USA > Kansas > Marshall County > History of Marshall County, Kansas : its people, industries, and institutions > Part 34
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Here was a summer health resort open for all. Here, clear pure spring water was flowing from the rocks and Aaron's rod had not been required ; here was found a variety of food more varied than the manna of old and easy to gather, as represented by the catfish in the river, the quail in the underbrush, the wild turkey in the trees, the antelope, rabbit and buffalo up the draw, or out over the hills. And here was abundance of grass for the horses and ox teams. Here was an opportunity for preventive medicine in a life of open-air freedom surrounded with plenty.
THE INDIAN MEDICINE M.VN.
Alcove Springs has the reputation of having been the summer camping ground of the nomad Indian. Here the Indian medicine man had for many generations sent his patients to camp on the hills and to breathe the clear. pure and invigorating air of Kansas breezes, or recline under the leafy branches of big spreading elms or bask in the warm sunshine out in the open, while his fevered brow was cooled by the gentle Kansas south winds. I doubt not but that many a convalescent Indian patient was aided by a channel cat-fish from the waters of the Blue river near Alcove Springs.
While the Indian, in his summer hunting trips camping here, was a fre- quent patron of Nature's dispensatory, and many a functional and pathological abnormality was warded off or aborted, yet, like the labors of the modern followers of Nesculapius, the prognosis was sometimes umfavorable and the Indian medicine man was called in the case. His methods usually consisted in spectacular demonstrations and barbaric endeavors to drive away the evil spirit.
We are told by early observers of Indian customs that the old-time medicine man practiced a system of counter-irritation somewhat similar to the mustard plaster of our grandmothers.
I remember in my boyhood days of seeing a picture in a history of primitive Indian customs and conditions that illustrated the similarity. According to that early-day observer it would be a frequent picture to see the Indian medicine man, after his fantastic demonstration had failed to drive away the bad spirit that had taken possession of the poor Indian with a head- ache, practice more heroic methods.
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BELOW THE DAM, MARYSVILLE.
ALCOVE SPRINGS. E. E. Forter, below, and John Schilling, above.
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Come with me, in your imagination, and let us stand on one of the bluffs overlooking that beautiful landscape garden surrounding Alcove Springs in its original grandeur, just before the late summer sun had ceased to cast the long shadows of evening, but is still lighting up hill and valley and giving a luster to the autumn foliage.
Focus your field glass and take a careful survey of the entire field. Up the valley, just across the bend of the draw, the herd of ponies is feeding on the fresh growth of grass that has sprung up since the recent fall rains, under the spreading trees that the white man has not yet cut down, the men are gathered in a small group discussing the exploits of the day and making plans for the morrow. Some of the women are getting supper while others are curing the fresh buffalo and antelope meat by cutting it into strips to dry in the smoke of a slow fire, kindled from dead twigs and buffalo chips.
CURING THE SICK.
The special part of the picture in which we are interested is down the valley and almost hidden by a clump of underbrush. Here we see a young Indian naked to the waist seated on a half decayed log that some cyclone had twisted from that deformed, bushy-topped cottonwood, his head grasped tightly with both hands, the face is cast down from our view, the elbows are supported on the knees and the entire body is as motionless and apparently as devoid of feeling as the old log under him.
The medicine man has apparently exhausted all ordinary methods to cure the headache : his drum has been set aside ; his buffalo head mask rests on the end of the log and now he is applying a live fire brand to the sick man's bare back. Here is counter-irritation with a vengeance, and who can say it will not divert the mind of the patient away from his headache.
When the gold seekers of the 1849 rush and the emigrant train of the forties and fifties came rolling in from Independence, Missouri, they crossed the Big Blue river at Alcove Springs and called it Independence Crossing. Fremont, in 1842, crossed here and, recognizing this as a health resort, camped here for some weeks. In 1849, when the Mormons first began their exodus to the West in large numbers, they camped here and it became an annual summer hospital for their sick and dying. A large number of graves were located here and scattered over the adjacent hills. No organized bury- ing plot was arranged nor permanent markers erected, and nothing now remains to show the last resting place of many an emigrant, Westward bound, who here received the call to which all must respon.1. Here mothers lost
(25)
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their babes and children lost their mothers. The survivors must pass on with the current of humanity, leaving on the hillside all that was visible of the dear departed.
