CHAPTER XXX
MEDICINE, LAW AND COURTS
The two professions β those of Law and Medicine β have been well
represented in Dickinson County since the first settlements in 1857.
Naturally, in the first years, there were few doctors and few lawyers, but the
services of one or two of either were adequate for the sparse settlements
around the lakes. Personal troubles and disputes were more often decided
among the parties involved or else submitted to the seer of the community.
Medical attention often came from some member of the family or a neighbor
who kept a store of simple remedies in his cabin.
The first doctors, though perhaps crude in comparison with the present
day methods of the physician, must be commended. Their knowledge
and practice were necessarily restricted. Frequently they had no
professional education to speak of, their training having been gained through
apprenticeship to older physicians. They followed the tide of emigration
westward and built up their practice with the new country. In the face
of biting winds and chilling rains, in the darkest hours of the night, the
doctor made his calls; fording streams, crossing sloughs and pushing his
way across the trackless prairie. The pioneers, as a class, were in financial
straits and the doctor's fees were small, generally in the form of flour,
meat or corn, or whatever commodity the settler could afford to give. Blue
pills, senna, quinine, bone-set tea, burdock or snake root bitters, decoctions
of wild cherry or hickory bark, and various poultices and plasters, and
Spanish fly, constituted the physician's available remedies. One pioneer
physician remarked that after the patient had reached a convalescent stage,
if indeed such a stage were ever reached, generous doses of castor oil were
given to work out of the system the deleterious effects of the initial course
of treatment. Blood-letting was also considered an efficient means of
combating disease, the doctors believing that by letting a copious amount of
the life-giving fluid from the veins thereby the tenement of the demon
disease would be destroyed. Duncan, in his "Reminiscences of the Medβ