Health Care Then

A Long Time ago is a self-published book by a woman who grew up in rural mid-Michigan at the beginning of the 20th century. I read it since I knew of the woman, a Mrs. Robinson who lived less than 50 miles away from my home town of Bay City, Michigan. My grandparents bought a painting she created and are mentioned in the book.

The book contains recollections of her youth, much of it in the horse and buggy era. It's liberally sprinkled with poems, anecdotes and stories, both charming and sad. You forget sometimes in this day of modern conveniences and 21st century technology how difficult life was for families living a hundred years ago.

I couldn't help but be struck by the vast differences in health care as it was practiced back then, before Medicare and specialized medicine, before emergency medical technicians and childhood inoculations. Living out in the wilderness, a trip to the doctor was only made "if it was a matter of life and death." Sickness and injuries were not uncommon. Neither was premature death.

Mrs. Robinson learned about folk remedies first-hand when, as a girl, her leg became impaled by a steel pike at her farm. No trip to the doctor for the wound, only a long convalescence. For treatment, one neighbor told the author’s mother “to put live coals of fire on a fire shovel and put black wool from a sheep on the coals and hold my leg over it. So we did, to no avail. Someone else said to wash it out with skoak root. That didn’t help either.”

She eventually recovered, but with a bad scar on her calf for the rest of her life.

Doctors themselves didn’t always have the answer either way back when. When Mrs. Robinson’s daughter ingested some deadly nightshade seeds, the doctors were quickly called. Two of them arrived at her home to find the young girl barely conscious. They pumped her stomach to no effect.

In the author’s words, “They did all they could and went away and left her to die. “ The next day a neighbor suggested giving the deathly ill child some castor oil. That worked. The girl began vomiting and eventually recovered. Mrs. Robinson credited the neighbor with saving her daughter’s life that day.

People of that era put their trust in prayer too, as much as they did doctors and medicine. Mrs. Robinson was a deeply religious woman who credited the power of prayer from a local congregation with helping her to recuperate from one serious illness that had herself at death’s door.

But not all her stories ended happily. Three of her sisters died within a few years of eachother, each leaving a large, mostly young family. And after her own son complained of being ill, she checked on him after doing chores to find him lifeless in his bed. The doctors never could figure out why he died.

It is amazing to realize how far medicine has come. And as this week has shown, not only in the treatments themselves but in how medicine is financed and delivered. You just have to wonder what is going to happen in the next hundred years.