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. |
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The Diary and Autobiography of Charles A. Hentz, M.D. Charles Arnould Hentz Steven M. Stowe. A SOUTHERN PRACTICE The Diary and Autobiography of Charles A. Hentz , M.D. EDITED BY STEVEN M. STOWE Published for the Southern Texts Society by ...
The Diary and Autobiography of Charles A. Hentz, M.D. Charles Arnould Hentz Steven M. Stowe. The Southern Texts Society gratefully acknowledges generous funding for this volume by The Watson - Brown Foundation , Inc. THE UNIVERSITY PRESS ...
The Diary and Autobiography of Charles A. Hentz, M.D. Charles Arnould Hentz Steven M. Stowe. portion of the autobiography join to form an unusually full , compelling narrative of a young Southerner leaving childhood behind , learning his ...
The Diary and Autobiography of Charles A. Hentz, M.D. Charles Arnould Hentz Steven M. Stowe. Finally , the family's move to Tuscaloosa and then to Tuskegee planted them in a certain geographical and social South which they would continue ...
... diary for 1865 and also con- cludes the first volume of the manuscript autobiography ; with a few notes made in June 1869 , the extant diary draws to a close as well . Before consid- ering the themes in Charles Hentz's writing that help ...
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 |