Medical Care ca. 1900

I'm back on the life of Rockefeller: Titan, by Ron Chernow.

I should probably post on a number of things, but for now this caught my eye.

Frederick T. Gates was the man Rockefeller counted on both to manage his investments outside Standard Oil, and to launch and manage large scale philanthropic donations.

[blockquote]On summer vacation with his family in the Catskill Mountains in 1897, Gates tackled a book of door-stopping length: Principles and Practice of Medicine, a thousand-page tome by William Osler of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, the most renowned contemporary physician. [Pause for some near-local colour: Osler was born and raised at Bond Head, not far from here, a little north on old Highway 27 from, er, Lloydtown]. [snip] Gates was appalled at the backward state of medicine unintentionally disclosed by Osler's book: While the author delineated the symptoms of many diseases, he seldom identified the responsible germs and presented cures for only four or five diseases. How could one respect medicine that was so strong on anecdote and description but so weak on diagnosis and treatment?...His timing was faultless, for major strides were being made in bacteriology. For the first time, specific microorganisms were being isolated as the causes of disease, removing medicine forever from the realm of patent-medicine vendors such as Doc Rockefeller [John D's father].[/blockquote]

[snip]

At the time, the concept of a medical-research institute was still alien in America. The country's medical schools were mostly commercial operations, taught by practicing doctors who picked up spare money by lecturing on the side. Standards were so abysmal that many schools did not even require a college degree for entry. Since these medical mills had no incentive to undertake serious research, medicine hovered in a twilight area between science and guesswork.

Doc Rockefeller was no doctor, but one of his favourite ways of making money was selling snake oil and variations thereof. Because of his desire to start a new life with a wife other than John D's mother, and a new set of children, he went by many years under the name Dr. William Levingston. For some years he had a young sidekick named Charles Johnston, who eventually became a "real" doctor.

[blockquote]Before meeting Johnston, Bill had fallen back on his old deaf-and-dumb peddler routine. [Wearing a sign saying "I'm deaf and dumb, can you help me?" Especially effective with female relatives of the clergy]. Native Americans believed that when the gods deprived people of one sense, they granted them supernatural healing powers in return, and this made them easy targets for Bill's act. Now he spotted a new opportunity. Charles Johnston had high cheekbones, nut-brown skin, and flowing black hair and could easily be mistaken for a Native American. Bill hired him as his assistant, decked him out in splendid feathers and war paint, and featured him as his adopted Indian son. From the back of his wagon, Bill told his spellbound audience that Johnston, an Indian prince, had learned secret medicinal formulas from his father, a great chieftain.[/blockquote]
[snip]

Later on, when he became a physician of distinction and president of the College of Medicine and Surgery in Chicago, Charles Johnston feared legal repercussions for his earlier gypsy wanderings with Bill and sought to portray him as a genuine folk healer instead of as a bald-faced quack.

The best and most respectable medical practice was separated by--how much? a hair's breadth?--from the most naked chicanery. The snake oil salesmen may even have struck a better balance between harm and good than "real" doctors, who were torturers as well as quacks by comparison. I should probably feel more how terrible it all was--the suffering people went through, even after the phony healers had finished with them. But mostly I find it all absolutely hilarious.

Sun Jan 30, 2005 6:43 pm MST by robertll | Email Article |

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Medical Care ca. 1900