Meet the “Angel on Snowshoes”
Snowshoe Kate and the Hospital Built for Pennies
Dr. Kate Pelham Newcomb (or "Dr. Kate," as she was known to her patients) was a doctor in rural northern Wisconsin during the early 1900s, a time when very few women practiced medicine. Because the nearest hospital was over two hours away and the snowy roads were often impassable, Dr. Kate frequently traveled many miles by snowmobile or snowplow in order to reach her patients, which lead to her nickname, the "Angel on Snowshoes."
In her years as a doctor, she delivered an astonishing 4,000 babies, and those same children later played a key role in the "Million Penny Parade," a massive grassroots fundraiser inspired by Dr. Kate's lifelong efforts to build a hospital in her community. Dr. Kate's dreams of being able to better serve her community finally came to fruition in 1954 when Lakeland Memorial Hospital opened — with Dr. Kate serving as chief of staff.
Release date: October 28, 2025. Published by ABRAMS Kids. Illustrated by Jaime Zollars, www.jaimezollars.com.
Reviews for Snowshoe Kate and the Hospital Built for Pennies
“Preus and Zollars excel at anchoring both human and numerical stories, conveying via first-person prose and crisp, digitally colored graphite images the expansive impact of both one doctor and all those pennies.”
“Memorable pictures of what a worthy life, and a million pennies, might look like.
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