Grant Wood 'Family Doctor' 1940

Good Morning Doctor!

By W.A. Rohlf (1938)

Reissued, Updated and Corrected in 2024

Preface

W.A. Rohlf ~1910
W.A. Rohlf ~1910

This little book was conceived neither as a medical history nor as a technical discussion of surgery. It is instead a story of people, of friends with whom I have shared joy and sorrow, in short, bits of the day-to-day drama which is the life of a country doctor. Many of the incidents are trivial, in one sense of the word, yet each has had in it something which appealed to me enough to make me remember it as a highlight in my forty-five years as a country doctor.

Friends who were entertained at my telling of these incidents often suggested in recent years that I write them down. But I never had the time to do it for I was much too busy with my practice. I worked hard. I took part in the activities of the state medical society, serving for a year as its president, at the same time continuing my professional business in Waverly. But after my term of office ended, when I expected to have a little more leisure, I found my days just as full. Working long hours, sometimes feverishly to keep pace with the demands which were made upon me, I seemed always to have more ahead than I could ever do.

Then one hot morning in the summer of 1936, after I had completed a trying operation, I collapsed.

There followed hideous months when nothing mattered.

Then, as a man sometime does, I found an interest quite by accident. That interest was the writing of this little book, just as my friends had asked. I mentioned, with some temerity, the idea to Mrs. Rohlf and she encouraged me. But even with her encouragement I doubt if I ever would have more than talk about it if it hadn't been for a country newspaper woman, Dorothy Moeller, who had insisted (like the others) that I write the book but who had added that if I ever did, she would help me.

So we started, I as autobiographer, she as my ghost. She took down the incidents as I thought of them, edited them, rearranged them, to form this little volume.

That is how this book came to be.

In it I have not embellished the truth. I have set down incidents exactly as they occurred. And while I realize that I, in living them, have had a richer experience than I can ever hope to recreate either by writing or telling, I shall be satisfied if in these printed pages there be found entertainment and, perhaps, inspiration.

William A. Rohlf, MD

Forward (1938)

I have had the rare privilege of being an assistant to Dr. W. A. Rohlf, country surgeon, author of this book. We were great friends and had many good times together at work and at play. I often hoped he would write of his varied experiences but the demands on this busy surgeon were too great. He never had the time to write.

As we neared home from operating late at night we would look for the porch light at his residence. His wife left it burning if we had more work to do—turned it off if our work was done. It was our signal. When it was out, we called it a glorious gloom. It meant rest for the tired, weary surgeon. It was a gloom but a glorious one.

Finally the eyes of this master surgeon began to fail. He could not see very well—not well enough to operate. Again there was a glorious gloom. Now he had time to give us his recollections. His vivid memory could now recall the interesting events of nearly fifty years of surgical practice.

And so, at the request of many of his friends and colleagues, he brought forth these pages. He has lived again. He has seen a great light through the glorious gloom. This light is reflected through a written record of achievement attained by few men. We are thankful for it.

Leonard A. West, MD

Forward (1995)

I never met Dr. Rohlf. By the time I came along the torch had passed to a new patriarch, my grandfather Herbert Rathe. I do remember Aunt Lottie, Dr Rohlf's widow, as a very old and revered member of our family. I continue to marvel at the intensity and longevity of relationships that began with a minor injury almost 100 years ago. Though I never met him, I came to know Dr. Rohlf through family tales when I was a child, through the inspiration he gave the the physicians in my family, and finally through this book.

This book is a true heirloom—a valued possession passed down in our family through succeeding generations. Its value is threefold. First there is the sentimental value of the book itself. My copy belonged to my grandfather and was given to me after he passed away. Second, it chronicles life and times very different from the present day. As a historical work, it furnishes important perspective on our current state of affairs. Finally and most importantly, this book reveals the essential compassion and humanism required of a good doctor. In the words of W. H. Auden:

A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist…. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.

I dedicate this new edition of Good Morning Doctor! to my grandparents, through whom I came to share Dr. Rohlf's legacy.

Richard Rathe, MD


Dedication

To Lottie 1938
To Lottie 1938
For Herbert and Dorothy Rathe 1995
For Herbert and Dorothy Rathe 1995
Original Portrait and Signature
Original Portrait and Signature

Chapter 1 (Hands)

They Decided to Keep Him
They Decided to Keep Him

There were ten of us, Mother, Father, seven boys, and one girl—and another baby coming. I knew we were a big family, but I didn't realize until that summer when Mother was sick just what it means to care for then people, to feed them and keep them clean, to give them shelter. I had turned twelve in January and as second from the oldest it had been my lot, ever since I had been old enough, to help around the house. So when Mother took to her bed it was only natural that I should take her place as best I could.

I was a husky youngster for my age; so work didn't hurt me. In Davenport where I was born I had done all manner of odd jobs; when the family got so big that Dad couldn't support us pegging shoes and we moved out onto his forty-acre patch, I did my share of field work, weeding onions and cultivating potatoes. We all worked. We had to. But we were happy to make a living, raising most of what we ate and selling enough to buy other necessities.

It was the summer of the seventh year on the farm, when Mother got sick, that I became the hired girl. The three older boys helped Dad in the fields while I stayed at the house, taking care of Mother, looking after the three little boys and the little sister. When I wasn't watching them or getting something for Mother, I was cooking or washing or scrubbing. Yet in all of it there was just one thing I couldn't stand—it wasn't the work—it was having the boys call me Mary.

Now that I look back it sounds funny but it wasn't then.

One wash day, I remember, I had had a worse time than usual. Even though I had put the water on to heat before breakfast, it was dinner time before all the clothes were on the line. Mother called from her room. You better get dinner started, son. Just let that last tubful soak until after you've eaten.

All right, I answered, trying to sound cheerful.

Why not stir up a batch of pancakes, she suggested. A good idea I thought; pancakes are quick and filling. So she gave me the directions, with me running to her door after each operation was finished to get directions for the next step. In that way I made many things that summer.

I got the little folks in and started on their meal before Dad and the boys came from the field. When I heard them, I poured out their cakes on the sizzling griddle and was just running the pancake turner around their bubbling edges when a grinning brother popped his head in at the door to inquire, Pancakes today, Mary? Ordinarily I might had paid no attention, but that day I was just tired enough to let it bother me.

Turner in hand, blazing mad, I rushed for him; but he turned and with a whoop of glee was founding out toward the barn. Then Dad appeared and the fracas was over almost before it began. Still smoldering, I went back to my pancake griddle and at least had the satisfaction of giving that taunting brother of mine some cakes that were doughy in the middle!

When I finally got the dishes washed and the last tubful of clothes hung up, my hands looked as if they were made of puckered pink sponge. Scrubbing the kitchen floor didn't help their appearance any, so that when I took Mother a drink I wasn't surprised that she looked at them. I grinned and she smiled.

You've had a pretty hard day, Willie, she said. Better take it easier tomorrow. You can just as well as not put away the bedding and the overalls and towels and such things without ironing. Then you might soak some beans tonight and have them for dinner tomorrow.

Sure, I'll soak the beans. But don't you be worrying about what we eat; I'll take care of that. You just rest and get well, I told her.

Taking my puckered, soaked hands in hers she patted them. Then, with a very solemn and strange look on her face, she said slowly, They are the hands of a helper, son. I hope they will be—ways.

My weariness melted in the glow of that idea—hands of a helper! That's what mine were! Even doing dishes, thereafter, wasn't so hard.

That was more than a half century ago. Today, with most of my life behind me, I look at my hands and wonder if Mother would still say, Hands of a helper.

Chapter 2 (Beans)

I put the beans to soak as Mother suggested. Next morning early, before the little folks got up, I tiptoed down to start breakfast. I was half way across the kitchen when I was jerked back in amazement, my eyes bulging at the sight before me.

The Beans!

I had forgotten they would swell. They were all over the place! The kettle, no match for its heaving contents, was almost hidden in a rounding mound of them; the knife drawer of the table had been left open and it, too, was full. On the floor around the table were little piles of the beans that had dripped off. Why, I had soaked enough for threshers!

Full of shame at my own ignorance and almost overcome with a desire to scoop up the mess and throw the whole thing out to the chickens, I finally pulled myself together and began scooping up beans. I used the dripping pan, the bread pans, the kettles! Before I was done I had every pan in the house full of beans? For that noon, and several meals after, the Rohlfs had more than plenty to eat although there was a certain monotony to the diet.

If the beans were bad, the eggs were worse.

It was some weeks after we had finished the beans that I, for lack of a better idea, decided on eggs for dinner. I had often seen Mother cook them, breaking each one into a saucer to test its freshness and then slipping it from the saucer into the skillet. To my boyish mind that method had merit but seemed much too slow. I got a big platter and broke to dozen eggs onto it; a labor-saving idea, I figured.

