Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 October 1879 — Medical Visits in the Olden Times. [ARTICLE]

Medical Visits in the Olden Times.

The early doctors, as a few of the old" er people well remember, were accustomed to make their daily tours through the village on horseback. They were generally recognizable by certain peculiarities of dress and saddle appurteances. To protect their pantaloons from mud and from being rubbed by the saddle, thevgenerally inclosed their legs in leather or felt leggins which, wneu the doctors were out of saddle and wiibimdoors, had much attention given them by the smaller children of the families visited* There also were their saddle-bags, which, when opened at the bedside of the sick, revealed filled phials aud curious instruments that 16ft a wonderful impression of their im- . portance as professional persons upon those who watched the composition of the medicines to be taken. Those who were ordered, to call at their offices often felt that they were then admittedto mysteries of compounding medicines and the preparation of ointments and plasters/too sacred to be mentioned. The doctors’ offices , in those days were minature apothecary shops. The young medical student who was reading with a doctor found himself often kept pretty busy with the “rudiments”—the pestle and mortar, and soon lost all sense of the romantic which had early filled his mind respecting the profession. The student’s first lessons in tooth drawing were given him over the massive jaws of certain toothache stricken Africans, and his first essay on blood letting on the bared arm of some poorhouse pauper. The Latin of the abbreviated terms on the gallipots, jars and bottles, which filled the shelves of the office, were to those waiting for prescriptions as cabalistic as words of magical import.