Page 9 - 2007 DT 12 Issues

I n T h i s I s s u e

Featured Article
Frontier Medicine............................1

Special
Western Snapshots..........................7
Departments
News & Notes..................................2
February 2007 Programs & Hikes...........................4
Desk Schedule................................6
Bulletin Board................................8

FRONTIER MEDICINE School rejected a demand that students

—The best advice to pioneer families . . . don't get sick! be given written examinations because
"a majority of the students cannot write
well enough." Nebraska was the first
by Chuck Kleber Tonic" assured buyers that it had been state to pass a law requiring doctors
on the market for over 20 years with a to register and be graduates of a rec-
t was said in the Old West that "The million bottles sold last year. A spoon- ognized medical school . . . in 1880!
cowards never started and the weak ful, regularly taken, would make adults Little wonder, then, that in the West
Idied on the way." There was a lot and children "as fat as pigs." That ex- you were at the mercy of chance and
of truth in that. It took nerve to set out tra blubber was thought to be a sign of treatment that sometimes bordered on
on a quest into the western wilderness. good health. Some entrepreneurs used the medieval. Blood letting and purg-
Hostile Indians, outlaws, treacherous side-show type entertainment to attract ing were still used to cure a wide range
trails and weather—all hazards, of illnesses. And folk medicine
but above them all stood the remained popular; the danger
danger of sickness. For much of lockjaw from a rusty nail
of the 19th century, the time of in the foot could be prevented
greatest migration to the West, by wrapping the foot in a cloth
there was a critical shortage of soaked in coal oil. Snakebite?
knowledge about what caused Mix gunpowder with vinegar.
disease and how to treat it. Warm manure was another
Cholera, for example, was still treatment. Some other cures
not associated with bacteria- were even more bizarre. But
infected water. Compounding there were also doctors, real
the problem was a lack of quali- Walter ‘Doc’ Welsh, circa 1910 and self-taught, who did their
fied doctors and medicines that best to help people. There were
could help. The weak did die on the people, including live testimony from many like TV's Doc Baker in "Little
way . . . and after arrival . . . but the charlatans to vouch for a liver restorer, House on the Prairie" and "Dr. Quinn
hardy survived, and they were the men snakebite cure . . . whatever. There was - Medicine Woman." In real life, Dr.
and women who won the West. something for every ailment. Marcus Whitman (1802-1847), rode
It was the era of "patent medi- In this climate of ignorance and vast distances in the Oregon Territory
cines," the cure-alls of sugared and shortage, if was often better to simply with his saddlebags full of medical
colored water that could eliminate let nature do its best. The vast major- instruments and useful medicines, like
your arthritis, remove the pain of gout ity of frontier doctors were self-taught quinine for malaria or perhaps opium
and even cure cancer. Distinctively "irregulars" with no formal training. to dull the pain if an operation had to
painted "medicine wagons" went from It was only in 1849 that the Ameri- be performed. Payment was often done
town to town, carrying elixirs with se- can Medical Association established
cret formulas, accompanied by outra- boards to qualify medical schools.
geous claims. "Grove's Tasteless Chill Twenty years later, Harvard's Medical Frontier Medicine, continued on p.6