Then carefully I took the brimming platterful over to the stove and poised it above the hot frying pan, ready to slide the eggs in slowly. I tilted the platter ever so little when plot! The whole mess dumped itself! The skillet wasn't big enough. Down its sides and onto the stove ran the eggs, changing as they ran from yolks and whites to stinking char. I grabbed the goose wing from behind the stove and frantically scraped at the smoking stuff; but before I could get it off, the whole house smelled of that bitter odor which simply wrapped itself around everything! For days the ghosts of those burned eggs seemed to haunt me; I couldn't open a cupboard door without that whiff of charred eggs fairly wrinkling the inside of my nose.

Chapter 3 (In the Onion Patch)

Miss Kennedy was my teacher in country school the year I started in eighth grade. One day, while I was dusting the erasers for her, she asked in her quiet way if I planned to go to high school. With a family the size of ours and with me needed to help at home, I had given so little thought to such a thing that her question startled me. I told her how it was and that I knew I'd be working on the farm.

You could go on as far as your studies are concern, was all she said.

She made me feel good, just saying that; but, after all, high school was not for me.

Before Christmas vacation she mentioned it again. Later, in the spring, she said the same thing. By the third time she had really started me to thinking so that I asked Dad. He was so surprised that all he could say was, How on earth could you go to high school! Then shaking his head he added, High school takes money. Besides, son, Mother and I need you here. I knew that every word he said was true. I was doubly sure than I asked Mother and she said the same thing, softening it a little by suggesting that maybe if I waited a few years I could go on.

I could earn my own way, I suggested feebly. They smiled and said no.

Examination time came. The day that Miss Kennedy handed back our papers she asked me to stay after school. I mustn't insist, William, she began, but it does seem a pity that you can't go on to high school. You're well qualified for your class work, and I just believe you could find work so that you could earn your own way, a big, husky boy like you. I know you are needed at home, but I am wondering if you might not be better able to help your folks if you had a high school training.

Walking home that night on the dusty road, I turned the idea over and over in my mind. Maybe this wasn't so impossible. After high school I could teach myself and get a paycheck every month. I might even be able to buy Mother a dress, and Dad some shoes. And there could be hair ribbons for the little girls (our ninth baby was a girl). By the time I turned in at our lane, I was practically through high school. But Dad said no and Mother said no; and I, sick at heart, tackled the summer's work. I didn't mention high school after that.

One blistering hot day Dad and I were down on our knees weeding onions in the patch behind the orchard when, like a bolt of lightning out of a clear sky, came these words from Dad: Son, your mother and I have been talking things over. If you can make your own way, as you say you can, we will let you go to high school.

Chapter 4 (Room and Board)

This was my big day. The horses were hitched up, Dad had on his good suit, I had on mine. I should have been filled with happiness; yet for one, long sickening moment I never felt worse in all my life. From the depths of me I didn't want to go to high school. Mother kissed me goodbye, my big brothers wished me luck, the little folks just stood there wondering at the goings on; and I, like a big baby, fought back the tears. But Dad was ready to go. I hesitated. It was Mother who helped me break away. With a firm but tender shove she pushed me toward the buggy. You better hurry, son, you haven't much more than time to get there.

So with ten dollars in my pocket and the clothes on my back, I set out that early fall morning for Davenport, six miles away. My throat was tight and my eyes burned as Dad and I drove out of the farm yard.

Once in town, I went to the old high school building, took the entrance examinations, and in the afternoon heard those magic words: We can accept you as a student.

So far so good. Purchase of books and supplies left only enough of my ten dollars to jingle faintly in my pocket; yet even that sound was reassuring as I started out to find a job. All of Miss Kennedy's encouragement, all of my dreaming, all of my parents' unselfishness in giving me this freedom would amount to nothing if I didn't find work.

As green as any country boy ever was, I had no idea of how to go about hunting a job; so I did the thing that seemed most logical to me at the moment. I stopped at a house and asked if they wanted a high school boy to work for them. They didn't. I went to the next house. They didn't either. I went to the next house and the next, up one street and down the other, asking at each door the same question and getting at each door the same answer, No.

It got to be past six o'clock. I thought of the warm farm kitchen at home; I wondered what my home folk were having for supper. But that thought tormented me and made me realize how hungry I was. With dragging feet I made my way to the next place which happened to be a hotel. The Ackley House, and by some kind of luck the first man I spoke to was the proprietor, Mr. Cross. He gave me work.

My first job was that of porter, and for this work I was given my room and board. Things went along nicely until the latter part of October when it began to get cold. My clothes had done well enough in moderate weather, but the chill of late autumn seemed to go right through me; more often than not I ran to and from school to avoid getting cold. It was after a couple of weeks of this weather that Mr. Cross, one night after school, asked me to go down town with him. I thought nothing of it, for I often accompanied him and carried his packages; but when we stopped at a clothing store and he said, Guess we'll get you something warmer to wear, I couldn't believe my ears.

We went in and he bought me a whole new outfit—underwear, suit, shirt, socks, and even a tie! Almost my first store clothes, and a whole outfit all at one time!

Mr. Cross didn't let his kindness end there. In a few months he made me a night clerk. I didn't have so much heavy work to do, and I had a chance to do much more studying since I could often work at my lessons while I was on duty. I was at the desk until midnight each night and then slept where a bell would waken me if someone came in later.

In the summer following that school year, I worked in the fields again. The next school year, I was house man for a wealthy Davenport family. But my junior year found me back as night clerk for Mr. Cross, and I continued in his employ until my graduation.

Chapter 5 (What Next?)

As graduation time approached, we seniors became more and more concerned about the professions we would follow. It happened that in our class there were a number of fellows who chose to study law. While I had never before been interested in that as a career, I found myself leaning toward it strongly. After each conversation with the law enthusiasts, I was more and more sold on the idea. Consequently by the time I was graduated I had pledged my future to the study and practice of law.

But to study law costs money.

And here again, while I didn't appreciate it at the time, that very lack of money was a blessing in disguise.

Back on the farm the lack of money had given me the job of hired girl, and I had learned in that experience the nobility in doing for others. Hands of a helper my Mother had said.

Lack of money had made a situation on the farm in which my parents, by letting me go to school, had shown me what real unselfishness is.

Lack of money had made me work my way through high school, in which process I had found a pretty good set of values. And now, lack of money was going to make me a school teacher—at least for a few years—instead of a lawyer. It was while I was a school teacher that I practically stumbled onto my real career.

Chapter 6 (Schoolmaster)

I taught school three years, two in the rural schools of Scott County and one in the village of Walcott, Iowa. During this time I gave my parents every cent I made above living expenses, realizing in some measure that dream I had had on the farm after Miss Kennedy suggested that high school might be for me.

It was in Walcott that I chanced to meet a village doctor, Dr. Thomas Byrnes, an unusual man, a scholar in three fields: medicine, mathematics, and acoustics. I was drawn to him not only by his great knowledge but also by the intensity of his study and by his remarkable application, two things which had come to be ideals of mine even at this stage in my life. Many an evening did I sit with Dr. Byrnes, listening to him discuss scientific problems, adding my trifle when I was able and feeling as we talked that I was attracted more and more by his first love, medicine.

I began reading his medical journals; then I started in on the books in his extensive medical library. Before I knew it, I had discarded law as a career and had substituted for it this new-found and earnest desire to be a doctor. I have never regretted that decision. If I had my life to live over again, I would be a doctor—only a better one.

January 5 of that year in Walcott I was twenty-one years old and that birthday marked the beginning of W. A. Rohlf, professional man. With a dime in my pocket I began saving my money for college, putting aside the biggest share of my salary each month. The summer I added to my funds by selling books, and then climaxed my efforts working with a threshing outfit for two dollars a day, Sundays included.

That fall (it was 1888) I entered the College of Medicine of the State University of Iowa at Iowa City. The grimy hands that had weeded onions in the patch behind the orchard years before had grown since then and I had grown too; but as I signed my name to that enrollment blank I trembled with the same excitement, I thrilled to the same expectancy that I had known that day when Dad had said, You may go.

Chapter 7 (An Ideal)

James Guthrie 1895
James Guthrie 1895

As I sat to hear my first lecture in the College of Medicine, I felt that there were others there in spirit with me: Mother, Dad, Miss Kennedy, Mr. Cross, Dr. Byrnes. And what I heard in that first lecture has stayed with me all these years.

Dr. Guthrie, of Dubuque, was the speaker and his eulogy of the profession of medicine was surely a fitting subject for such an occasion. His words burned themselves into my mind and more than once, in the years that have passed, I have recalled them. This is what he said:

Great is the science that contemplates impenetrable space and studies the whirling worlds, each in its own proper sphere, as they have leaped into space from the fingertips of God's creative genius; but greater is that science that snatches from space the mysterious element and applies it so that the blind may be made to see and the lame to leap for joy.

