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
Results 1-5 of 74
... brother , and two sisters , and changes in his life were at hand . His parents , both teachers , were planning a move that would soon relocate the family more than 100 miles southeast to Tuskegee . At the same time Charles was thinking ...
... brother - in - law John Keyes , who had married Charles's sister Julia in November 1846 and with whom Charles enjoyed a warm friendship . However , a position as curator and librarian at Louisville , secured through Drake , enticed ...
... brother Thaddeus commenced boarding with Charles and Bettie . So the Hentzes were domiciled in 1856 when Caroline , at the height of her career , became ill suddenly and , despite her son's best efforts , died on February 11. Soon ...
... the oath of allegiance to the United States with comparative promptness , in July 1865. That November , showing a restlessness not evident since his medical school days , Charles traveled with his brother - Introduction / J.
... brother - in - law Robert and other friends to the Tampa area , sizing up the prospect of leaving Quincy for a new life . An account of this trip comprises Hentz's diary for 1865 and also con- cludes the first volume of the manuscript ...
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 |