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
Results 1-5 of 85
... Marianna and Quincy , thus was not far removed geographically or emotionally from the scenes of his youth in Tuscaloosa or from Columbus , Georgia , where his parents next lived , a short trip up the Chattahoochee River . Moreover , the ...
... Marianna , twenty - one - year - old Charles decided to strike out on his own . He chose the small and ( even for the panhandle ) rough settlement of Port Jackson , a ferry point and minor cotton warehousing port on the Chatta- hoochee ...
... Marianna and about twenty miles west of the state capital at Tallahassee . Late that year Charles's parents ( Nicholas now " an invalid " ) came to reside with the Keyeses , and it was during this time that Charles began to court Mary ...
... Marianna's main street in September 1864. Thad- deus , who had enlisted in the Confederate army in 1863 , was incarcerated in the infamous prison at Elmira , New York , for the duration of the war and then released more or less ...
... Marianna and Quincy in the following decade . Hentz's Florida was a fertile , well - watered land of cultivated fields and limestone outcrops crisscrossed by many small tributaries of the Chipola , Apalachicola , and Chattahoochee ...
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 |