The doctor worked by the year— $25 for the whole family. I remember two of the Florida doctors, Chowning and Meredith . They not only tended an entire family for $25 a year, but furnished the medicines themselves. Good measure, too. Only the largest persons could hold a whole dose. Castor oil was the principal beverage. The dose was half a dipperful, with half a dipperful of New Orleans molasses added to help it down and make it taste good, which it never did. The next stand-by was calomel; the next, rhubarb; and the next, jalap. Then they bled the patient, and put mustard plasters on him. It was a dreadful system, and yet the death-rate was not heavy. The calomel was nearly sure to salivate the patient and cost him some of his teeth. There were no dentists. When teeth became touched with decay or were otherwise ailing, the doctor knew of but one thing to do: he fetched his tongs and dragged them out. If the jaw remained, it was not his fault.
Doctors were not called in cases of ordinary illness; the family’s grandmother attended to those. Every old woman was a doctor, and gathered her own medicines in the woods, and knew how to compound doses that would stir the vitals of a cast-iron dog.
He might be able to say that "the death-rate was not heavy" but that was only because he didn't know what was ahead in the world in terms of keeping death at bay. Still, Mark Twain's writing seems remarkably modern, which reminds us that a low death rate is a gift of the modern world, not the thing that created it.
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