June 7, 2010

Public health nurse Mamie O. Hale (who became Mamie O. Garland after her marriage in 1949) is shown here leaving a client’s home; circa 1945. In 1945, Hale was appointed midwife consultant for the Arkansas Department of Health, responsible for training Arkansas’s largely illiterate and elderly midwives. She supervised them at deliveries, taught them to register births, and promoted their certification as trained midwives.