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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... side , the sunlight , and the instruction and beauty of Nature . On his way to a call , he enjoyed how " now and then a beautiful white heron would alight overhead and entertain us with its croaking note . " He had an eye for the lay of ...
... side of the Courthouse square - upstairs — over the store of C. D. Humphries & Co. " His house was on King Street , a short distance away , and " at one or the other place , I can be found " ( advertisement in the Quincy Commonwealth ...
... side , for columns of figures . Hentz has hand numbered each page . Inside the front cover are several ink sketches by Hentz , including horses , people's faces , and the interior of a steamboat cabin . On the title page Hentz has ...
... side of the drawing , Hentz has written , " Done in India Ink , when I was 14 years old . " Lengthy newspaper obituaries of Dr. Tobias G. Richardson , with whom Hentz was friends in medical school , are pasted on the inside of the back ...
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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 |