Ethnographic traits in the writing of Mary Breckinridge

Mary Breckinridge, founder of The Frontier Nursing Service, employed ethnographic methodologies--participant observation, interviewing and fieldwork--as foundation efforts toward construction of highly responsive health-service systems, developed under circumstances of duress, e.g. after World War I and pre-industrial Appalachia. In culturally representing the Appalachian, she drew upon two vast resources, her first-hand field experience as well as her considerable rhetorical skill. She narrated and described an enormity of selected 'realities' of Appalachian life with immediacy of detail and nonpatronizing sensitivity for 'insider' perspectives. In an era of transition with few indigenous cultural writers, Breckinridge capitalized on her family heritage in Appalachia, which further underscored the intimacy and authenticity of her accounts. As portrayed in her autobiography, crosscultural encounters of one kind and time or another supplied an infrastructure of longstanding meaning throughout her life. The final and lasting impression is that, in both skills and orientation, Breckinridge's were essentially those of the ethnographer.