A Southern Practice: The Diary and Autobiography of Charles A. Hentz, M.D.As a physician practicing in the rural South in the years leading up to and through the Civil War, Charles Arnould Hentz (1827-1894) lived in the midst of enormous changes in southern society and medicine. A Southern Practice includes the diary that Hentz kept for more than twenty years, beginning with the river journey his family took from Ohio to Alabama when Charles was eighteen. This vividly depicted trip--people, places, and sensory details--sets the stage for Hentz's record of his life through middle age: his apprenticeship and decision to pursue a medical career while a youth in Alabama; maturing as both a man and a doctor while at school in Kentucky; and establishing a general practice--and a large family--in the rough society of the Florida Panhandle. This edition also includes Hentz's autobiography, written at the end of his life, in which he reviews his past as doctor, southerner, and family man. Taken together, Hentz's diary and autobiography dramatize with unusual clarity and realism the demanding work of a physician in an age before medicine could reliably cure patients. The rural doctor's work plunged him into the center of his community's life. He attended patients enslaved and free; worked one day with the challenges of childbirth, another with desperately sick children; treated the victims of stabbings and shootings; and faced the looming threat of epidemic fever. By telling what he liked to call his "professional stories," Hentz also gives a relatively rare picture of the feelings and experiences of a middle-class southern white man. His work, religious faith, and social relations with neighbors, slaves, and strangers are described. In their frankness, sharp observation, and good humor, Hentz's writings illuminate nineteenth-century medicine in its full social setting, thus revealing a fresh portrait of the Old South. |
From inside the book
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... Louisville , Kentucky , was located squarely in the midst of this shifting , striving society . Hentz does not say why the Louisville school became the place for his medical training in 1846 ; there had been some discussion with his ...
... Louisville and his friends , and money was hard to come by . So it was that Daniel Drake's invitation in the summer of 1849 to come to Cincinnati ( where Drake re- cently had relocated ) attracted Charles for more than one reason . It ...
... Louisville just two years before Hentz ) , and his humorous " Lou- isiana swamp doctor " tales . The frontier worlds and the medicine of Lewis and Hentz were the same , equally uncertain and rough . But where Lewis wishes to laugh at ...
... Louisville . " I have just indulged in one of those rare fits of crying , which do me so much good . Your father is in bed & asleep so I have disturbed no one by this outpouring of a surcharged heart . " No one , that is , except ...
... Louisville , and Will and Jesse Coe , with whose father Hentz boarded while getting his start in Florida , he experienced a sunny companionship Twain- like in its mix of competition and playfulness . In his writing about his friends ...
Contents
1845 | 41 |
1846 | 77 |
1847 | 149 |
1848 | 177 |
1849 | 222 |
1850 | 267 |
1851 | 270 |
1852 | 272 |
1853 | 293 |
1854 | 302 |
1857 | 303 |
186O | 320 |
1861 | 353 |
1865 | 369 |
1869 | 388 |