FIRST PHYSICIANS—EARLY PRACTICE—PIONEER REMEDIES—MODERN MEDICINE AND SURGERY—PROMINENT PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS—ATCHISON COUNTY MEDICAL SOCIETY.

Any history of this county would be incomplete did it not dwell at some length upon the activities of the splendid service rendered the community by the physicians and surgeons who were among the earliest arrivals upon the frontier, and have presided at the births and administered to the sick and dying for the past sixty years.

It was peculiarly fitting and appropriate when Atchison was born, that a prominent physician of those days was on hand to assist in the delivery. In truth, Dr. J. H. Stringfellow was not only the physician in charge, but he also was one of the parents, and from that time to the present the medical profession has been active in the affairs of the county. There have been many splendid representatives of the profession here since the days of Dr. Stringfellow, and the vicissitudes and trials and hardships they went through make up a romantic chapter in our history. The oldest physician in the city of Atchison in 1916 in point of service is Dr. E. T. Shelly, and it might be said, without disparagement to others, he is not only the oldest, but he is perhaps held in as high esteem and respect as any other physician who ever practiced here. Dr. Shelly combines the qualities that make for good citizenship. He treats his profession as a good Christian treats his religion. He is a man of ideals, of vision, of integrity, and his life rings true. Yet, withal, Dr. Shelly is not a professional hermit. While his profession comes first, he does not allow it to exclude him from an active interest and participation in the affairs of life. He is a student of political and economic questions, an essayist, and a vigorous advocate of a liberal democracy. His views on these 303questions are wholesome and instructive, but it is to the profession of medicine that Dr. Shelly addressed himself in a recent interview the author of this history had with him, and his views were expressed as follows:

“What changes have occurred in the practice of medicine since the days of the first physicians here! He did his work on horseback with his medicines in saddle-bags thrown over the horse, and often had to go many miles to visit a patient over a sparsely settled prairie with roads that were little more than trails. The streams he had to cross were bridgeless, and the larger ones could be crossed only at fords, which, after heavy rains or during freezing weather, were very dangerous.

“Today, in this section of the State, these primitive conditions can hardly be imagined. Nearly every country doctor now has an automobile, and crosses gullies and streams on concrete bridges and travels over ‘dragged’ roads. Instead of passing through a sparsely settled country, he finds a fine large farm house on nearly every ‘quarter’ or ‘eighty’ supplemented by a substantial barn and spacious granaries. He passes a school house every few miles and occasionally a rural church, and lives in a comfortable, modern home in a flourishing, well kept country town.

“In the science and art of medicine the change has been no less marked than in its general practice.

“Until forty years ago, doctors possessed a few great remedies which they often used very skillfully, but the knowledge of the nature of disease was very slight. Treatment was largely symptomatic; that is, remedies were expected chiefly to combat certain symptoms, rather than to treat underlying causes.

“A notion very prevalent until then, and which has not yet disappeared entirely, was that there is a remedy for every disease, and that whenever a patient is not cured of his illness it is due, not to the limitations of the healing art, but to the fact that treatment was not begun early enough, or his doctor didn’t know enough, or didn’t care enough to give him the right medicine. About that time it began to dawn on the most thoughtful and capable medical men that the course of disease can usually not be quickly checked; that most diseases run a definite course; that most patients recover spontaneously, or the disease persists to the end and is not much influenced by any of the remedies used. About that time medical men began to appreciate also another fact: that underlying most diseases, there is a natural tendency toward recovery, which means that most diseases will cure themselves if given time enough.

304“While medical men insist that the practice of medicine is both a science and an art, they are also perfectly willing to admit that it is neither an exact science nor a perfect art. In other words, modern medicine admits that it has not yet scaled the heights or fathomed the depths of scientific knowledge in regard to the nature of disease or of its cure. It is still willing to learn. Indeed, it realizes the fact that there is still infinitely more to learn than has yet been found out. And there is no avenue of human knowledge which it is not willing to explore in order to find out things that will get the sick well and keep the well from getting sick.

“A stunning blow to the old notions of the nature of disease and to the old methods of treatment, was administered about thirty years ago by the discovery that most diseases are due to infinitely small, living organisms, called germs or bacteria, which prey upon, or poison the tissues of the body, and thereby disturb, more or less seriously, some, or all, of the normal functions of the body. The scientific laboratory thereupon became the shrine of modern medicine; a new epoch in medicine had arrived.

“This new epoch meant not only that medical and surgical disorders were henceforth to be treated in a much more scientific and rational way than they had been in the past, but that one of the greatest scientific conquests of the ages was underway—the intelligent prevention of disease. Preventive medicine had been born. Soon thereafter a new and unprecedented popular interest in medical matters became prevalent. Newspapers, magazines and the public forum took a hand in popularizing this new knowledge of the nature of disease and the methods of preventing disease, which was founded on the new knowledge. Disease began to be looked on no longer as only a mysterious dispensation of Providence, but as a thing which, as scientific medicine advanced, was more and more to come under the knowledge and control of science.

“In no domain of modern medicine have greater advances been made than in surgery, due chiefly to the discovery of the role which germs play in the causation of surgical troubles. Because of the discovery of the necessity of asepsis (the absence of germs) in surgical operations and its practical application, operations, which, if done thirty years ago, would have been almost invariably fatal, can now be done nearly with impunity. Then, surgical operations in large surgical clinics were done by men in Prince Albert coats. Today, the surgeon and his assistants are arrayed in sterilized white gowns and rubber gloves with caps for their heads and special coverings for mouth and nose, which are worn in order to prevent any unfiltered, contaminated 305vapor from these orifices coming in contact with the freshly made wound. Where proper precautions are taken, and no pus or other filth has come in contact with the wound, some of the most extensive operations are followed by immediate repair, without the formation of pus in the wound. To enumerate even a small part of the triumphs of modern surgery would occupy too much space and is uncalled for here, and these triumphs would have been impossible before the advent of surgical cleanliness.

“But modern medicine does not stop at treating or curing people. It does something even bigger and better—it tries to keep them well. Indeed, the medical profession is the only immolating profession there is—the only profession that is all the time trying, by its efforts in the direction of preventive medicine, to destroy its only source of income—the treatment of disease—by doing all within its power to make disease less and less prevalent. It is continually urging better personal and public hygiene and sanitation. Because medical men understand the stunting effects of ill health on the growing mind and body of the child, they are urging careful medical inspection of schools and school children, and they call for better health conditions in the family, the factory, and the mine, and they denounce without measure unhealthy child labor. Modern medicine tries to banish from the home and school, as nearly as may be, that brutal precept—“He that spareth the rod, hateth his son”—because it knows that the irritable, petulant, stubborn child may be a sick child, or has fools for parents, while the incorrigible boy or girl needs the attention of an expert in nervous and mental diseases rather than the brutality of an impatient, ignorant parent or policeman.

“Modern medicine enters the jungle and by proper sanitary rules and regulations makes a deadly, miasmatic swamp a model of cleanliness and healthfulness, as was done in the Panama canal zone, and without which the building of the canal would have been impossible.

“Modern medicine seeks to help and to save mankind, not only from physical ills, but from moral ills as well. By the careful study of the influence of inheritance and environment on the development and the conduct of the child, it tries to make his physical inheritance as favorable as possible, and his economic and social environment as helpful as may be, realizing that much of our moral delinquency is due to unjust civic and economic conditions.”

It would require a volume to tell the story of the lives of all the early-day physicians of this county. Investigation discloses the fact that they were numerous, and that in addition to Dr. Stringfellow, who gave more of his time 306to political matters than to his profe............