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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... writing one's life story involved more than locating self - discipline . Writing bore witness to , reconfigured , and sometimes offset the meaning of life's surpris- ing turns . The text itself began to matter , the accumulated pages ...
... writing , in part , because he was a physician — a calling with a problematic identity among even practitioners of medicine themselves . On the one hand , doctors were literal - minded , working with the physical bedrock of bodies and ...
... writing , by the 1850s Caroline would write many popular works of fiction that explored the social world and sensibilities of women in the South . Charles thus began his own writing amid his growing admiration for his mother's ...
... writing , Charles Hentz's life stories open outward from a terrain of his thoughts , impressions , and wishes , to his relations with family and friends , and finally to vistas of a larger social world . In sizing up Hentz's writing ...
... writing became more flexible , more tactile ; he began taking pleasure in carrying his journal with him and in the physical act of writing , enjoying the capture of " my truant mind " by " the mechanical allurements of the pen . " He ...
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 |