subject: The Creation Of The Medical Profession [print this page] Over the passing years progress within the medical profession has brought us new polysyllabic names for everything from regular office hours to the flu. Even though doctors do still work very hard, they do not work nearly as hard as did the country doctors did in the past.
In a recent film, one modern physician describes what life was like for general practitioners who lived and worked in his city a century ago. Interestingly, a doctor was the first white man to come to this town.
This gentleman was one of a group of early explorers traveling through the region. However, because of the limited population in the area, the doctor eventually decided not to stay and went back to his former practice where there was no shortage of patients.
The doctors who already resided in this scantily populated area were having a difficult time making a living at their profession. With the onset of the Civil War, they gathered their medical equipment together and moved out.
In this place, the doctors of the 1800s were known as the best unrecognized heroes who ever lived. Back then, it took a lot of determination in order for a young man to become a doctor.
Doctors worked whenever their services were required and often received no pay for their labor.
More often than not, there were more sick people who couldn't pay for services rendered than there were those who could.
Not many evenings went by that the physicians weren't called to tend to a patient. When the doctor's services were needed, his sleep would often be interrupted by a stampede of feet up his steps and thumping on his door loud enough to wake his neighbors.
The bleary-eyed physician would harness horses to his buggy and set out on a cold, lonely ride to see his patient.
Early physicians usually never received payment for their services in silver. There were a lot of times when patients had to pay their bills with their farm produce or by going to work for the doctor.
Early physicians didn't enjoy high salaries, and some of the more innovative ones made and sold their own home-made medicines for extra cash. This respective physician proved to be such an individual.
Another physician who had earned several degrees and postgraduate honors made, marketed, sold specific cures in a time when ethics were not so rigorous. His neuralgia and headache treatments were moderately successful.
At a cost of three doses for ten cents, the patient was guaranteed that his problem would certainly be alleviated in five to twenty minutes.
Other physicians earned some extra cash through starting their own drug stores. A doctor started the first pharmacy in the city and put it right downtown. Then three other doctors, observing his success, opened drugstores of their own. Before long, cities began constructing hospitals where doctors could practice medicine in reasonably clean and safe surroundings.
Eventually, doctors began practicing medicine in accordance with a standard code of conduct and ethics, giving the public a high degree of confidence that their medical needs would be well provided in a modern hospital setting.
