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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806148632 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/1951 |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.71(d) |
About the Author
Lewis J. Moorman, M.D. (1875–1954) began practice in Oklahoma Territory as a horse-and-buggy doctor. A worldwide authority on tuberculosis and former dean of the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, Moorman is the author of Tuberculosis and Genius.
Read an Excerpt
Pioneer Doctor
By Lewis J. Moorman
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 1951 University of Oklahoma Press Norman, Publishing Division of the UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4914-1
CHAPTER 1
The Doctor and I
LONG before dawn on a bleak February morning in 1875, according to all available data, the old farmhouse was strangely animated. There was a sense of anxious alertness. It seemed important to be awake, yet the door to the children's room was closed and conversation subdued. The smoldering fire had been restored, the hickory backlog was glowing, and the kitchen stove was going because there was water to boil. A rider had been dispatched for the doctor who had set the date for my first birthday party. Unfortunately he could not attend because some other unborn baby was claiming priority on my natal day. Being thoroughly familiar with the ways of the stork, however, the doctor placed his wife in the receiving line. Fortunately she was not a novice at the trade. Not only had she brought other people's babies into the world, she had experienced prenatal stress in her own womb and had endured the Biblical travail. She knew better than the doctor that babies must come when they must. Serving as an experienced accoucheuse, she relieved the stork's tired wings. Knowing the pitfalls of life through the behavior of her own derelict son and being a good friend of my mother's, no doubt she blessed me with a silent prayer born of maternal sympathy.
To this day it makes no difference who launched my life, who tied my cord, who applied the oil, who washed behind my ears, who first clothed my body, or who put me to the breast. It was no concern of mine who tucked me, as number eight, in the creaky old cradle and chunked up the fire that I might be enveloped in the intriguing lights and shadows which have blended so mercifully throughout the years of my life. It matters only that the first lusty cry was not stimulated by a slap on my bottom or a dash of water on my chest, but by the doctor's absence. My first vigorous vocal performance might be considered a spontaneous protest against the community's god who had stood me up.
The period of infancy and childhood, sans immunity shots and bacterial prohibitions, was a lively adventure oblivious of danger. That I am living today suggests luck rather than survival of the fittest. Christopher Morley once said, "When a man is born, he's done for." I quote this not to refute or affirm, but to say that I have been "done" for many things since I was born. According to Andrew Lang, "Every man is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian." I knew nothing of Socratic reason, the grove of Apollo, the school of Plato, or Plato's famous pupil and rival, Aristotle. In retrospect I take sides with the lad from the womb of Phoestis who came down from Macedonia clothed in bearskins. It was the lot of this country boy ultimately to snatch the metaphysical Plato from stargazing and daydreaming and bring him down to a realistic consideration of man's earthly existence and the close analytical study of living forms. Perhaps my preference is based upon the fact that Aristotle was the son of a physician, a patron of medicine, and the progenitor of the natural sciences.
Our old family doctor, a true disciple of Aristotle, was not committed wholly to survival through luck. Long before our proposed birthday party, Edward Jenner had discovered that vaccination against smallpox not only promised an addition of three years to the span of life but assured protection against unsightly pitting which marred so many otherwise beautiful faces. So when the appointed time came, the doctor dragged me from hiding under the manger to give me all he had in the then undeveloped field of immunity. This first vaccination, with Mother and Father standing by, not lifting a hand, left me with a generous scar on my arm and an exalted opinion of the doctor's authority. A few years later, when my next older brother was dangerously ill with typhoid fever, again I came under the ferrule of this unquestioned authority. After declaring that I was suffering from walking typhoid, paradoxically the old doctor insisted that I remain absolutely in bed.
One day when this same brother, my constant bedfellow, was spitting blood, the doctor with Prince Albert coat and flowing white beard solemnly sat at the bedside with saddlebags across his knees. No doubt he was contemplating the boy's uncertain future while Mother and Father were worrying about what seemed to them a catastrophic present. I have never forgotten this bedside picture, which became more impressive as my knowledge grew. As the agile old clinician lifted the reins from over the gate post and took to his saddle, he said to my father, "If you don't watch that boy, some day he may have consumption."