This evidence of the frailty of humanity would indeed be dark and gloomy were it not for the symbolic meaning of the evergreen on the bluff close by. "From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death, hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing."
AMPUTATION UNDER DIFFICULTIES.
The story is told by early historians that among those emigrants passing through Marshall county was a company of Missouri farm boys with ox teams. One of their number broke his leg shortly after leaving the Missouri border. It was a compound fracture and soon became infected, not only with pus but also with the larvae of the flies. By the time they reached Alcove Springs his comrades decided that the boy's life was in immediate danger. A consultation resulted in the decision that the leg must come off in order to give him the last hope. Not one of them had ever seen such an operation : they must be their own doctors, and, worse, they had no modern operating equipment, no antiseptic and no anesthetic. They were farm boys from Missouri and knew no such word as fail.
With a lariat rope for a tourniquet and one of their hunting knives and a handsaw, the leg was soon removed above the infected injury. With a pair of common pincers they tried to find the severed arteries but could not. They heated the king bolt from one of the wagons and seared the entire face of the flaps and sewed it up with a waxed end such as had been provided for repairing their shoes.
The story as I have heard it declares that the patient made a good stump and became one of the settlers on the coast. Here was emergency surgery, with thorough sterilization of the field of operation.
GRANDMOTHER'S REMEDIES.
Up to this time there was no local doctor settled in the county. There was no county organization. The floating, moving, ever-passing hosts were thrown on their own resources.
With the coming of the actual settlers, who stayed here with the idea
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of making this a permanent home, all was changed. The good housewife came with grandmother's ideas of catnip and boneset tea and a supply of roots, dried barks and herbs, and the spring time dosing followed.
"When they see the tender grasses, And the fragrant lilacs bud, Kate takes sulphur and molasses, For to purify her blood."
From the time Frank Marshall started his ferry boat across the Blue river and on to 1860 and the starting of actual hostilities in the war, many families had formed several settlements in different parts of the county. There was a struggle for existence and none but the stoutest survived. Many a homesick young girl found herself a housewife with the house unbuilt, long- ing for the supporting hand and cheering sympathy of mother or the heavy step and hope-giving voice of the old family doctor back "in the states." Those were trying days. In times of sickness neighbor helped neighbor. What little medicine had been brought from home was usually shared with the ailing. The open-air methods of living; the absence of modern luxuries and the fact that but few delicate persons came, all helped to keep the standard of health high and the death rate low.
TIIE FIRST BABIES.
The first known white baby born in the county was George W. Thiele on September 14, 1855, about one and one-half miles east of the present town of Bigelow. The ancestry came from Germany and first settled in old Con- necticut. Later, they came to the free home life of "Sunny Kansas." George W. Thiele was born in the log cabin home on the free one hundred and sixty acres then farmed by the family. He is now a prominent business man of Washington, Kansas.
The second baby, of which we can find any record, is William H. Todd, born on August 13, 1856. The last heard of him, he was in Colorado.
The third baby was a girl, Sarah P. Martin, born on September 3, 1857, in the log cabin farm home six miles southeast of where the town of Beattie is now located. The family came from Indiana, where an elder brother, George, had been born two and one-half years prior. This little girl, now a grandmother, Mrs. William Crane, lives just west of the Marysville bridge and attends daily to the household duties of her own home. She tells me
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that at the time of her birth there was neither door nor window in the log cabin, but simply a blanket hung over the opening in the log wall for a door- way and the cracks between the logs stopped with chunks of wood and daubed up with mud. Mrs. Martin's sister, Mrs. Life, living on an adjacent farm officiated as nurse.
