Dr. Florence Brookhart Yount loved history as much as she loved medicine. She could tell you what was going on in Prescott in the 1800s just as easily as she could count how many babies she delivered in a year. Her own history in the central Arizona town touched many lives and she is remembered as the lady doctor who delivered and looked after “Grade A babies.”
Born in Washington, Iowa, on March 5, 1909, Florence relocated with her family to Washington, D.C., in 1927 after her father, Smith Brookhart, won a seat in the U.S. Senate.
Florence had an avid curiosity for science, and by 1935, the striking 23-year-old had graduated from George Washington University and Medical School. She was one of five women in her class, all that was allowed by university rules.
One of the other 88 medical students was Clarence Edgar “Ned” Yount, Jr. Florence and Ned interned at a Washington, D.C. hospital and married on June 22, 1936. They immediately headed for Prescott, where the Younts had been part of the town’s medical community since 1902.
Ned began practicing with his father while Florence completed a residency program in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital in Chicago. Her friends warned her about the dangers of Chicago “mobs,” and Florence soon realized her home was right in the middle of gangster territory. “But it didn’t matter,” she said. “We were on duty 24 hours a day.”
Returning to Prescott, Florence began her practice in the offices of her father-in-law and husband.
Emergencies involving children sent her flying out the door. Pay was not important. Local quarrymen sometimes brought her flagstones as compensation for delivering their newborn son or daughter.
During the Depression years, Florence instituted a well-baby clinic and distributed canned milk to mothers who could not afford to buy their own. She taught them that a well-balanced, nourishing meal often meant drugs would not be needed to treat their children.
She followed the children she brought into the world throughout their young lives, even attending football games at the local high school if one of her kids was playing. “I did have lots of Grade A babies,” she said.
The hospital situation in Prescott was in dire shape when Florence arrived in town. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet had run the first hospital in 1878, but that facility only lasted 10 years. In 1893, the Sisters of Mercy founded a small hospital in a vacant house until they completed a more modern facility in 1903. Mercy Hospital burned to the ground in 1940.
Many women opened their homes to patients, particularly expectant mothers from rural communities who came into town near their delivery dates. Florence gave birth to her own son, John Edward Yount, in one of these homes on Sept. 6, 1940. Ned, who was in the National Guard at the time, was on his way to the South Pacific. He “brought me home,” Florence said, “and left an hour later.”
During World War II, many doctors left to serve in the military. Florence, her father-in-law, and a few older physicians took care of Prescott’s growing population.
As the need for a modern hospital became even more imperative, a vacant elementary school attracted Florence and others who thought it would suffice as a healthcare center, if they could raise the $10,000 necessary to convert it into a workable facility. “We had to work hard to generate the spirit for a community hospital,” she said. “These were difficult times, but everybody did rally.”
On March 1, 1943, Prescott Community Hospital opened its doors. That evening, Florence delivered the first baby at the new facility.
With the new hospital came the need for medical equipment, which was hard to find as most of it went to the war effort. Florence heard of an old stove gathering dust at the abandoned Golden Turkey Mine near what is now the ghost town of Cleator. Jumping in her car, she used her own gasoline rations to haul the stove back to Prescott, where it was installed in the new hospital.
In 1949, Florence joined the State Public Welfare Board to help manage the distribution of grants to programs that assisted disabled children, Indian children, the aged, and the blind.
In 1973, at age 64, she retired from practicing medicine and devoted her time to learning the history of Prescott along with studying the history of medicine. She particularly enjoyed discovering some of the old medical remedies that were prevalent in the 1800s.
Florence discovered that at one time, it was thought that babies stood a better chance of growing straight and tall if they were dressed from the feet up, and that earaches could be cured by dipping black sheep’s wool in rum and putting the concoction in a child’s ear.
An expectant mother should boil her wedding rings in tea and drink the mixture to alleviate a difficult labor. And someone once professed that if a person would “hold the sharp edge of an axe against the abdomen of a woman in labor, it will take her mind off her troubles.”
“We have in our home the medicine chest that served the Younts a hundred years ago,” she said. “It is full of stationary at the moment, but if you bring your nose close enough you can still smell the quinine.”
Florence was part of the effort to establish the Territorial Women’s Memorial Rose Garden at Prescott’s Sharlot Hall Museum that “is dedicated to those women of Arizona who prepared the way for others.” She also participated in acquiring Gov. John C. Fremont’s old house and restoring it on the museum grounds.
Florence died on Nov. 25, 1988.
Growing up with two physicians in the family, son John said that as a child, he “didn’t dare get sick,” and he never missed a day of school. But the pride he had for his mother was always evident. He once remarked that when she first began practicing, many assumed she was the nurse in the office.
“She wasn’t a nurse, she was a doctor,” he said, “and a damn good one.”
