This is a transcription of the Minnie (Edwards) Atwood biography from New Hampshire Women: A Collection of Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Daughters and Residents of the Granite State, Who are Worthy Representatives of their Sex in the Various Walks and Conditions of Life, The New Hampshire Publishing Co., Concord, NH, 1895, page 111.
Minnie (Edwards) Atwood
MINNIE EDWARDS ATWOOD unquestionably stands as the representative lady embalmer of New Hampshire, being the first to receive a diploma from the “United States School of Embalming” under the tuition of Professor A. Renouard, who for many years has been acknowledged as the leading demonstrator of this science. He writes of Mrs. Atwood, “I found her an able, intelligent, and refined lady, of keen perceptions and clear reasoning faculties.” For six years she has unflinchingly shared the duties of her husband, William H. Atwood, a progressive funeral director of Lisbon. As a contributor to the undertaking journals she labors for the higher education of the fraternity, believing it the only means whereby an honorable profession can be established for those engaged in the sacred and important work of caring for the dead; that they should be compelled to prove by examination and registration that they are competent to preserve dead bodies from decay and protect the living from infection; that good moral character, refinement, and culture are as necessary for those who must enter the home under such peculiar and close relations, as for the physician. Also that it is only fitting and proper for a woman to attend the bodies of women and children. In order to make herself a peer of any of the opposite sex in her profession, she matriculated at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Roston for a special course in anatomy. Mrs. Atwood is the only daughter of George Kinsman Edwards and Harriet Kinsman (Howland) Edwards, and was born in East Landaff (now Easton) at the base of Mount Kinsman, a peak of the Franconia Range, which took its name from Nathan Kinsman, her great-great grandfather. Here amid the uplifting, soul stirring grandeur of New Hampshire’s natural scenery has this family lived for five generations, until they may perchance have imbibed some of the characteristics of the old granite hills, so clear to the subject of this sketch whose passionate love of nature is intensely developed.