Lottie Blake

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Charlotte Cornelia Isbell Blake (born June 10, 1876 in in Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia; died November 16, 1976 in Alabama) was a physician who practiced in Birmingham and Huntsville and as a missionary for the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Panama, Haiti and Jamaica.

Lottie was the oldest of eleven children born to Thomas and Frances Duiguid Isbell. The family moved to Columbus, Ohio when she was three. Her mother's Sunday School became the nucleus around which the Union Grove Baptist Church was founded. She graduated from public high school in 1894 and enrolled in a teacher's training course. In 1896 she and several other members of the family converted to the Seventh-day Adventist Church and she transferred to the Adventist Nurses' Training School in Battle Creek, Michigan which was headed by cereal inventor John Kellogg.

At Kellogg's urging, Lottie Isbell continued to study at the American Medical Missionary College, where she completed her medical doctorate. She aspired to work as a missionary doctor in Africa, but, again following Kellogg's advice, began her career at the Rock City Sanitarium in Nashville, Tennessee. Her faith in "natural" remedies made her subject to derision in the well-educated community. In 1903 she moved to Huntsville as resident physician for the Oakwood Manual Training School, and was successful in battling an outbreak of serious illness shortly after her arrival.

Isbell soon associated with Birmingham physician Jim Pearson and commuted to Huntsville regularly. She obtained her medical license in Alabama in 1904 and in 1905 she founded a nurse training program at Oakwood. On September 18, 1907 she married Adventist minister David Blake in Birmingham.

The Blakes returned to Nashville while he studied at Meharry Medical College and assisted her at her private sanitarium. After he earned his M.D. they moved back to Ohio and organized the Columbus Ephesus Church. In 1913 David Blake accepted a call to a mission in Empire, Panama. He was soon joined by Lottie and their three daughters. They welcomed a fourth daughter and a son while living there. As private missionaries, they supported themselves by practicing medicine professionally, and established a well-equipped practice in Cristóbal.

By 1916 the Blakes had relocated to Port au Prince, Haiti, but found themselves struggling financially. The Seventh-day Adventist General Conference approved funds to construct a church and school in Cape Haitien, but within a year David had relocated to Charlestown, West Virginia to try to establish a more stable medical practice. Lottie and the children remained in the Caribbean, staying with Blake's parents in Jamaica. David Blake died from pneumonia on October 31, 1917.

After she was widowed, Blake's younger children were sent away to live with various family members. Some tensions arose when those relatives fell away from the Adventist church. The church granted Lottie an $8.00/week "sustentation fund" to support her efforts to raise her daughters in the faith. She re-established herself in Charlestowne for the next five years, then returned to Columbus where she was rejoined by her children resumed a successful medical practice.

In 1935 Blake moved her practice to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and partnered with Stark O. Cherry until his death in 1945. She specialized in treating women and children, and was renowned for her well-respected cure for "Smokey City pneumonia" which was a common ailment in the steel-producing city.

After retiring in 1957, Blake shared a home with her daughter Alice in Huntsville. She died there at 100 in 1976.

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