While others slept, Ellis Reynolds Shipp dreamed and studied, worked and struggled. And thus the thirty-one-year-old mother, who would bear ten children, became one of Utah’s first woman doctors. Her diary entry for March 14, 1878, is short: “Graduated from Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.” But that one sentence marks both the end and the beginning—the end of her three-year separation from her husband and family and the beginning of a medical career that would extend for nearly fifty years and bless the lives of countless people.
While Others Slept contains the writings of Ellis Shipp: an early autobiography completed in 1866 (when she was nineteen years old); her diary from 1871 to 1878, covering the early years of her marriage and her years at medical school; and a reflective look at life written when she was eighty three years old (nine years before her death).
Her writings contain vivid descriptions of what she learned of the “stern realities of life”: death, illness, poverty, problems in human relations. Added to these are in the insights she gives into her own deeply felt conviction about education, motherhood, plural marriage, and the gospel.
The depth and breadth of her life is best revealed in her own words, such as the following excerpts:
“Life was indeed one endless day of sunshine until Heaven took from me my mother. I had never known grief. That was my first real sorrow.”
“Early in my womanhood I marked out for myself a plan for study which served me well as the years passed on. I could not well concentrate on the lessons in books during the very busy daylight hours, so I decided on the early morning hours for my studies. Therefore I began my studies at four o’clock and put in three solid hours before the household began to stir.”
“The world had long since proclaimed this cruelty sacrilege [plural marriage], but with all my soul I believed it to be a most true and righteous principle, else I could not have under any condition accepted and become reconciled to its practice.”
“I have gone to bed on one or two occasions thinking I would give up—but I would think of the wise words of God that we must not give way to all these pains and aches; if we did there would ever be something to distract our thoughts.”
“Had I only to depend upon my strength I should surely despair, but if I am faithful I know there is One who will aid and bless me.”
“The busy days and months and years following my return to my mountain home, with its responsible and most sacred duties of wife and motherhood combined with the practice of my profession, I fear I shall never be able to depict in words.”
“I feel that it was only through the divine interposition of Providence that I was enable ever to bring myself to pass through the ordeal [leaving her young family and going to medical school], and it might have been that had I fully realized the magnitude of the undertaking I would have shrunk from it.”
“I do not feel my spirit great. But Oh, I have suffered—and pray it has never been in vain.”
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