Eulogy of the Profession of Medicine

Great is that science that delves into the bowels of the earth and seeks to find there the footprints of the Creator, left ages and ages ago in the form of leaf or flower or fish upon the surface of solid rock, or that delves into the earth and seeks to find things of material and industrial value to humanity; but greater is that science that delves into the dark realms of the earth's bosom and seeks for those elements that may be used to alleviate human suffering.

Great is that science that seeks to classify the green verdure of the earth from the modest violet to the sturdy oak, the swaying elm, the weeping willow, and the clinging vine; but greater is the science that seeks to find in root, in branch, in leaf, in flower or fruit, the elements that may be used to smooth the wrinkles from the pillow of human pain, or lull to sweet and peaceful sleep the weary, tired, bewildered brain.

Great is that science, profession, or calling that points through the dark, dim, distant horizon of the future beyond the grave to the bright and brilliant star of hope for life eternal; but great is that profession that robs the grave of its victim, and restores the infant, laughing in childish health and glee, back to the arms of a grateful, happy, loving mother!

Now, gentlemen, this profession that you have chosen will require of you at all times your best in mental effort and moral behavior. Even at times your devotion to your profession will demand of you the facing of physical hazards.

To Dr. Guthrie every word of that lecture was the living truth, a truth which found practical expression daily in his long professional career. And when, one tragic day in the dead of winter—when he was confined to his bed by illness—a patient needed him, he did not hesitate but arose and went to minister to him. Giving his last ounce of strength of this unselfish act, his own illness overcame him and he passed on in March of 1930.

Chapter 8 (Preceptors)

When my class entered the University (there were 21 of us) the medical course took three years. Each student spent six months of the year on the campus and six months with some established physician who, in this advisory capacity to an undergraduate, was known as a preceptor.

In many ways, of course, the training we received was greatly inferior to that given in medical colleges today; our tools were cruder, our equipment was limited, and scientific knowledge had not developed as it has today. But taking all these things into consideration, I am inclined to believe that in some ways our training prepared us for our professional careers even better than many modern institutions do. Medical colleges in that early day had much to commend them and perhaps foremost was this system of preceptors.

It is gratifying to find that today there is an ever increasing tendency toward a return to this system. In the past decade it has been my privilege to be a preceptor to a number of students during their vacation periods; and I feel now, as I did a half century ago, that a young man profits greatly by being placed, during his student days, in a situation similar to the one in which he will find himself after graduation.

Chapter 9 (Dr. Middleton)

W.D. Middleton 1890s
W.D. Middleton 1890s

If you have happened into my private office any time since I started practice forty-five years ago, you may have noticed that lone portrait hanging on the wall. That is Dr. W. D. Middleton.

I met him at the University, and while I was yet an undergraduate he stamped so indelibly upon my heart his great ideals, that I have carried them with me always. I believe that the years, as they have passed, have cut them even deeper, giving them a beauty and meaning which as a younger man I could not know.

Dr. Middleton was not only a great doctor, but he increased his professional stature by a concept of charity and human kindness loftier than any other I have known. Surely it was a kind fate that let me have him for my preceptor.

Outwardly such a modest, unassuming man, he soon showed me in hundreds of ways while I was associated with him a depth of character and a medical skill as remarkable as they are rare. His insight was almost uncanny. He never mentioned it, but he knew that I was very poor; and whenever he had the slightest excuse he saw to it that I received pay for work that I did for him.

His generosity extended farther. He gave me responsibilities beyond routine matters, the better to train me for actual practice. Probably one of the happiest days in my life was when he allowed me to assist him in performing his first laparotomy. He successfully removed a thirty-pound tumor and the patient recovered.

It was in helping with his general practice that I really learned to know him. Seeing him follow day in and day out his rigid code of ethics was an even more valuable experience to me than was the chance to have intimate contact with his large general practice. More than once in those months was I impressed by his unselfishness, his devotion to the sick, and, above all, his cheerfulness and patience. He was never too tired to make another call, never too hurried to a word of encouragement. And he so gave himself that, regardless of the toil it might take, he would always merit the trust and complete confidence of his patients. They were sure that if there was anything in the field of medicine to help them, Dr. Middleton would know about it and would make available such relief.

After I had been in his office for some months, the doctor let me make such calls as he thought I could, especially on days when he was particularly busy. It was just such a day when, after office hours, I suggested that I might take care of a certain case, a man whom I had seen that morning with the doctor.

Dr. Middleton shook his head, invited me to sit down and have a cigar. No, he said slowly, that is one call I couldn't let you make. They might not understand. Then he went on to tell me that the family, once well-to-do, now very poor, had for years employed him as the family physician. I wouldn't want them to feel that because of their poverty I had lost interest in them. That is one call that I must make.

How many times since then have I recalled that homely incident, recognizing anew the truth it told; that the reward of a physician is not always money but sometimes something far more precious than the coin of the realm.

His idealism extended into his relations with other physicians. He helped younger physicians, was loyal to his colleagues, did not know jealousy, and was charitable even to those who were unkind to him.

One time a doctor friend, who was in the habit of bringing his surgical patients to Dr. Middleton, was asked by a patient to call in Dr. X, instead of Dr. Middleton, for an operation. This doctor friend came to Dr. Middleton, telling of the patient's request and asking his advice about Dr. X, who was a young surgeon and quite unknown to the doctor friend. It happened that Dr. X had not been ethical in his relations with Dr. Middleton and that, coupled with the obvious fact that this case would normally have come to Dr. Middleton, put my preceptor in a position which would have tempted any lesser man.

Magnanimous under even such trying conditions, Dr. Middleton replied truthfully, unmindful of himself, I know Dr. X very well and am well acquainted with his ability as a physician and surgeon. I can assure you that he is the peer of any surgeon in the state, and I feel that you will make no mistake if you grant this patient's request and have Dr. X into see him.

I only hope that in my professional dealings with broth practitioners I have reflected, even in a small way, that splendid idealism of Dr. Middleton.

Chapter 10 (The Little Vial)

Toward the end of our senior year, our class was called into the old amphitheater to hear a special lecture. The subject and the identity of the speaker had not been revealed. Finally the door by the speaker's table opened and in walked Dr. Middleton.

The Little Vial
The Little Vial

In his hand he held a little vial filled with some sort of fluid. He carried it with greatest care as though it were very precious.

Holding the vial up before us he began, My friends, I have here a weapon which you fortunate gentlemen may carry with you after you leave this University; a weapon with which you may successfully wage war against one of mankind's greatest scourges. It is a happy coincidence which gives this to you as you embark on your professional careers. Gentlemen, his voice trembled, with the fluid in this vial you shall conquer diphtheria!

There was a sigh in the big room. Nobody moved. We were a part of one of the most dramatic chapters in medical history!

This, Dr. Middleton pointed to the vial, is diphtheria antitoxin. In Europe at this moment this antitoxin is being used successfully. This very vial full was brought over only a few days ago by Dr. Littig, and it is by his kindness that we have it here now.

Then he told us how the antitoxin had been discovered, how it was being produced, and how efficiently it was cutting the diphtheria death rate.

Think, men, what this may mean. Think of the people who may not only have their lives saved but who may be spared the suffering which diphtheria brings for this antitoxin can prevent as well as cure the disease. And if diphtheria has yielded to the magic of science, think what other diseases may also be conquered.

Perhaps some day, through the efforts of our laboratory men, with their conscientious and everlasting diligence, there may be found an antitoxin or a vaccine which will be effective in preventing and perhaps curing typhoid fever which is now all too widespread; and some day the same kind of research may give us a remedy for scarlet fever, that other scourge of childhood.

A marvelous vision and truly a prophecy! For most of us have lived long enough to see his dreams come true.

That lecture, a climax to our student experiences, made such a lasting impression on all of us that seldom have I talked, even in these later years, with any one of my classmates without finding the conversation inevitably turning to that lecture.

When Dr. Middleton died, no so many years later, a victim of one of the hazards of surgery—blood poisoning—he was mourned not only as a great doctor but also as a great man. It might well have been said of him as Mark Anthony said of Brutus,

This was the noblest Roman of them all; … His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, This was a man!

Chapter 11 (My First Office Furniture)

Graduation 1891
Graduation 1891

As you might well imagine, I wasn't exactly a rich man when I arrived in Hampton, Iowa, in March of 1891, to begin the practice of medicine. To get through college I had sold books and medical supplies and had run a boarding club (they called it Rohlf's Starvation Club!), but the cash return from these enterprises was scarcely more than enough to pay my school expenses.

The morning after I came to Hampton I registered my certificate at the courthouse and paid for my license; that morning, too, I had paid my hotel for six weeks' board and room in advance so that I'd have that margin of safety. But with those items out of the way I was practically without funds.

