospital, lists Elizabeth G. B. Cannon as an intern in 1939.
So, at least a handful of women had been practicing medicine around the county for years.
But not enough to prevent an incident that dismayed Witmyer one day soon after West Side opened... .
