History of medical practice in Illinois - Bushnell Historical Society

150 History of Medical Practice in Illinois"The early efforts at organizing medical societies were not very successful, onereason being the difficulties of transportation. Men could not meet frequentlyenough to really get acquainted. But now, with hard roads, all this is changed. . . ."Finally, why take the advent of the hard road as a dividing line in medicalpractice in Illinois? There are several reasons. First, the hard road is the greatestsingle accessory ever given to the medical practice of central Illinois, even greaterthan die railroad. Second, there is not one of the places mentioned in this paperwhich cannot now be reached—summer or winter, rain or snow, day or night—in 30 or 60 minutes of comfortable driving by automobile. Both distance andtime have been greatly shortened for the doctor. Third, the hard roads havelifted the country doctor and his consultants out of the mud and dust. Fourth,the cost of travel by auto has greatly reduced the doctor's expense. A team of goodhorses and the necessary feed, harness, care and vehicles were a far greater expensethan the auto. Fifth, this great saving of the doctor's time permits him touse it in odier more profitable ways. Sixth, the easy and rapid transfer of thepatient from his home to a well equipped hospital saves much labor and time andgives the patient the benefit of better service at less expense."If it were not for the hard roads, we should still be doing many operations inthe home. From my point of view, the hard road has been the greatest single contributiontoward the improvement of the practice of medicine in Central Illinois.It has had much to do in lifting it from the crude pioneer level to the high levelof modern medicine."Dr. Erwin H. Ackerknecht, of the University of Wisconsin, gave the D. J.Davis Lecture at the University of Illinois School of Medicine in 1952.Following are some pertinent excerpts from his discussion:"The diseases the Midwest(then called the West or Northwest) suffered fromwere, with a few exceptions like milk sickness and goiter, the same as those ofthe East: malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery, erysipelas, cholera, smallpox, epidemicmeningitis, tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever and influenza. It was theirquantity and the specific setting that gave them their particular Midwesternaspects. . . ."Several reasons make it impossible to give exact overall figures, due to theabsence of reliable statistics; the faultiness of diagnoses; and the lingering ofthe Rush-Broussais ideas of the 'unity'of disease which made even some of thebest observers deal with diseases as different as malaria, typhoid fever, milk sickness,meningitis and dysentery under the same heading."Malaria was the prevalent disease in the Middle West during almost the wholeof the 19th Century. . . . The malariousness of the region was such that seriousobservers doubted the possibility of settling it permanently. ... As a matter offact, malaria had become so common that by many it was no longer regarded asa disease. . . . The older Dr. Mayo left Indiana for Minnesota as late as 1854 onaccount of malaria. . . . Malaria practically disappeared from the Middle Westbetween 1890 and 1900."It was the impression of N. S. Davis and many other qualified observers thatduring the 1850's in Illinois, typhoid fever took more and more the place ofmalaria. ... It will probably be forever impossible to state how much of the'malaria' in the 19th Century was typhoid, and how much 'typhoid' was malaria,