In all three of these cases the general conditions were similar. Mrs. Crane tells me that when she was three years old she and her father, Mr. Martin, had chills and fever all summer until they were nearly exhausted. This was the prevailing ailment of the carly settler. After using all the home remedies and exhausting the small supply of quinine in the neighborhood. the mother took them in a farm wagon with an ox team sixty miles north into Nebraska, where they heard there was a doctor. This one hundred and twenty miles round trip with an ox team, camping on the high prairie and liv- ing in the open with winter coming on, was the last supreme effort of the despairing wife and mother to cure what she believed to be dying patients. They made the round trip, saw the doctor, got their medicine and made a recovery. The combination of conditions produced the desired result. The patients were removed from the vicinity of the creek and mosquitos, the sum- mer season was past and they lived on the high prairie for several weeks.
While it is but reasonable to suppose that other white babies were born here prior to these three, yet it remains a fact that the Old Settlers' Associa- tion has failed to find any.
The first doctor known to come to the county to locate, was Dr. J. P. Miller, who came in 1856. During that summer a number of young men came from Atchison and from different points in the south for the purpose of starting a town. They were all pro-slavery party men and they came to Marshall's ferry and organized the town of Palmetto, supposedly under ter- ritorial laws.
How near they complied with the legal requirements, is best answered in the general statement which is made on page 914 of A. T. Andreas' "His- tory of Kansas". 1883 :
"The first election in Marshall county was on March 31. 1855. Every inhabitant, who should be an actual resident, was a qualified voter. The pro-slavery party put the most liberal construction on the law. At the elec- tion on October 5. 1857, only one Free-state vote was counted in the county." That vote was given by James E. White.
Dr. J. P. Miller was one of this group of pro-slavery party men, who came for the purpose of making Kansas a slave state.
They were not of the home-making kind, like the settlers in other parts
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of the county. In the border-turmoil days, just before the war, there was little opportunity for Doctor Miller to become a family physician. His patients for a few years were the floating and emigrant kind. Might made right and the arguments concerning differences were often settled with the gun. The doctor had a wide and varied experience along this line. Under the pro-slavery methods of conducting politics, it was an anti-election decision that all important positions should be taken by their members.
ONE OFFICIAL TO FOUR OFFICES.
Doctor Miller was elected to the pro-slavery Legislature and served the party well. Later, he was elected to several local county offices, and held them all at the same time being, respectively, sheriff, clerk of the court, justice of the peace and coroner. His endeavors to manipulate political matters apparently occupied most of his time. As a doctor he was independent of the drug stores, because there were none in the county. In answering calls among the scattered settlers, he went on horseback and his saddlebags stock was chiefly quinine, calomel, opium and a poor grade of Missouri whiskey.
One of his contemporary settlers informs us that Miller was a fine example of the southern gentleman of the early frontier type; that he was a heavy user of the last-named article in his saddlebag supply, but that the Missouri article did not agree with him and he died before he reached his full measure of usefulness.
Before the opening of national hostilities in the War of Secession, a bitter contest was raging in eastern Kansas. Marshall county, as one of the extreme frontier points, on a direct route to the mountains and the coast and occupied by extreme representatives of both factions, was a history-making community, where individual freedom and an advance in modern civilization was striving to overthrow slavery.
During this period of uncertainty, distrust and strife among the poli- ticians, we find but few doctors, several druggists and no mention of the dentist until after the close of the war.
After the admission of Kansas into the union as a free state, the pre- ponderance of pro-slavery advocates rapidly declined and almost disappeared among the doctors.
THE "COPPERHEAD" SOCIETY.
In 1864 we find the business card of Dr. John Hall, of Marysville, in a newspaper of that date. In a book on early history in Kansas, now in the
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library of the Historical Association in Toepka, E. C. Manning gives an account of conditions in Marshall county in 1864. Manning states that he was publishing a paper in which he said many things against the pro-slavery party and the "Copperheads."
