Adventures in Medicine

BACKWARD India or rural Kansas, the story is the same. And what a story! Dr. William E. Aughinbaugh (I Swear by Apollo: A Life of Medical Adventure, Farrar and Rinehart, $3.00) fought leprosy in Venezuela, bubonic plague in India, canyon fever in Peru, typhoid in Mexico. Dr. Arthur Hertzler (The Horse and Buggy Doctor, Harpers, $2.75) battled smallpox, diphtheria, pneumonia, peritonitis, in Kansas. Both have seen the worst diseases so well controlled that doctors of the future may only read about them. Both have helped rid the world of fears and pains and superstitions that had paralyzed it for centuries.

‘The patient promptly recovered and is now a useful citizen in his town and recently voted for Landon,’ says Herlzler enthusiastically of one of his most exciting cases. He has little use for newfangled politics, and less for newfangled medicine. He could operate under an apple tree (’There were no birds in the tree’) with his patient stretched on the kitchen door supported by two barrels, and knew that speed and skill counted more than operating superintendents, face masks, and layers of sterilized sheets. When he started practice, wire cutters, a kerosene lantern, and a revolver were essential implements of travel; diphtheria ravaged communities but could not be fought because it was regarded as the expression of divine will; when an operation was performed the surgeon held the knife in his teeth when not in actual use! He has brought the best in medicine and surgery to rural Kansas, built a hospital, and written a valuable addition to Americana.

Aughinbaugh operated in the open air, too — in Mexico. When he missed the slop pail with the excised appendix, buzzards devoured it. He was immediately knocked unconscious by the attendant relatives! Some men are born to adventure, and escape its perils miraculously. Aughinbaugh missed his boat to Martinique: next day’s boat was destined to be the first relief ship after a volcanic eruption that killed 30,000, including every soul on that missed boat. He rode the first automobile in Bombay, and just escaped death at the hands of a mob. He examined the harem of an Indian rajah, his hands pushed through a heavy curtain and his neck shadowed by the swords of two unfriendly eunuchs. He shipped to South America with a cargo of dynamite that shifted during a bad storm and should have blown the ship sky-high. He found countries where the father goes to bed and moans for ten days when a child is born. He encountered one man whose sole purpose in travel was to drink himself into enough beer-bottle labels to paper his house in Michigan. He talked with men in odd corners of the world ’who can’t come back.’ He doctored the only man who ever kicked a cardinal and who insisted on wearing a red shoe on the kicking foot. If he took a train ride a passenger in his ear had a bag full of rattlesnakes, the train was wrecked, and he applied a tourniquet to the leg of the engineer with a bone from the skeleton of a coyote. When he presided at a dinner of the Explorer’s Club in New York, 750 feet of snakes got loose and a constrictor coiled its seven feet around his midriff inside the boiled shirt. I Swear by Apollo is as fascinating a collection of tales of adventure as I have ever encountered.

Though a provincial practitioner by choice, Hertzler has had his adventures, too, adventures with human nature. A doctor sees much that is ugly and stupid and hypocritical in human beings — more than he dares tell. The Horse and Buggy Doctor is bitter against clergymen, lawyers, and neurotic women. If ministers would just forget the hell hereafter and concentrate on the hell on this earth, if lawyers would forget the law and concentrate on justice,’and if the neurotic lady would ‘marry a profligate and drunken husband,’ the doctor’s job would be far easier. This book is amusing in its penetration. A gynecologist is ‘an unfortunate individual whose mission in life it is to aid the human female to correlate her biologic instincts with the dictates of Christian ethics.’ Strong are the arguments against socialized medicine and expensive hospitals, and in favor of the family doctor who knows his patient intimately and is at the bedside during the crisis. Here is a rare compendium of common sense about the doctor and his patient which should be required reading for both.

ROGER W. HOLMES