I lived to see the tragic results of this drama which was so poorly comprehended at the time. Through three generations the pallid actors have taken their pathetic tuberculous course across the stage. Their lives have been punctuated by flashes of blood, bouts in bed, surgical collapse, and chronic invalidism, with all the domestic, economic, social, and psychological side effects.
But in defense of the good old doctor who failed to break the contact between the unsuspecting brothers, it may be said that he acted in the light of his time, which was little, if any, more revealing than in the days of Homer, who said, "There is a grievous consumption which separates soul and body." Fortunately a brighter day was dawning. Robert Koch was on the trail of the tubercle bacillus. Already the intrepid Trudeau was learning his lines in the Adirondacks. The founding of the National Tuberculosis Association and the American Sanatorium Association was not far away. A knowledge of the bacterial cause of disease was dawning, and medicine was approaching the end of a period in which tuberculosis was truly "the captain of the men of death." Spinoza, Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Beaumont, Balzac, Rousseau, and John Locke were among the multitudes saluting this "captain."
Molière, after playing the part of the imaginary invalid in his own comedy, coughed his life's blood into the lap of a Sister of Charity and died in less than an hour after leaving the stage. Francis Thompson, having been denied the shelter of London's public libraries because of an objectionable cough, had languished on park benches, shivering the nights away sustained only by laudanum and the exalted spirit of his poetry. After a long life of physical and psychological accomplishment with periodic bouts of fever and weakness, Voltaire had died from exhaustion following a series of pulmonary hemorrhages. Friedrich Schiller during the last ten years of his life worked frantically and sought swift recording of his creative images, knowing the Captain of Death was on his heels. Because of physical frailty, cough, and a dash of blood, Shelley had gone to Italy only to be prematurely claimed by the sea. John Keats, shockingly young, had died of advanced tuberculosis in Rome. Ralph Waldo Emerson had spent a fateful winter in the South with his cough and his pleuritic stitch only to seek further relief at sea. No wonder he blessed a suffering world with his reflections upon the compensation of calamity. Fortunately, medicine was thinking of prevention of disease rather than the compensation of calamity, and the time was passing when a doctor could sit at the bedside of a youth coughing his life's blood away with never a word about the danger of contact.
Although I was often in conflict with the doctor throughout my youth, it was his fine character, his high place in the community, his hold upon the hearts of the people, his unselfish devotion to duty, his obvious wisdom, and his unchallenged authority that influenced me to go to medical school. It was due to his interest, approval, and assistance that I decided between my junior and senior years to take the Tennessee State Board Examination for temporary license to practice medicine. It was his saddlebags filled with his favorite remedies that came down from Kentucky with my cherished saddle mare when I located in the little town of Big Rock on Dyers Creek, twenty-five miles from the nearest railroad station. Thus the good old family doctor sent his wife when I was being born and blessed the premature birth of my medical career with his own saddlebags and his time-tried medicine.
CHAPTER 2In Nature's Power
LIKE most country boys, I was born down the lane diagonally across from the barn lots. How I escaped cowlick is a mystery. The big log house had taken on a clapboard front, but the rustic setting belied its modernity and defied description. The wide, picketed lawn, the birds and insects, and towering trees, flanked by green meadows and cultivated fields with the deep forest as a mysterious backdrop, created a picture for the reader's imagination and for the writer's eternal keeping.
Through a stile east of the house, a path led from the yard into the great apple orchard and followed its shady course to the old log barn with spacious sheds and cavernous depths. The enclosed sheds served as a haven for the sheep always exposed to the danger of predatory dogs. There was a well-chinked workshop in the orchard where harness, machinery, and tools were repaired. The most exacting of all the shop's crafts was the making of axhandles from fresh, choice cuts of white hickory wood. The old orchard is one of the most vivid and most cherished of all my childhood recollections. In retrospect, I can see the ancient trees in full bloom merging their graceful boughs in friendly intimacy, presenting a symphony of fluttering blossoms in delicate shades of shell pink. The old gray mare and her annual foal are under the great rambow trees, muzzling fallen petals in search of the first tender tufts of bluegrass. In imagination, I see them shivering the drifting petals off their shoulders.
