Lauretta Eby Kress

Lauretta Eby Kress (February 10, 1863 – June 28, 1955), also known as Etta, was a Canadian-American obstetrician who was the first woman to practice medicine as a licensed physician in Montgomery County, Maryland. Kress was a prominent members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and founded the Sydney Sanitarium while on a mission in Sydney, Australia.

Kress was born in Flint, Michigan to Hannah Amelia Burkhart Eby and Aaron Eby. Her mother was a teacher and her father, a Canadian immigrant, was an affluent blacksmith and carriage builder. The family later lived in Detroit and Buchanan.

Kress graduated high school early at the age of sixteen. She worked as a school teacher in Buchanan before moving back to Detroit and working for a pharmaceutical company. She met Daniel H. Cress (later Kress), in Canada, and the couple moved to the United States after marrying.

Both Kress and her husband were practicing Baptists, and Daniel Kress became a pastor, before leaving the congregation over Sabbath celebrations. The couple eventually became Seventh-day Adventists.

After meeting John Harvey Kellogg at a conference, Kress and her husband moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, where they worked at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Kellogg convinced them both to study medicine, both at the Sanitarium and later at the University of Michigan Medical School. Both Lauretta and Daniel Kress graduated from Michigan in 1894, she as an obstetrician/gynecologist and surgeon, and he as a gastroenterologist.

From the 1890s to the very early 1900s, the couple worked as medical missionaries in London and Australia, at the personal urging of Seventh-day Adventist cofounder Ellen G. White. While in Australia, Kress founded the Sydney Sanitarium.

Kress joined the medical staff of the Washington Sanitarium in 1907. In 1916, she opened the Kress Maternity and Children's Hospital at the Washington Sanitarium, which later became Washington Adventist Hospital, delivering more than 5,000 babies in 30 years there. In 1930, she became the Director of the Women's Clinic in Washington, D.C.

Kress was a member of the Women's Medical Association, and was president its D.C. chapter from 1927 to 1929, and national chair for legislature from 1934 to 1935. She was an early advocate for nonsmoking, as she believed it was harmful to health.

Kress and her husband published the Good Health Cookery Book, in which they advised readers to eat two vegetarian meals a day, one early in the morning and the other in the mid-afternoon.

Kress convinced her future husband not to smoke or drink, and they were lifelong advocates of abstinence from both, and also from eating meat.

She married Daniel Hartman Cress on July 9, 1884 (his surname was originally Cress, but she later convinced him to change it to Kress). They had three children, Eva Lauretta Kress (born 1885), Ora Hannah Kress (born 1887, who also became a physician and later ran for Congress), and John Eby Kress (born 1903). She painted china as a hobby. The family lived at 705 Carroll Avenue, Takoma Park, Maryland, that is now a historic home. Although the couple began their married life as Baptists, and he was briefly a Baptist minister, they became devout and famous Seventh-day Adventists.