I rented two rooms over Baldwin's Drug Store; the druggist took a chance that he would get his rent through profits he hoped to make on prescriptions I hoped to write.

Then I called on the leading furniture dealer and told him that I was a young, inexperienced physician who had located in Hampton the day before to practice medicine. I showed him my diploma. I also told him that I had an office rented but that I needed some furniture and had come to him about getting it. I admitted that I had no money to pay for it and no resources except that diploma on which the state said I was prepared to practice medicine.

He asked me some embarrassing questions about business references. Of course I told him I had none.

He hesitated.

After a pause I asked him if he was also an undertaker.

He said, Yes.

I reminded him that when I introduced myself I had mentioned that I was a young inexperienced physician and had paid my board and lodging bill six weeks in advance. I added that to me the outlook seemed a real opportunity.

He looked me over again and then burst out laughing. Young man, he said, I am willing to take a chance on you. How much furniture do you think you will need to start with?

I told him and he let me have everything I mentioned. In a reasonable time I was able to pay cash for the furniture—and it was not through commissions to my benefactor, the undertaker!

After forty-five years I still have my first waiting room table.

Chapter 12 (My First German Patient)

It so happened that I was the only German-speaking physician in Franklin County; therefore I mentioned that fact in the professional card which I inserted in the local paper after I opened my office. A day or so after the announcement appeared, my fist German patient came in.

He greeted me cordially and told me that he needed a prescription for a tonic. He said he wanted something to give him an appetite and to relieve a general feeling of debility. From his appearance there was nothing to indicate that he was seriously ill; so I complied with his request and gave him a prescription for a pint of Elixir Calasaya Iron and Quinine. With it went directions that he was to take two teaspoonfuls in a quarter glass of water after each meal.

Smilingly he took the prescription, went downstairs, and had it filled.

In a few hours he stormed into my office, raging mad. Vat the ____ you trying to do! Poison me! he roared, rounding out the sentence with some picturesque German phraseology.

Poison you?

Ya, dat rotten stuff you gafe me liked to kill me. Und der boys, dey all got stomach aches! Vat de hell!"

Came the light: he hadn't wanted tonic! What he had been after was whiskey, and that was why he had talked to me so knowingly when he first came in; that was what he had meant when he had winked as he told me his symptoms. Consequently he thought whiskey was what I gave him! And he had invited the boys around to the livery stable for a nip!

Didn't you read the directions on the bottle? I countered.

Directions! You a goot Cherman and don't know enough to gif me viskey ven I vant it! You tick-headed _____! He was almost running out of words. If you don't gif me my money back, I'll take id oud uff your hide!

You asked for a prescription and got it. That's all there is to it. Now get out of here and get out quick, I said, deciding that, after all, my hide was mine and it was up to me to protect it.

He started to go on with his abuse, so I rushed him. I took him by the coat collar and the seat of his pants and unceremoniously helped him down the stairs and out into the street.

My first German patient had come and gone. After the flush of excitement had died away I wondered if I would ever be able to redeem myself in the community. But I was worrying unnecessarily, for I soon found out that Hampton was very much a prohibition town, had never had a saloon, and allowed the sale of alcoholics only by druggists on a physician's prescription.

Where I came from there were open saloons, and so for more reasons than one I had not tumbled to the meaning of the wink of my first German patient!

Chapter 13 (I Become a Specialist)

Quite naturally, when I graduated from the University, I was determined eventually to make surgery my field. Dr. Middleton, who exerted such a great influence over me, was a surgeon; Dr. Peck, then the leading surgeon in the West, had his office across the hall from Dr. Middleton's office in Davenport; and, coupled with my friendship and contacts with these two men, was the fact that at college I had had the opportunity to do dog surgery.

Don't be misled by thinking that I was immune to the usual reactions to blood and cutting. When I saw my first operation, a leg amputation on a little boy, done by Dr. Peck, I was as sick as anybody ever was under similar circumstances. But I eventually overcame that and did everything I could to get information and experience in operative technique.

But being determined on surgery, it was a much of a surprise to me as to anybody else that before I had been in Hampton a week I was being called an eye specialist. Of course, if my public thought that, I had to qualify; so did the best I could and read everything I could get my hands on to gain knowledge about this specialty of mine!

My reputation was the result of treating a case of sympathetic ophthalmia. A young man, suffering from the disease, called on me; his physician had advised him to see me and at the time I questioned his motive. I still do.

I found that the young man was living in a horrible place. I moved him into clean quarters and sent for his mother who lived twenty miles away and who knew nothing of her son's condition. I told her that to save one eye for her son, the one worst affected must be removed. She urged that the operation be performed.

I removed the eye, and in time the man recovered enough so that with the saved vision of one eye he could earn his living as a laborer.

With his recovery, the word went around like wild fire; and soon I was fitting glasses and doing all manner of minor eye surgery.

It must be a dozen years ago that I spoke at a banquet in Burlington, a banquet which honored men who had practiced medicine a half century. I happened to remember that early experience as I was introducing Dr. Young, an eye specialist who had practiced in Monmouth, Illinois, before coming to Burlington. I said I wondered if he had moved from there for the same reason that I had moved from Hampton. Had he, like I, when going up and down the streets encountered so many glassy stares that after a while he just couldn't stand it?

Chapter 14 (My First Consultation)

New Doctor ~1891
New Doctor ~1891

In April of 1891, about a month after I arrived in Hampton, I made my first consultation visit. And that call harked back to the little vial of diphtheria antitoxin held by Dr. Middleton in the lecture room. I had seen to it that I got some of the precious stuff, and although my supply was limited I had told my colleagues that I would be glad to let them have some of it if they wanted it. So one afternoon a physician called and asked me to come to his little town bringing some of the antitoxin with me.

Because of good train connections, I was able to leave in a few minutes. Arriving at my destination, I happened to be the only passenger to get off. An old gentleman was standing on the depot platform. As I alighted he eyed me suspiciously, his brow wrinkled. He watched the train steps but nobody else got off. Perplexity creased his brow deeper; he stared at me and finally came toward me.

You aren't Dr. Rohlf of Hampton, are you? he asked, his voice suggesting that he'd just about as soon believe I was Queen Victoria. I answered that I was Dr. Rohlf.

With a gesture of despair the old gentleman exclaimed, Oh, mein Gott!

Chagrined to no end, I realized that probably my youth was my drawback.

You were looking for an older man, I suggested.

I sure was! he answered with vehemence.

I know I'm young, I admitted, but if you'll just give me time, I will get over it. That seemed to strike his fancy so that he relaxed in a grin and asked if I had the diphtheria medicine. I told him I had and he, explaining he was the sick children's grandfather, showed me to their house.

Trembling with fear, for this was the first time I or any other doctor had used the antitoxin in that county, I administered the shots to the two children.

The next morning I dreaded hearing from that family. But when the word came it was good news. The doctor told me that the children were fine and that if I had any more antitoxin he would like to have me come to treat another case.

To make a long story short, we had forty-two cases during the epidemic in that community, and all of them recovered. I might add that the grandfather, although suffering from shock, also recovered and quite forgave me for being young.

Chapter 15 (The Tracheotomy Tube)

Diphtheria, which had been the subject of Dr. Middleton's prophetic lecture and which had brought me my first consultation call, also gave me one of the most tragic experiences in my early career.

It was in 1892 that I was called out into the night, a few miles in the country, to see a little boy who was choking to death. Arriving I found a seven-year-old lad with membranous diphtheritic croup (in which the membrane forms in the windpipe instead of in the throat). The child was near death unless some immediate relief was given. But since the family doctor had prescribed whiskey I suggested perhaps that better be tried.

I left the home. Three hours later I was called back. The child was worse. Antitoxin, in this advanced case, would be of no avail. I told the family that the infection of the disease had progressed to such a stage that I feared nothing could be done to save his life; but that I could give him temporary relief by the insertion of a tracheotomy tube.

The little fellow was turning blue as I spoke. He was fighting, gasping for breath. His parents begged that I hurry, that I perform the operation without delay.

I had only a pocket instrument case and a tracheotomy tube that I had brought from the office. But there was no time to waste; so I proceeded. By the time I had scrubbed and had boiled the instruments the boy was practically unconscious.

His father held the kerosene lamp over the bed; it was the only light. His mother helped as I directed. Without any local anaesthetic or anaesthesia I opened the trachea and succeeded in inserting the tube. Then, with my own mouth, I sucked out that choking membrane through the tube.

As if by miracle, the child began breathing normally through the tube; his natural color returned; he became conscious and smiled wanly, albeit a bit puzzled.

The mother, sobbing with joy at this relief, clutched my arm. Oh, doctor, even if he doesn't get well, you must know that I will always be thankful for what you have done.