The main barn, across the lane where the horses and mules were housed and where the hay and corn were stored, was the center of unceasing interest and an abiding source of childish delight. In the great hayloft, through open windows, iridescent barn swallows flitted to and fro tending their young in nests securely plastered to high rafters. Naturalists say that these swallows have winged their way across North America from around Lake Baikal in Asia, but we accepted them as the product of our own little world. It was not uncommon to discover hens' nests full of eggs hidden in the hay or a bed of tight-eyed kittens temporarily deserted by the wild, mewing mother.
The endless tasks around the barn, save emergencies and routine chores, were allowed to accumulate for rainy days. On such occasions my older brothers and I worked frantically husking and shelling corn, in anticipation of the wild scramble for rats and mice as the pile dwindled. Occasionally we competed with each other in forking manure or stripping tobacco and tying it into hands ready to be bulked down to await an opportune market and a favorable season for delivery.
Only those who have never lived with tobacco and have never seen it in the bulk on the floor of the barn from month to month and year to year can chew and smoke without certain misgivings. Dogs, not often ambidextrous, seemed to favor the left-hand corner of the bulk. Occasionally horses and mules backed up to make their deposits; often chickens nested there and sometimes roosted overhead. One can never be sure what gives the juicy plug its licorice flavor, or what brings to the choice cigar its delicate aroma. Not withstanding all this, Lord Fairfax wrote to George Washington: "I would that you smoked a pipe. It confers great equanimity in times of doubt, and the Indians hold it to be helpful in council."
Coming West with this tobacco background, I found nothing more impressive than to meet a cowboy on the plains who had exhausted or lost his plug or his twist of homespun. After a friendly greeting, his first question was, "Have you got a chaw?" With marble mantels, brass fenders, and no hot coals to make the ambeer sizzle, chewing tobacco is rapidly becoming a lost art. For a genuine red-blooded plainsman, there is no such thing as soul-satisfying cogitation without a "chaw" in his cheek and a place to spit. It will be a sad day when the reflective quid entirely disappears.
Before I was large enough to do heavy work I often rode behind my father as he traveled from field to field and from farm to farm to see how the crops grew, to inspect the livestock, and to direct the work. His homemade twist of tobacco always bulged his hip pocket and disturbed my comfort. On one occasion, after riding through a deep forest, we found two young sons of a tenant farmer piling brush. Not satisfied with their work, my father dismounted to show the boys how it should be done. They dropped everything to watch the demonstration. After a while the older one said, "Mr. Moorman, you are a working old devil, ain't you?" Never had I seen my father so completely nonplused, but he recognized the truth in this frank assertion and held his peace. The ground was being prepared for tobacco, and anybody who grew tobacco in Kentucky in those days became "a working old devil."
In addition to cultivating "the weed," my father was a wholesale tobacco dealer, covering three counties. The tobacco was rehandled, prized into large hogsheads, and shipped to Louisville, where it was stored in great warehouses to face the hazards of a fluctuating market. From the time I can first remember to the time I finished college, I was a slave to tobacco. At best the tobacco crop was on the grower's hands 365 days in the year. In winter there was clearing and logrolling to make the new ground ready; in spring there were plant beds to burn and sow. Night fires illuminating wooded hills supplied ample evidence of the Kentucky tobacco growers' industry. Later came plowing and harrowing to make ready for the delicate plants grown in soil chastened by fire and protected from sun and insects by a covering of cheesecloth. There was a long season of chopping, plowing, worming, and suckering. At night our trousers would stand alone because of the gum from the tobacco and the goo from the mangled worms.
