of
Muscatine County Iowa
1911
| History of Muscatine County Iowa 1911 | |
Source: History of Muscatine County Iowa, Volume I, 1911, pages 353-354
THE MEDICAL PROFESSION. The pioneers of the healing art in Muscatine county were the guardians of a widely dispersed population. Aside from their professional duties,they contributed their full share to the material development of a newly opened country. Some were men of culture, who had gained their medical education in college. Others were of limited educational attainments, whose professional knowledge had been acquired in the offices of established practitioners of more or less ability in the sections from which they emigrated, Of either class almost without exception, they were practical men of great force of character who gave cheerful and efficacious assistance to the suffering, daily journeying on horseback scores of miles, over a country almost destitute of roads and encountering swollen, unbridged streams, without waterproof garments or other now common protection against the elements. Out of necessity the pioneer physician developed rare quickness of perception and self-reliance. A specialist was then unknown, and the physician was called upon to treat every phase of bodily ailment, serving as physician, surgeon, oculist and dentist. His books were few and there were no practitioners of more ability than himself with whom he might consult. His medicines were simple and carried on his person and every preparatIon of pill or solution was the work of his own hands.
During the summer and autumn of 1837 cases of bilious remitting fever occurred, which readily yielded to treatment. The winter following several cases of bilious pneumonia demanded prompt atttendance and special vigilance in the observance of changes indicative of greater danger. These were the diseases and the principal ones which called for medical help up to the year 1849. Since that year, or from that period, the summer and autumnal fevers ceased to be epidemical and pneumonia became less frequent. It may be well to mention here that the fevers of 1849 after the third or fourth day assumed a typhoid. character, the remission hardly observable, and the nervous depression occasioning great anxiety.
It was probably Dr. Rush of Philadelphia,--a great name up to about 1825--who said the lancet was a "sheet anchor" in all inflammatory diseases, so it might have been said of quinine, as used in remittent and intermittent fevers, in both the Mississippi and Missouri valleys from 1830 up to 1850. During that period 120,000 square miles west of the Mississippi and north of St. Louis became populated and all of it more or less malarious. In some of these years the demand for quinine was so great that the supply in the American market became exhausted. "Sappington's pills" were indirectly the power which worked steamboats up the river from 1835 to 1843. They were verily, the "sheet anchor," not only aboard boats but in many households. Dr. Sappington was a regular allopathic physician of considerable ability residing up the Missouri river, who thought it would be a benefaction to the new civilization of the west to prepare quinine ready to be taken in the form of pills. Boxes of his pills contained four dozen each and the pellets two grains each. The direction on the box was to take from two to twenty as the urgency of the case seemed to require, without reference to the stage of the paroxysm.
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