The poor boy went out from his infection about a week later. He died with the tube still in his throat. His case is typical of what faced the country doctor in those days; twice pitiful in retrospect because with today's knowledge and equipment that life could have been saved.

Chapter 16 (A Grandmother's Relief)

The little girl—she was only five—was motionless on the bed. When they had called me they asked that I hurry, for she was unconscious.

When I entered the room, the first thing I noticed was the acetone odor and the peculiar diabetic color of the urine in the vessel under the bed. The mother told me that the little girl hadn't been able to get enough water to drink and that she passed large quantities of urine; that she had gradually become weaker and had been unconscious for a short time before I arrived. I said there was no doubt that she was in a diabetic coma. (Afterwards I examined the urine and found it loaded with sugar; there was no question that it was diabetes.)

This was in the days before insulin and there was nothing I could do. Within a few hours the child died.

The grandmother arrived shortly and was told that I had diagnosed the case as diabetes.

Diabetes? She repeated the word wonderingly. Diabetes. Again and again she said it as though the mere saying gave her some sort of satisfaction. Turning to me, her face serenely peaceful in spite of this new grief, she explained, Doctor, you don't know what a load you have taken off my mind. Years ago, one of my babies about her age, she motioned to the still form on the bed, was sick just like she was, and she died, too. A pause. But I never knew what killed her. All these years I have wondered; I have thought maybe she could have lived if we'd have known what was the matter. Now I know. I won't worry any more. We couldn't have saved her anyway.

Chapter 17 (Miss Beed is Ill)

Wedding 1893
Wedding 1893

If any of the other doctors had been at home that night in Hampton, I might never have met Miss Lottie Beed; and if I hadn't met her, the chances are that I would have missed much in the years that followed. But fate was kind. The other doctors were all away and it was I who was called by Mr. Beed to attend his daughter. It wasn't until later that I knew I had been fourth choice that night. However, by the time I did find it out, it made no difference, for by then I had managed to work myself up a little higher in the esteem of the Beeds, especially Miss Lottie.

Things worked out so well that eventually I had the temerity to ask for her hand in marriage; and I was accepted. We were married December 19, 1893, and we are still together after all these years. We must be old-fashioned, for we continue to enjoy each other's company; or perhaps it's just that we have grown so close to each other.

What Lottie hasn't been through with me! Time and again she has had her plans for an evening with me ruined by an emergency call; more often than not, when we have accepted an invitation to go out, she has had to go alone or stay at home because at the last minute I was called away. She has had to be chained to the telephone to answer calls day and night. And many times she has had to bring my clean short to the office so that I could freshen up that much for the new day after having been out on a case all night. In spite of this hectic existence, Lottie has always managed to be cheerful.

Yet even that phase of her help to me is overshadowed by her aid to me professionally. She is one of those born doctors and, while she has never had any technical training beyond that which I have been able to give her, she is an excellent assistant. Always interested in my work, she was during the first years of our married life my office girl, my homemaker, and my professional assistant. Of a morning she would get the work done at home, come down to the office, take care of callers, help me with minor surgery and then, after office hours, scrub up the place and rush home to get supper.

Her first experience with the surgical end of the business might have been her last if it had not been for her staunch spirit and her aptitude for surgical nursing. It was a tonsil and adenoid case—a bloody affair—but she stuck it out.

She often laughs about the second time she got sick during an operation. She hadn't been feeling well that day, and the sight of blood was just enough to push her over the line. About half way through the operation she felt herself swaying; she slipped out of the room, opening the door with her elbow so as not to touch anything with her sterile hands. Into the kitchen she went and flopped out full length on the kitchen floor, holding high her hands, for though she die she must not let those precious hands be contaminated. And there she lay, eyes shut, sick, arms up!

After a time she felt better, elbowed her way back into the operating room, and again took her place beside me. She swears I didn't even notice she was gone!

One Sunday afternoon, a pleasant day, I was called out into the country and Lottie went along for the ride. We hadn't been told the nature of the case. When we got there and found a woman in confinement about to give birth to a child, we had little time to do anything and little to work with, for the home was very poor.

The woman was lying on a straw tick, a tattered affair. Before we could make her bed any more presentable, the baby was born, tumbling out onto that ragged tick. I handed him to Lottie and began, as best I could with only my medical case with me, to take care of the mother.

I happened to glance around at Lottie. There she stood, methodically and carefully picking, much as she might a chicken, the bits of straw from that newborn babe!

And what happened to the baby? He thrived and grew and became a man. Years later when the call to arms was heard in the World War, he joined the United States forces and served in France. Then he was honorably discharged and has taken his place as a useful citizen.

When in May of 1897 we moved to Waverly, feeling that the professional field here held more possibilities, Lottie continued as my helper. And in these later years, when she hasn't had to be tied to the office, she retains her interest in my work. I don't suppose I ever came home from a confinement case without her rousing up enough to ask, Was it a boy or a girl?

Chapter 18 (Emergencies)

I am inclined to feel that in spite of our handicaps in those early days, we doctors were better able to meet emergencies than we are today. For back in that time we knew that we had only ourselves to rely upon. Miles of mud, pouring rain, blinding snow, and poor roads practically isolated us with our patients.

Even the horse and buggy which took us to the sick had its advantages. Riding to and from our calls we had time for serious thought about our cases, for study of the situation from all angles. Now, speeding over the roads, listening to the jazz from the auto radio, we find ourselves in circumstances which are hardly conducive to serious contemplation!

Diverting just a moment from the true meaning of emergencies, I recall that in an examination at college one of the questions was: If you were called to officiate in a case of confinement and found the right hand of the child presenting with the palm against the left thigh of the mother, thumb up, what would you do? One classmate wrote: I would take that little hand in mind and say, 'My child, you are in a serious predicament. I will send for Professor S (the man who was giving the examination) to come to our assistance.'

Of course there was no Professor S to call for when we were out practicing. Our cases were our own responsibility; it was up to us to do the best when we could.

The ordinary farmhouse operation of that day required not only knowledge and skill in surgery but also ability to set up, as it were, a hospital in the home. Let me tell of one typical case.

I was called into the country to attend an old lady who was suffering form a strangulated hernia and who, I found, to have relief must submit to an operation. The nearest hospital was miles away; yet it could have been reached had not the patient refused to consent to the operation, unless it be performed in her own home.

That home consisted of three rooms, with the bedroom the only room in which there was sufficient light to operate. Among the various and sundry things in that room was an old hen hatching out some chicks under the bed. But that was a small matter.

We cleared the room, washed down the walls, scrubbed the floor, put the washboiler on the stove to sterilize, by boiling, the sheets, gowns, towels, gauze, and other linens to be used during the operation. Then the pans and instruments were sterilized by boiling.

For an operating table we used a dining table; and on the ceiling over the table we tacked wet sheets to prevent dust from falling into the wound.

After several hours of preparation, we covered a small table with a sterilized towel and laid out the instruments ready to work. The field of operation was prepared by scrubbing the skin with soap and water for ten minutes, then washing with alcohol, and finally with ether.

In the meantime, the patient had been anaesthetized by another physician and the nurse was at hand, prepared to assist me in the operation.

It had taken so much time to make ready for the operation that it was necessary to do the actual work by artificial light, a kerosene lamp in the hands of a member of the family. But that helper became so faint that he couldn't hold the lamp, and the nurse took it, leaving me to proceed without assistance.

I may add that without infection the patient made a fine recovery and that the old hen successfully hatched her brood.

Chapter 19 (Thank You, Doctor)

The longer I practiced medicine the more I realized that human nature is often revealed more starkly in times of stress than at any other time. And as I took notice of this fact I was constantly impressed by the certainty that man's behavior is rarely predictable. Take the case of these two men"

One of them called me a bitter cold night to come to his country home to see his wife. That necessitated a drive of fourteen miles. The poor soul, I found on making an examination, was suffering with an attack of acute gallstone colic; I was able to relieve her pain and eventually she made a very good, though of course temporary, recovery.

A few days later the husband came into my office to pay the bill. As I remember it was about eleven dollars. When I told him the amount he answered with an incredulous What! Only eleven dollars! Why, I wouldn't have turned my dog out the night you made the trip to my place! Here, you take these. I want you to know how we appreciate what you did for mother, and he shoved two twenty-dollar bills into my hand.

It was probably just as well that my heart was still warm from this experience when I had my contact with the second man. He called me out that same winter (it was in 1899) to attend his wife in confinement. Since I expected to spend much of the night at the place I didn't take my driver with me. Driving six miles in the inky, cold night, I finally arrived at the place only to be welcomed by a distinctly unfriendly dog. I waited, but nobody else appeared. So rather than cause the delay of getting someone from the house, I unhitched my team by the light of my dash lamp and put them in the barn.

Once in the house, I found that although this was a confinement case things had not progressed far enough to make it necessary for me to remain. However, feeling that perhaps if I did go home I might be called back about as soon as I got there, I decided to stay.

