Dr. Kate Pelham Newcomb was a popular physician in Northern Wisconsin who provided health care where few medical services were available.

Kate Newcomb, born Kate Pelham in Kansas, grew up in Buffalo, New York. Her mother died when Kate was very young; later on, when a high-school friend also died, she told her father that she wanted to be a doctor. He said no, so she became a teacher, but then she gave that up, too, to help her father after his second wife died. Newcomb eventually convinced her father to let her go to medical school at the University of Buffalo. After earning her M.D. in 1917, she moved to Detroit for an internship at the women’s hospital, working in a section dedicated to unwed mothers. She met and married her husband and eventually moved with him to his hometown of Boulder Junction, outside Eagle River, Wisconsin.