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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... plantation , but they returned to Quincy for the last time a few years later . Cornelia contracted a systemic , weaken- ing illness , apparently of her nervous system , in the late 1880s and died an invalid on May 14 , 1894. Charles ...
... plantations up and down the River bottoms . " 29 Although living in a place where men made fortunes -- some of these men were his patients — Hentz seems never to have been tempted to turn from medicine to planting cotton or investing in ...
... plantation practice in Ocheesee to Marianna , a rela- tively sizable town and the county seat . His worst fears came true when he handled one of his first cases badly — overdosing a Mrs. Anderson with a commonly used but highly toxic ...
... plantation early in that decade . A major railroad venture in 1848 had among its investors Wade Keyes , Jesse Coe , and Hentz's future father - in - law Dr. William Booth . The fact that both plantation and railroad failed economically ...
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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 |