It was well into the night by now and I was dead tired; yet there was no place for me to sleep: no bed, no couch, no cot. Well, I made the best of the situation. Putting my fur coat on the kitchen floor alongside the stove for a mattress and my fur cap over a piece of firewood for a pillow, I dozed off.

I awoke at seven to find that not even then were my professional services needed; I suggested to the husband that I would go home and that he should call me when I was needed. He made no move to go out and hitch up my team. I accepted the offer of a cup of coffee from the neighbor lady who was helping. I sipped the coffee, but still the husband made no move to leave for the barn. I sipped and he sat. Purty cold this mornin, he observed; the thermometer says 22 below. Yet he continued to sit. So with breakfast over I went out, hitched up my team, and started home.

A full three weeks later I was called out again on this same case. Again the dog barked at me, again I unhitched my own team. But this time the baby did arrive, and by morning, with the mother and child both all right, I was ready to leave. As before, the neighbor lady served me a cup of coffee; and as before, I hitched up my own team.

That was bad enough. But when, after having sent the husband a statement which was ignored, I read that he was having a sale and was moving out of the state, I decided I had had enough. So I handed the bill to an attorney. That bought action.

In a few days the husband burst into my office, boiling mad, cursing me up one side and down the other.

I don't suppose you know that I have a bill against you, he snorted.

A bill against me? I was dumfounded.

Yeah, and here it is! Triumphantly he produced a dirty paper and from it read: Stabling your team two nights, one dollar; two breakfasts, one dollar; one night's lodging, one dollar.

A traveling man who was in the waiting room and who had heard the conversation, jumped from his chair at the reading of the bill.

Three dollars, repeated my irate caller, and I figure you better take that off your bill if you've a mind to be fair!

Three dollars for what I got at your place? What that's an outrage! After all, there was some limit to what even a doctor could take. Why, I had to unhitch my own horses, hitch them up again myself; I had to sleep on the floor with a piece of wood for a pillow, and for breakfast I had exactly one cup of coffee! As a matter of fact—

But here I was interrupted by my friend, the traveling man. He strode into the office room. If you don't mind, doctor, he said with his lower jaw set grimly, I'd just like to lick hell out of this man. I think he has a good threshing coming to him! And he started to take off his coat.

That gave me an idea. No, I answered, I want that pleasure myself.

The husband looked at the traveling man and then at me. Oh, well, he shrugged his shoulders, If that's the way you feel about… And, as meek as a lamb, he started to wrote out a check.

Handling it to me, he wheeled around and strode out the door. With something akin to panic I eyed his broad shoulders; I wonder what might have happened if he had called my bluff!

Chapter 20 (Horse Sense)

There were times in my early career when all the doctors and nurses in the country, with every kind of medicine and equipment known, would have been powerless to aid the sick without those loyal horses who brought the doctor to his patient, plowing through mud, lunging through drifts, fighting bitter cold, feeling their way along roads in blinding storms.

The winter of 1899 put my team to the severest of tests, for that was one of the worst winters I have ever lived through. In February of that year the thermometer never was above zero for seventeen consecutive days and nights and was often down to twenty below, dipping once to thirty-two.

That month I was caring for a typhoid case nine miles from Waverly. I had been making trips there every twenty-four hours for about two weeks when I was called out to see the case one night. It was bitter cold and the snow was raging down from the northwest in a regular blizzard. I had to drive north against the storm; but after I got on the right road I gave the horses their heads for I couldn't see to guide them. I trusted that they would know the way after all the trips we had made to this particular place.

They plowed along. Bundled up in my fur coat, I had no idea where we were when we suddenly stopped.

Startled, I leaned forward to get the lines. In the split second before my hands closed over the reins, a roar and a light rushed from the blinding storm. A train! It passed so close in front of those horses that they had to turn their heads to keep from being hit!

Quietly, without flinching, they stood there. The train thundered by. They went on. And I, unscathed, but trembling and weak, settled back in the cutter.

I was driving that same little roan team one night in a terrific downpour of rain. We were on our way home after making a call and, except for the times when sudden flashes of lightning gave me light, I couldn't see anything. Sometimes the wheels of the buggy squashed in mud, sometimes they slopped through water. But we were making progress when the team stopped.

I spoke to them and one of them whinnied. With my train experience in mind I realize that something was wrong. I waited for a flash of lightning. Then, to my horror, right in front of the horses I saw a rushing, boiling river across the roadbed where a large culvert had been washed out!

Regaining enough composure to back the team around on the pike, I drove the horses back over the way we had come and spent the night at a farm home.

Maybe I was sentimental, maybe I was just glad to be alive; whatever the reason, I found myself lingering in the stable when I got home to give those faithful horses an extra pat, an extra lump of sugar.

Chapter 21 (A Narrow Escape)

These experiences of mine were not unusual in the life of the early day country doctor as witness this happening which I am giving as it appeared years ago in the West Union Argo Gazette. (Dr. Whitmire and I were talking about it no so long ago and he verified every word of it.)

The quite village of Westgate was thrown into a fever of excitement Monday evening. About seven o'clock Dr. Whitmire of Sumner rushed into the house of John Dickman, near town, hatless and as wet as a drowned rat, and all out of breath.

The first words he spoke were, I want a horse and a rope right quick to get a man out of the creek up north of here.

While the boys were getting a team and other things ready, he told Mr. Dickman something in regard to the accident. He said that himself and a young man from Sumner, whose name we could not learn, were returning from visiting a patient of the doctor's near Westgate, over the same road they had traveled about two hours before, and when they came to the creek were much surprised to find that the water was a great deal higher than when they had crossed it previously, but not being acquainted with the stream did not deem it dangerous.

It being dark they thought that they would keep as near the center of the road, between fences, as they could, and making the attempt drove right into the channel.

The current was so swift that the horses and buggy were swept directly downstream in about seven feet of water, lifting the occupants of the buggy up into the to At this juncture the doctor said to his companion, Let's get out of here.

The doctor let go of the lines and managed to get outside of the top of the buggy, but how he does not know. The water was very deep and icy cold, but not wishing to leave his companion there to drown, he caught him by the collar and pulled him out of the water, too.

The young man could not swim and as there was no bottom to stand on it all depended on the doctor's keeping cool (which he found no trouble in doing in one sense of the word).

Fortunately, for them they finally struck a small mound where they rested. Paying no further attention to the team, thinking that the horses were surely drowned, the doctor, telling the young man to stay right where he was on the mound, for if he moved he would drown, succeeded in swimming to shore and made his way three quarters of a mile across the fields to Mr. Dickman's house for help.

By the time the doctor and help arrived on the scene of the disaster again, the young man must have been in the ice cold water, about waist deep, for fully three quarters of an hour, but he was still alive although much discouraged.

He told the doctor that he could not stand it much longer, but he was encouraged to do so while the doctor tried in vain for some time to get a rope to him, even wading in the water waist deep and holding on to the fence posts and all the time encouraging his partner to stand fast. Finally, the rope was thrown so that the young man got hold of it, and tying it around his waist he was pulled to shore safe, but cold and stiff.

In the meantime, the neighbors had gathered from all directions with lanterns, and while the doctor was so glad that his companion was saved, and had given up his team as lost, and himself and the young man had started for Sumner and drier quarters, the neighbors thought of the horses and finally located the rig, and watching for a while they found the horses still alive.

Wiling feet waded about twenty rods across the bottom to where the horses were and found them out of the channel but fast in a wire fence. The tugs were at once cut and the horses untangled and cared for during the night by Mr. Henry Katz.

The doctor and his young companion will always remember this episode in their lives, and look back upon it with very thankful hearts that they escaped.

Their experience was quite typical of the hazards confronting the pioneer doctor who never knew what he might be called upon to face in the fulfillment of his duty.

The unselfish loyalty to his companion was characteristic of Dr. Whitmire who through forty years of professional association was always my true friend.

Chapter 22 (The Automobile Arrives)

Transportation hazards did not, as one might think, disappear with the coming of the automobile. More than once after I bought my first car did I yearn for those steady, dependable horses of mine.

Dr. and Mrs. Rohlf in an Early Automobile
Dr. and Mrs. Rohlf in an Early Automobile

My driver and I were on our way to Aplington in my first car. The roads were a glare of ice and we drove with chains; but the chains, for some reason, kept coming off or getting loose. We would go a way, then stop to adjust the chains; go a little further, then stop for the chains again. Thus we traveled all the way to Parkersburg. Once my driver borrowed some wire off the fence along the way to see if that would help. It didn't.

Once in Parkersburg, which was a town on the way, we decided we might just as well do the thing right. We put the car in the garage and ordered not only new chains but also new tires. While the work was being done we relaxed over some juicy beefsteak.