As autumn approached and frost threatened, the mature plants with their great spreading leaves took on a yellow tinge in anticipation of the knife. All hands were assembled to cut the crop, split the stalks, and string them on sticks for the scaffold. This operation required dispatch because a heavy frost might prove disastrous. After a period of curing on the scaffold, the crop was hung in the tobacco barns for further curing. Later the stripping, tying, and bulking down followed the course already described. Thus one could claim the unique experience of having been a slave to "the weed" without becoming an addict. In the over-all picture there was one redeeming feature for small children — the tobacco sticks made thoroughbred stick horses.
Feeding time at the big barn always held a lot of interest. Carrying corn into the stalls involved fascinating hazards and required experience, courage, and a certain degree of mastery. Thus boys were envious and eager to grow up to the bushel basket. No one could tell when a frightened animal might kick or whirl, pinning the man with the basket to the wall, but no farm boy past ten years of age should be denied this risk. Every winter we had from ten to twenty young mules in one large stall. Once while throwing down hay from the loft, I stepped on a loose board and landed in the center of the stall. Suddenly, twenty excited animals were cowering in fear with forty heels promptly turned toward the surprised interloper. In this emergency, the mother of invention called for mastery. Artfully employing the language of the mule skinner with a degree of authority that relaxed tense muscles and released crimped tails, I escaped unharmed.
Living on a big farm in Kentucky with its ever changing environment was synonymous with learning. Growing up involved an interesting process of progression. In fact, learning to walk and learning to work were simultaneous accomplishments. Through the channels of adventure, knowledge comes easy and work flows like fun. Having to negotiate one task after another as experience came, until the whole range of farm work was encompassed, possessed the elements of a fascinating game. Such experiences made a college education seem only supplementary to more essential ingrained knowledge.
On our farm it seemed that colts, calves, pigs, and lambs were forever being born and needing special care. Tempering the wind to the shorn lamb was among the most interesting of our childhood tasks. Nearly every day in springtime new lambs dropped down from the sky. In the daytime the sheep grazed in the meadow below the orchard, and when night approached it was a wonderful sight to see them hurrying to their fold between long rows of blossoming trees aglow with the slanting rays of the setting sun. Lambs too new to follow their mothers out of the meadow were brought in under our arms. If they were too weak to stand up and get their dinners, they were placed in a basket by the big open fireplace where they received warm milk from a bottle until they were strong enough to join the flock. Just before being driven into the sheds at night, the lambs were more playful than at any other time. In great glee they chased each other up and down the trunks of fallen trees, jumped ditches, disappeared down deep gullies, and momentarily bobbed up in unexpected places until sobered by the call to the sheds or obscured by the waning twilight. Their energy seemed to be inexhaustible.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pioneer Doctor by Lewis J. Moorman. Copyright © 1951 University of Oklahoma Press Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword, by HENRY A. CHRISTIAN, M.D.,Preface,
Chapter I. The Doctor and I,
Chapter II. In Nature's Power,
Chapter III. A Profitable Interlude,
Chapter IV. Big Rock,
Chapter V. Medical School Completed,
Chapter VI. Alabama,
Chapter VII. Westward Ho,
Chapter VIII. The Promised Land,
Chapter IX. Chickasha,
Chapter X. Jet,
Chapter XI. O. B. on the Plains,
Chapter XII. From the Mill Run,
Chapter XIII. Social Amenities,
Chapter XIV. The Profligate Plains,
Chapter XV. My Horses,
Chapter XVI. The Transition,
Chapter XVII. Vienna,
Chapter XVIII. Sparks from the Grindstone,
Chapter XIX. A Bug Full of Tricks,
Chapter XX. The Little Devil's Dues,
Chapter XXI. Danger Signals and How to Meet Them,
Chapter XXII. Prevention and Management of Tuberculosis,
Chapter XXIII. The Psychology of the Tuberculous Patient,
Chapter XXIV. Lights and Shadows in the Sanatorium,
Chapter XXV. Medical Education,
Chapter XXVI. Medicine in Retrospect and Prospect,
Chapter XXVII. Abroad and at Home,
Note,
Index,