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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... gave me timely support and good advice , and colleagues Wendy Gamber and David Nord gave me the benefit of their readings of the Introduction , as did Paul V. Murphy . Paul also transcribed the entire diary and autobiography with care ...
... gave way to the more intriguing and difficult effort to see himself plainly . " One indication of a great mind is a steady perseverance in any thing , " he wrote self - instructively . But then he looked at what he had written and ...
... gave a professional context , a sense of learnedness , to a man's working experience in a craft . In fact , formal schooling was not required for a man to become an M.D. in the 1840s . Certification by a mentor or a medical society was ...
... gave him a politics in the wide - open world of healing . 20 The Louisville Medical Institute was the largest medical school in the South in the mid - 1840s , and just before Hentz's arrival , it had associated itself with the ...
... gave way to the feminine domain of the sickroom . Although there were serious rivalries among different kinds of healers , no savvy practitioner turned down help from any source unappraised . Healers male and female , slave and free ...
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 |