It seems like we all have disease and medicine on our minds these days. It has been awhile since we faced a disease that we could not treat and, at the beginning, could not even understand. It will be many years until we can write a history of Covid 19, and while it seems to be under control (for now), we must file it under the handful of diseases for which is not 100% curable.
There were and are many reasons a disease cannot be
cured. The state of technology, the
availability and usability of medicines, and, sadly, the cost of treatments,
all play a part. Less troublesome now
but a great hindrance once was the availability of transportation. If you lived in the city, you were more
likely to have access to trained doctors, hospitals, and drugs. If you resided in the country, you were more
apt to rely on quack medicines and poorly trained practitioners. Even trained physicians had no access to
modern transportation. The (justly)
praised frontier doctor who travelled five miles in a blizzard to treat a
frontiersman is part of the folklore of our settlement.
One
example of the stress and strain of early doctoring can be found in a letter
from Joseph Waldron of Wauseon in Fulton County dated February 11, 1881. Writing to his brother, Martin in New York
State, Mr. Waldron faced a medical crisis, and a financial one. He wrote:
Jessie was taken down with the
fever. She had the doctor for six weeks
and then Charley had the fever and when it turned [,] the lung fever set in and
Juley came down with the same fever. But
Dr. Hollister broked it up on her, and now little Philley is down and we are agoing
to have the doctor for him to night. . . .
Joseph
Waldron was a day laborer. He had a much
younger wife, Jessie, whom he had married when she was 17 and he was 36. They had four children by 1880, and the sick
ones, Charles, Phillip, and Julia were the youngest at 4, 6, and 9 years old. They all, apparently, suffered from “lung
fever,” an outdated term which could refer to anything from bronchitis to
pneumonia to lung cancer. None of the
siblings succumbed to the ‘fever.” This
is not to say that they were not very sick, but they survived to move to
Toledo. Joseph Waldron died in 1912,
having relocated to Camden, Oneida County, New York, whence two of his children
followed him.
Whether
the medical care was heroic or routine, the Waldron children were treated by a
local doctor, Dr. De Witt Hollister (1825-1902). Like his patients’ family, Hollister was born
and educated in upstate New York. His
medical education was half-apprenticeship, half-college, the latter at Geneva
Medical College, which he attended for “two terms.” His first professional position was eighteen
months in Jefferson County, New York,
“after which he joined the tide of
emigration to this then western country, and took up his abode at Wauseon, in
the newly created county of Fulton. At that time Dr. Hollister was the only
resident physician in the place, and soon acquired a large practice; and, being
a young man of good education and address, and possessing a thorough
understanding of his profession,”
attracted customers from all over Fulton County. Dr. Hollister married a local girl, Permelia
Lamb. After ten years, he joined another
doctor, William Hyde, creating the practice of Hollister & Hyde.[i]
A taste of the heroic light in which Dr.
Hollister was viewed may be seen in this recollection:
Doctor
Hollister was a most welcomed settler, for up to that time we had to diagnose
our own disease, and prescribe our own medicine, or be to the great expense of
getting a physician who lived miles away.
None can appreciate the hardships that Doctor Hollister endured, as
he rode, night after night, on
horseback, over the cow- paths through the dense forest, to render relief to a settler who was suffering from disease contracted from exposure, or
the unhealthiness of the climate.
I say none but the early pioneer can appreciate the hardships that Doctor Hollister endured to relieve the
sufferings of his fellow men.[ii]
Thanks to this scrap of a letter, we can appreciate the
efforts of Dr D. W. Hollister in doing what needed doing to relieve the
suffering of pioneer children.
[i] History of Henry & Fulton
Counties edited by Lewis Cass Aldrich - Syracuse NY - Publ. D. Mason & Co.
1888.
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