Agnes Sholly Knights: Shamokin’s “Lady Doctor”

A doctor at the door

In April 1947, a Selinsgrove newspaper marked fifty years in medicine for Dr. Agnes Sholly Knights. Reporter Agnes Sellin Schoch described an older physician who still answered calls from longtime patients, sometimes leaving home with her medical bag when a car arrived from the surrounding countryside. Children played on her lawn, and she settled their quarrels with refreshments. The portrait was affectionate, but its subject’s memories also reached back to the difficult beginnings of a woman’s medical practice in Shamokin.

There, she had become known as “the lady doctor.” Knights recalled treating women and children, keeping office hours in the afternoon and evening, and making obstetrical calls across the coal hills. A horse and buggy eventually helped with her rounds. When another call came after the horse had been put away, she sometimes took her bag and walked.

From the classroom to medical school

Knights grew up near Verdilla in Snyder County and attended Freeburg Academy. In Schoch’s account, she taught in rural schools before joining the public-school staff in Selinsgrove. Teaching was her first profession; medicine came after an episode she still remembered more than half a century later.

She told Schoch that she had received permission to visit the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, hoping the trip would help her teaching. On returning, she found herself suspended without pay. Dr. Newton Nipple encouraged her to study medicine in Philadelphia. She initially expected to enter Jefferson Medical College, only to learn that women were not admitted. She then applied to the Woman’s Medical College.

Her preparation was not straightforward. Knights remembered needing more Latin and chemistry and fitting additional study around her teaching schedule. She described medical school as demanding, but in 1897 she completed the course. A contemporary notice in the Snyder County Tribune congratulated Agnes Sholly on her medical examination and graduation at the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia.

Making a practice in Shamokin

After graduation, Knights said, she worked for a time in the college’s outpatient obstetrical service. She also recalled passing the state-board examinations and returning to Selinsgrove for the summer. A September 1897 newspaper notice announced that Dr. Agnes Sholly was offering professional services. That brief item did not say where her office was.

In her later interview, Knights placed her move to Shamokin in the fall of 1897. She remembered resistance to a woman doctor: landlords would not rent her an office, she said, and she had to purchase property to establish one. Her practice centered on women and children. Men in the household might ask her for medicine when she was attending a wife or child, but, in her telling, were reluctant to become her patients themselves.

Those memories belong to Knights’s own account of her work. Newspapers from January 1903 provide a separate glimpse of an established Shamokin practice. The Miners’ Journal described her as a physician with an extensive local practice; a same-week reprint in the Snyder County Tribune carried a similar description. Contemporary readers knew Dr. Agnes Sholly as a practicing Shamokin physician.

House calls over the coal hills

Knights’s recollections make the geography of that practice tangible. A morning round could be followed by office appointments and another trip on foot after dark. She remembered walking as far as six miles on a call and being summoned at night for births. These were journeys to patients’ homes, not visits to a single clinic.

She also recalled treating illnesses such as typhoid fever and diphtheria in years when sanitation and preventive care differed sharply from what she knew in 1947. In her recollection, a medical bag, office hours and the willingness to travel were all part of caring for families across the coal hills.

Retirement that did not last

By April 1914, the Selinsgrove paper was reporting a property purchase by “Mrs. Dr. Agnes Sholly Knights, of Shamokin”: a dwelling at High and Walnut Streets and the adjoining lot. The notice records the purchase, not the exact day she moved. In 1947, Knights recalled returning to Selinsgrove before the First World War and building a house on West Walnut Street.

She had intended to retire, but soon opened an office and continued working. She recalled caring for patients during the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919, when local doctors were stretched. By the time Schoch interviewed her, her work was smaller in scale, centered on old patients and people who still sought her help.

On June 13, 1947, the Shamokin News-Dispatch reported her death at Sunbury Community Hospital after an illness. Its obituary called her the first woman physician to practice in Shamokin. That was the newspaper’s description of her place in the community. The fuller life remembered in its columns—and in her own interview—is of a teacher who pursued medical training, established a practice against resistance, and kept answering the door.