Alan L.Hart: Trailblazing Transgender Doctor #66

In February 1918 Alan L. Hart was a talented, up-and-coming 27-year-old intern at San Francisco Hospital. Hart, who stood at 5'4" and weighed about 120 pounds, mixed well with his colleagues at work and afterward—smoking, drinking, swearing and playing cards. His round glasses hemmed in his pensive eyes, a high white collar often flanked his dark tie, and his short hair was slicked neatly to the right. Though the young doctor’s alabaster face was smooth, he could deftly go through the motions of shaving with a safety razor. A photograph of a woman, who he had told colleagues was his wife, hung on his boarding-room wall.

Then, one day that February, Hart was gone. He left behind nothing but his razor, a stack of mail, a pile of men’s clothing—and the photograph, still gazing down from the wall.

Alberta Lucille Hart, known as Lucille, was born on October 4, 1890, in Halls Summit—a lonesome part of Kansas just west of the Missouri border. The child’s father Albert, a hay, grain and hog merchant, died two years later, and his widow Edna moved with Lucille to make a new start in Oregon. They eventually settled there in the pretty town of Albany, where the Calapooia and Willamette rivers twist together like twine into a single sprawling flow.

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