.A secret "Copperhead". society existed here, of which this Doctor Hall was a member. It was decided at one of their meetings that Manning must be put out of the way and by lot it became the business of Doctor Hall to do it. A friend of Manning's, who was let into the plot. told Manning and the next morning Manning hunted up the doctor and informed him that he knew all about it and that he would give him twenty-four hours in which to leave the country. Doctor Hall disappeared at once.
We find an advertisement in a local paper. dated 1864, of a drug store owned by Doctor Edwards and a man named Horr.
This Doctor Edwards was an elder brother of the Dr. A. G. Edwards. who located in Marysville after the war. This local advertisement states that a full assortment of liquors and wines was constantly carried in stock. While several saloons were running in Marysville at the time, this drug store and druggist, who should be the assistant of the doctor. were working in harmony with the saloon-keeper and the bartender. This liquor business of the druggist, along with the saloon keeper, continued until the prohibition laws placed the liquor business all in the hands of the druggist. intending that he should be the handmaid of the doctor, but so many ex-bartenders became druggists, that the doctors quit the drug store and of late years nearly all doctors in the county dispense for themselves.
Before, during and for some years after the war, there was no legal standard of qualification in regard to the doctors. The business, in a com- mercial way, was open to all. Very few were graduates of any medical school. But few had even what would now be considered a common-school preparation.
A "CURE" FOR CHILLS.
The following story is told of one young fellow who, like many others in the early day, took up a claim on a creek bottom. He came from "Egypt." in southern Illinois and his mother having learned that quinine was made from willow bark, fed him on willow-bark tea to cure the chills. It always worked when taken late in the fall after the malaria season was over. He used these fundamental principles, but, with business tact, he manufactured a more elegant article.
In the first place he kept the secret to himself. He was not married.
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He trimmed the rough bark from a willow tree and then scraped the inner bark into a pulp by using a hoe or a corn knife, being careful to scrape down- ward. The tea made from this, flavored, colored and preserved with elder berries and whiskey, seldom failed to cure the chills, if taken early and con- tinned until late in the fall. Occasionally, there was a stubborn case and for them he scraped the bark from below upward and made it strong by using more "aqua fortalis," boiling it longer and adding a little wild turnip root to give it a sharp twang.
This combination never failed, if the conditions were favorable. The first, he called "Hipopalorum," and the second, a strong medicine, he called "Lopopahirum." At one dollar per half gallon for the first and two for the second, the young doctor had a nice little income.
After the close of the war a great change came over the country in many ways. The army was scattered and the boys who were mustered out flocked to the West to take up homesteads. Many young doctors who had served under the flag located in Marshall county.
Among them were A. G. Edwards, of Marysville; Patterson, of Beattie; Paul Garven, of Frankfort; D. W. Humfreville, of Waterville, and several others. Those men were of a sterling type of manhood that the county had never before possessed. This class of young men had responded to the call of the Union in the hour of distress. Some of them had enlisted in the ranks and had been promoted to service in the medical corps. They had dropped a school course half completed, they turned away from promising futures and answered a call for help in a cause for right.
A NEW ERA.
This class of doctors gave their best efforts to the distressed on both sides of the conflict. When in the late sixties they came to Marshall county, with the rush of home-seeking settlers, it was but natural they would find a place in the new homes and hearts of the people. As those new homes swelled the population of the trading posts into towns and transformed the prairies into farms, the doctor was taken into the consultation with the par- ents as no other person could be. The babies, as they grew up, learned to look upon the doctor as their friend and staff in times of trouble and as one who rejoiced with them in their prosperity.
Through the storms of winter, the deep mud of spring and the burning hot winds of the long, dry summer, the doctor could always be depended upon in times of sickness and accidents. No road was too long or too bad, no
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night was too dark or too stormy, no creek too deep or dangerous to ford, to deter the doctor from going to the call for help.
The merchant might refuse a sack of flour or the druggist refuse medi- cine, until the poor and needy secured an order from the county, but the cloctor was always the friend of the deserving.
From out of the darkness and out of the wild.
