Knowledge & Nibbles – Dr. Mary Safford & Dr. Fidelia Whitcomb: Doctors, Reformers, Humanitarians, and Friends

Dr. Mary Safford (actor Dee O’Brien) and Dr. Fidelia Whitcomb (actor Elizabeth Coachman, MD) recount their over ten-year association that eventually led to their practicing medicine in Tarpon Springs in the 1880s. Dr. Whitcomb was a student of Dr. Safford at the Boston University School of Medicine. Both women were homeopathic physicians and ardent proponents of various reform movements. In the mid-1880s, they ran the Tarpon Springs Hotel as a health spa based on homeopathic principles, and both opened medical practices in town. The two women were likely Florida’s first trained woman physicians.