We left town in high spirits; we had had a good meal, our car was in good repair, the roads were much less icy. We chugged merrily along—for almost a mile—when pop! a tire blew out! A new tire!

I, who prided myself on never swearing, pressed my lips right together and just sat, looking neither right nor left. My driver said nothing. Then I began to laugh.

Laugh if you want to, my driver said. You may not swear, but to me that silence was the most profane thing I ever heard!

Another time I was driving to a little town in Grundy County for a consultation. I got lost but finally saw a settlement and pointed it out to my driver. That may be the town, he replied dryly, but there aren't any doctors there.

Puzzled at his show of intuition I asked him how he knew.

Look over there, he nodded to one side. There's the cemetery but there's only one tombstone in it! We had a good chuckle and eventually did find the town, one with a doctor in it!

But when I think of how my horses saved me from great injury and possible death at least twice, I can't help recalling the time that my car, inanimate though it was, performed a similar service.

It was before the roads were improved for automobile use. My driver and I were going at dusk over a high turnpike just after a spring freshet, with the water over the roadbed in many places.

As we approached a bridge, one front wheel struck a large rock in the rut, tilting the car toward the deep, running water beside the road. The soft dirt gave way and the car started to swerve and turn over. Then, just as it seemed nothing could save us, the headlight caught on the railing of the bridge, held the car thus supported by the rail, and keep us from being thrown into the rushing stream.

Recovering from my fright, I told my driver that when we were on the verge of being dumped into the water, I had had the comfort of the flashing thought that my thirty-thousand dollar accident policy would help care for my wife.

Just to satisfy myself, when I got back to the office, I looked up the insurance papers. That policy had expired at noon that very day! The agent who collected the premiums, I learned upon inquiry, was seriously ill and so had not taken care of my policy.

Believe me when I say that I lost no time in restoring the validity of that policy. After all, two narrow escapes in one day are enough for even a country doctor!

Chapter 23 (A Flickering Light)

Strangely enough, the coming of the automobile was intimately connected with the development of farmhouse surgery. For the lights of the cars, even the first ones, were an improvement over the kerosene lamp when it came to furnishing illumination for operating in the home.

Until we had automobiles, a kerosene lamp, often held in the hands whose trembling only increased the natural flicker of the flame, gave us our only operating light. But with the cars came a better light for the surgeon. He could drive his machine close to the window of the operating room and turn on a brighter, steadier light by which to work.

Soon after the coming of the automobile I recall that I was called into the country for an emergency operation, an extra-uterine pregnancy that had ruptured.

Dr. John McDannell and Dr. L. H. Goodale, both of Nashua, were there: Dr. McDannell to assist me and Dr. Goodale to give the anaesthetic.

But we had no light.

So Dr. Goodale drove his old one-lung Cadillac up to the window and turned on its yellow acetylene light. With that for illumination we proceeded. Incidentally that operation marked the beginning of associations between Dr. Goodale, Dr. McDannell and me which ripened into most cherished friendships, friendships which grew to include their families and mine.

Yes, in those early days we operated under almost unbelievable handicaps. I remember doing laparotomies with only a flashlight to see by. Just another emergency for a country doctor to face.

The flashlight and the car light were far superior to the lamp because they gave a steadier and brighter light. Yet much more important was the fact that they did not generate the heat which a lamp did. The flame of the lamp was hot enough to release the chlorine fumes from the chloroform, causing severe throat irritation for the patient as well as for the surgeon and his assistants. And ether was very dangerous under such circumstances because of its high inflammability.

Chloroform suggests to me the whole subject of anaesthetics, and that in turn impels me to introduce a fine old doctor who was well along in years when I came to Waverly and who was present at one of the most dramatic moments in the history of anaesthesia.

Chapter 24 (Truly a Pioneer)

It wasn't long after I had located in Waverly that an elderly gentleman walked into my office one morning and asked if I was Dr. Rohlf, the new doctor. When I answered in the affirmative he said, I am Dr. Oscar Burbank and I came to call to welcome you to the professional ranks of this county. I wanted to ask you, doctor, if you remember the Johnstown flood?

Why yes, doctor, I do. Very distinctly.

You should forget it, doctor, he replied, and remember the Maine!

And that was typical of him. He managed to have some fun in almost everything he did. He often told of his first call. It came from the home of a man who was said to be very sick. When Dr. Burbank arrived he made the diagnosis of intoxication and then, getting ready to leave the house, was told by the sick man, I suppose you want money for this call. The doctor answered that money would be very convenient since he had been in town only a few days and was in need of ready cash to pay his lodging and meals.

Then the man spoke up, But you haven't told me what's the matter with me.

Very well, sir. My diagnosis is that you are drunk.

Without another word the patient turned to his wife. Mother, the doctor is right; you better pay him. Then turning back to the doctor he added, If I need you again I'll let you know.

Dr. Burbank's dramatic experience with ether came when he was a student of medicine at Harvard. This supreme incident occurred in the General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, in the presence of a group of doctors and students like Dr. Burbank; it was the first time that ether was used as an anaesthetic in major surgery. The room was hushed as the patient was anaesthetized. Then Dr. John Collins Warren proceeded to remove an ugly growth from the patient's neck. The operation completed, Dr. Warren turned to the tense spectators. Gentlemen, said he, this is no humbug.

The room where that operation as performed October 16, 1846, remains intact today in the General Hospital in Boston and is known as the Ether Dome. In it are preserved, as they were the day the operation made medical history, the very bottle and sponge that were used in that amazing experiment.

An account of that incident was written for me by Dr. Burbank when he was eighty-five years old. It may be seen today in the Iowa State Medical Library in Des Moines, Iowa. There also is shown a group of Dr. Burbank's surgical instruments which he designed himself and which a Waverly blacksmith made, using for the handles the bones of Dr. Burbank's first horse! The instruments were designed for the repair of a vesico-vaginal fistula. The operation was done by Dr. Burbank for a farmer's wife in her home, using an ordinary dining room table for an operating table. The operation was a complete success.

Dr. Burbank was born September 24, 1819, in Parsonfield, Maine. Among his instructors at Harvard, where he took his course in medicine, was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes who taught him anatomy. The parchment which Dr. Burbank received on graduation from Harvard in 1848 remains a cherished possession of his family.

He came to the Middle West from Maine after he had been to California in the gold rush of 1849, rounding the Cape in a sailing vessel on the way out and crossing Panama on the return trip. Coming to the Middle West, he reached Cedar Rapids by train, went on to Waterloo by stage coach, and came to the newly-platted town of Waverly by team. He and his wife arrived here in 1854 and built a small cottage, having at first only blankets for a door and a plank on a pork barrel for a table.

He models on horseback all over this section of the country. There were no roads. At night he had only the stars to guide him.

Through his long years of practice he was always a student, keen and alert to the very end. In fact, when he died in his eighty-eighth year, a victim of pneumonia, he was taking a post graduate course at Drake University in Des Moines!

He not only read many medical papers, but he organized a professional study club which met frequently to keep its members informed on progress in medicine. While he was alert to new developments in his profession, he never accepted them until he was sure in his own mind that they were sound. He hesitated, I remember, to admit that surgery was the way to treat appendicitis. In fact, he wrote an article for a certain paper in which he ridiculed the idea that appendicitis could cause so much trouble and criticized the frequent operations for its relief. Later, Dr. L. C. Kern and I invited him to the hospital to witness an operation for the removal of an infected appendix.

The old gentleman accepted our invitation and watched the operation. On its completion, he apologized not only for his attitude but also for that article he had written for the local paper in which he had scoffed at surgeons for operating and removing what he had until that moment believed to be an inoffensive organ. Surely that incident alone showed how truly great he was; for only a man of real character has the courage to admit, without reservation, that he wrong.

As I think of him now, however, I recall him as a very human, very entertaining person. His sly humor was one of his greatest attributes. It was this quality, as much as any other, which kept him close to us, which let him be one of us rather than one set apart because of unusual talents and great achievement.

The doctor was a very strict prohibitionist. One morning when he was passing a saloon two friends took hold of him and suggested that they would take him into the saloon and get him a drink. Of course he said, No. Then they lifted him up bodily to take him in.

Well, I am surely specially favored this morning, said the doctor calmly from his precarious position. Our Lord was carried into Jerusalem on the back of one ass. And here, this morning, I am carried by two!

Chapter 25 (The Letter)

It has occurred to me that perhaps some of my readers might be interested in the content of the letter written by Dr. Burbank to which I have referred in the preceding chapter. For that reason I am repeating its text:

Dr. Rohlf:

As I was present when the first surgical operation under the influence of ether was performed you have requested my recollections of it.

About the middle of October, 1846, Dr. Warren says; Dr. W. T. G. Morton called on him stating that he had the means of producing insensibility during the extraction of teeth, and he would like to have Dr. Warren test its power in a surgical operation.