Came a voice : I'm alone with my dying child, Oh winds, bear a message; tell some one to come; In God's mercy send help to our sad, stricken home. The wild storm was raging, the snow drifted high,
Was't the wind or an angel brought the doctor that cry.
So out in the darkness and out in the wild,
He brought hope to that mother and help to her child.
Associated with these grand army doctors, who grew old as they became engrafted into the hearts and homes of the people, we find a great assort- ment of humanity attempting. succeeding or pretending to follow in their footsteps. For more than thirty years after the close of the war, our county was robbed by a class of impostors who came as itinerant doctors to prey upon the weakened, chronic, incurable, or the loving sympathy of the friends, as well as upon the poor, deluded mind that dwelt upon some real or imaginary functional abnormality, and secured a depraved pleasure in the thought of chronic individualism. Those criminal impostors sometimes had an advance agent to round up the victim. Others had a tent and a show to draw the crowd. A third class put up at hotels, but all were alike in one respect : They secured a contract, in the form of a note, which they sold to a broker and then departed to find new fields for conquest.
A second class embraced a large number of would-be doctors, who possessed neither the natural or acquired ability. They remained a short time and disappeared. . \ third class came better prepared and as time advanced and population increased, this third class of doctors increased both in numbers and proficiency.
.As the nation, the state and the county developed. so the individuality of the medical profession developed in the standard of qualification. In the early days there was no established minimum of qualifications. It was in the early eighties that the first effort was made to raise the standard through a state board, but without avail. About ten years later the present law was
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passed by the state Legislature. As this law first went into effect the doctors were divided into three classes.
First, those who were graduates of reputable schools of medicine ; second, those who would pass a creditable examination before a state board and, third, those who were not eligible for either first or second grade, but who had been continually engaged in the practice of medicine for the ten years last past.
CONDITIONS TO OBTAIN PERMIT.
Later. the law was changed, and as it now stands an applicant for a state permit must be a graduate of a recognized medical school and then must pass a satisfactory examination before a state board. The certificate of the state board must be recorded in the office of the county clerk, where the doc- tor resides.
As the state board was to be the judge of what constituted an acceptable school, it became necessary to establish a degree of proficiency for standard schools. Up to a few years ago the medical diploma in America was a joke in the opinion of the rest of the world.
In the report of the United States commissioner of education for the year ending June 30, 1915, we find the statement that the number of medical schools in America was one hundred and sixty-two, about one-half the total number in the world. In 1904 there were five thousand seven hundred and forty-seven graduates from these medical institutions. As the commercially- run schools are being put out of business, the number of graduates has rapidly decreased. Many of these schools were private, carried on in the interests of commercialism. The only entrance qualification was to be able to pay the fee. The post-graduate qualification was the ability to call one of the pro- fessors in consultation, or send an endless stream of patients to the hospital. This led to the infamous practice of robbing the patient and dividing the fee. The state of Kansas, ever in the front ranks protecting the interest of the oppressed, declared such fee-splitting a crime and established a penalty.
By co-operating with other state boards, the qualifications of both doc- tors and schools were raised. This resulted in weeding out the commercially- run schools. Today, nearly all the medical schools in America are the med- ical departments of standard universities. The total number of new gradu- ates turned out each year, in the last ten years, has been only about one-half the number of former decades, but the proficiency has averaged much higher, and is increasing every year.
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ADVANCE OF MEDICAL SCIENCE.
The researches of such men as Pasteur and the many who have come after him, have completely revolutionized the science of medicine. In the past fifty years greater progress has been made than during all preceding ages. The old, empirical methods are abandoned in the light of the micro- scope. test tube and the post-mortem revelation.
The research labaratories have opened up new fields: have broadened our view-point ; deepened our vision : turned the search-light into the closed recesses and the X-ray through what was opaque, giving us a clearer compre- hension of the relationship between cause and result. The field of bacteri- ology is a new world of life and death, in which we have found the solution of many former mysteries. Along this line our anti-serums and their uses are being developed. The relationship of organic or inorganic chemistry to biology, has as yet been but lightly touched.
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