Avelina Mills Saville
1859-1920
Avelina Mills Saville was born October 18,1859, in Salt Lake City, Utah. She married John Harrie Saville in Salt Lake City, Utah. They had four children, three daughters and one son. Only her one daughter, Caroline, and the son, Willard, lived to maturity.
“Aunt Dean” Saville, as she was lovingly called, was called and set apart as a nurse and doctor to go to Colonia Juarez, Mexico, by Apostle George Teasdale in the Salt Lake Temple in 1896. She had studied and practiced medicine for three years with Doctors Seymour B. Young, Wright and Mattie Hughes Cannon and passed successfully the Utah State Medical Board Examination. She was well prepared with knowledge and experience and a large stock of the best drugs and equipment to fulfill this mission. But she always felt that the success and power to heal the sick, during the 17 years of ministrations to the native people surrounding the colony and that of the LDS who lived there, was due more to her complete dependence upon, and her faith in, the promise of Apostle Teasdale when he set her apart: that if she relied and put her trust in the Lord and called upon Him for aid, she should at all times know just what to do in the very hour of her need. This was literally fulfilled, as of all the 800 women she delivered, not one died under her care.
A typical case was when she was called to go up a 60 mile rugged mountain trail burro back, leaving during the night, with a small boy as her guide over the wild and strange mountainous country, to remove from a Mexican woman the afterbirth that she had retained for 10 days. She corrected the woman and had to do it kneeling down with the patient lying on a sheepskin on a dirt floor. The woman lived. The only remuneration “Aunt Dean” received was the first body louse she had ever had. Her efforts were untiring. She went when she was more physically ill than the patient. She not only cared for women and children but removed many cataracts from eyes of the Mexican people, a malady to which they are very susceptible.
She displayed great skill in removing a bullet from the palm of a stranger who came once to her during the night. The bullet had remained in his hand for three days and had caused it to swell to three times its natural size. He had traveled day and night, having been directed to come to Colonia Juarez to have his hand treated. He took from a back pocket a pistol and asked her to keep it while his hand was being dressed. She placed him under the influence of ether, yet it took three strong men to hold him down while she removed the bullet. While under the ether, he talked and told her he had shot and killed a man and had received the bullet in his hand and was fleeing for his life to the United States, as he was an American. He was forced to stop in this colony to have his had treated. After he recovered from the ether and was ready to leave, he asked for his pistol and said it was a good thing he did not have it in his pocket while he was out of his head or he would have shot someone. She told him to go to a doctor as soon as he reached Deming, New Mexico, and have his hand examined and dressed. He wrote her a not and told her that the doctor had told him whoever removed the bullet had done a fine piece of surgery and did not need his care. The most outstanding memory people have of her was her gentle, soothing touch and the cheerful assurance that all would be well.
Even after she could no longer attend patients, many said, “If only Aunt Dean would sit by me and hold my hand I could endure any kind of pain.” She never spared herself, and at the time, in 1912, when colonists were called out to El Paso, she left all she had and went with the rest. There were many sick and some births among these refugees who were placed by the El Paso Commercial Club in a big lumber shed which was divided into small sections for each family. Huge supplies of food were sent each day. She spent almost her entire time among the sick for three weeks. Although she had one of the best rooms and a private bath in the city’s leading hotel, she was seldom there. This great strain and lack of proper rest and care and the sorrow of leaving all she had possessed broke her health and she had to give up her glorious work and submit to being cared for by others for over five years. Eventually, she had the great desire of her heart granted, to return to her former home and the few people who returned to the colonies. Here she was lovingly cared for by her own daughter, and cousin, Maggie Ivins Bentley, as well as other devoted friends, until the end of her eventful, useful life.
She was truly a great a pioneer in this frontier country as was her pioneer mother, Emily Hill Woodmansee, the poetess, who came from England as a mere slip of a girl and pushed a handcart across the plains to Utah in 1856. Her passing was peaceful and many of the children attending her funeral were brought into the world by her hands, many of them with children of their own. They were all dressed in white and filled one side of the meetinghouse. Bishop John J. Walser said of her, “Now she is free from all physical handicaps, there is no limit to the heights she can go for the good of others, that her great soul will take her.
While the Mexican people were usually thought of as a being barbarous and uncivilized, yet the noble colony “Doctor Woman” who cared for the sick in the mountain colonies was often called to go on horseback to the ranches to attend one of their women in confinement. She was usually accompanied by only one of them to show the way. Several expressed themselves as never being afraid and they were always treated with the greatest courtesy. These women preferred our sisters to wait upon them, believing their children would be more fair than if they were waited upon by a native doctor.
Avelina Mills Saville died in Colonia Juarez, Chihuahua, on March 7, 1920 and was buried there the same day.
Caroline Telford, daughter
Stalwarts South of the Border page 600
Nelle Spilsbury Hatch
More information filling in some of the banks in Avelina’s life story can be found at: http://29deadpeople.com/wp/?page_id=109