In a few days after this (Nov. 26—I am not certain) a young man having a tumor on the left side of the neck, just below the left jaw, which had probably existed since birth, was chosen for the experiment at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

I remember Dr. Morton was late in arriving which he excused by saying he had made some alterations in his inhaling apparatus.

He (the patient) inhaled the ether from a tube, connected with a glass globe. In four or five minutes he seemed to bed asleep. The operation was begun with no indications of pain; but as the operation proceeded he moved his limbs and cried out; but after the operation he said he suffered no pain but knew of the operation.

At the time no one but Dr. Morton knew what the patient inhaled.

I remember that when Dr. Warren had completed his operation he stepped forward saying, Gentlemen, this is no humbug.

The gentlemen M.D.s present as I recall (were) Drs. J. Mason Warren, his father (the operator) John Collins Warren, Parkman H. I. Bigelow, Dr. Charles Heywood (house surgeon), Townsend George Hayward, Dr. A. L. Pierson of Salem and other surgeons of note whose names I cannot recall after over 53 years' lapse of time.

  Fraternally,
  Oscar Burbank
  Waverly, Iowa
  November 30, 1899

Chapter 26 (The Kind-Hearted Bachelor)

When I came to Waverly there was no hospital there; in fact, there was none for miles around. What operating I didn't do in the homes of my patients I took to a residence hospital in Waterloo, an unhandy arrangement at best and one for which I could see no immediate solution. Yet the solution came unexpectedly and swiftly.

It happened like this:

There was a traveling man who was taken very ill at the hotel in Waverly and I was called to see him. I found he was suffering from acute appendicitis with abscess and needed immediate operation. The surroundings did not lend themselves to surgery. The private home in our town where two nurses sometimes had a few cases was temporarily closed. While I was looking for a place where the patient could be properly cared for I met Abraham Slimmer, an elderly and wealthy bachelor Jew, who lived in a fine, large house.

He was in the habit of taking in and caring for down-and-outers; so I told him about this sick man. And what do you want, a place in my house?" he asked.

That would, I admitted, be a great help.

All right. When do you want to bring him and what can be do to get things ready for you?

I told him we would need one of his well-lighted rooms, with the walls wiped down and the floor scrubbed, and a wash boiler of water boiled and cooled. When we arrived with the patient, Mr. Slimmer himself was busy scrubbing the floor; the other instructions had been perfectly carried out, and with the aid of a nurse the rest of the preparations were completed.

During the preliminaries Mr. Slimmer asked how I knew that this was a case of appendicitis and what made he think there was an abscess. So I answered that perhaps he would like to stay and watch the operation to see for himself. He would and he did.

We proceeded. We opened the abscess, removed the perforated sloughing appendix, and put in a drainage. But Mr. Slimmer, satisfied, retired from the room long before we were through.

After the patient had been put to bed, Mr. Slimmer, who seemed doubtful of the outcome of the operation, sent for the young man's wife. He made her his guest for three weeks until her husband fully recovered. And for all this, Mr. Slimmer refused to accept any remuneration either from the young man or from his wife.

When they were gone, Mr. Slimmer was inspired with idea. Why couldn't his home be used for a hospital some day? He had previously deeded the property to the county to be used after his death for an old people's home. But since the county home for the indigent had already been established and the county could not legally use the Slimmer house for this purpose, the authorities deeded it back to him. He, in turn, deeded it to the Catholic Sisters of Mercy, for a hospital. And that was how there came into being St. Joseph's Mercy Hospital of Waverly.

To the original house, an old limestone and brick structure, has been added enough through community donations, individual contributions, and funds from the Sisters of Mercy, to make a fifty-bed hospital. It eventually became one of the first standardized hospitals in the state of Iowa.

The generosity of Mr. Slimmer was not limited to the hospital or even to the city of Waverly. He gave so liberally to other hospitals and charitable institutions that before his death he had bestowed on others all of his worldly possessions which, in the aggregate, were more than a half million dollars.

Chapter 27 (Cats and Dogs)

He IS a Surgeon
He IS a Surgeon

As I continued to do more and more surgery in Waverly, I constantly came upon new operative problems and for that reason, I used up almost all of Waverly's stray cats and dogs. Whenever I had to do an operation I had never done before, I would try it out first on one of these animals.

This work went on in an old barn near the hospital. One of the Sisters assisted me as the anaesthetist. The system worked very well until one day, quite by accident, we got the town marshal's dog. Marshal's dog or no, I had by that time become intensely interested in intestinal operations, a field in which I have done considerable work since.

None of those dogs died in vain if from them I had learned enough to save only one human life, just one life. Perhaps it was that rosy-cheeked baby boy of fourteen weeks whose little bowels were telescoped, whose moans of pain became happy gurgles in the days after that operation, who in due time was able to enter kindergarten.

The more operations I performed the more I realized the truth of the remark that no two operations are alike; and yet no matter how they differ, no matter how much equipment there is to work with, or how much previous experience there is to fall back upon, the man behind the instruments is what counts. That is a very chastening realization, one which humbles a surgeon. In his hands he holds life and death. Has he so prepared himself that his judgment will be sound, that his hand will not slip, that he may take from death to give to life?

Chapter 28 (A Sliver in His Finger)

A towheaded little boy of four, whose parents kept a store in the same block as our office, ran a big sliver into his finger one day and came up to the office where Mrs. Rohlf cared for him. Then and there the boy and Mrs. Rohlf became friends, and it wasn't long before she was Aunt Lottie and I was Uncle Doctor.

Herbert Rathe 1902
Herbert Rathe 1902
Many years later, Dr. Rathe confirmed this event in his memoir with one correction—I caught my toe in the boardwalk. This makes sense. At that time, little boys ran around barefoot and streets would have been dirty, muddy, or worse!

That was in the horse and buggy days and the lad took delight in going with me to make my calls. We used to have long talks about things in general and doctoring in particular. By the time my little friend was old enough to start kindergarten he had decided that he was going to be a doctor. And faithful to that idea he continued to accompany me on calls; when I got my first car he went with me as before.

Herbert went through the grades and was graduated from high school. In all that time there were few days that he didn't stay at our home or our office for a little while. Every Sunday afternoon, even through his high school days, he came to visit with Mrs. Rohlf.

By the time he was graduated from high school he and I had dreamed for many years that we would some day be partners. But the war came and interrupted our plans. He joined the navy, making seventeen trips across the Atlantic on a ship which convoyed American troops. After the war was over and he was honorably discharged we took up where we had left off. He entered the college of medicine at the State University of Iowa, my Alma Mater.

Herbert Rathe 1917 on the USS Montana
Herbert Rathe 1917 on the USS Montana

In 1925 he was graduated and became an interne at the General Hospital in Montreal, Canada, completing his internship there. Before he left Montreal for a few weeks of study in New York City, he and his lovely sweetheart of college days were married in an historic cathedral there. So the trip to New York was their honeymoon, too. After its conclusion they came to Waverly to make their home and Herbert became my assistant.

It was the first of January, 1930, that our dream of the years came true. No longer doctor and assistant, we became partners. I shall never forget the day that I ordered our new office stationery: Dr. W. A. Rohlf, surgeon. Dr. H. W. Rathe, physician.

I have long since ceased to be Uncle Doctor. I had in turn become Doctor and then W. A. But I am Uncle Bill to Herbert's three children, and once a year I get letters from them addressed to Uncle Santa.

Chapter 29 (Cheerful Tom)

On the morning of August 4, 1907, I was called out about two o'clock to meet an injured freight conductor who was being brought in from a neighboring town. The poor fellow arrived at the hospital on a cot, motionless, a pitiable sight.

I examined him and found that he had a number of fractures of the spinal column with destruction of the spinal cord so that he was without motion, except to the slightest degree in his arms, and without sensation from the neck down. Mentally he was not affected but the injury to his spinal cord was such that he had no control of himself, not even of his bladder or rectum. He was a hopeless case. The only thing we could do for him was to make him as comfortable as possible. Obviously we could not hope to cure him.

He was placed in the ward with one of the Sisters as his special nurse, with the other nurses of the ward assisting. And there he lay, day in, day out; night in, night out; unable to move, unable to do a thing. As day and night followed each other in a long procession he never lost courage. One morning I asked him how he was doing. As quick as a flash he grinned at me and with a twinkle in his eye answered, Well, Doc, you know I can't kick.

For eight long months he lay there, and only twice in that time did I see his spirit shaken. Once was the time when, as I approached his bed, I found him with his eyes downcast. When he did look up, I saw that he was crying. With a choke in his voice he sobbed out, Oh, Doctor, have you ever been so happy you couldn't keep the tears back?

I nodded.

Well, that's me this morning. See, look here, he nodded toward his hand. On it he was wearing a ring set with a small diamond. The boys on my train bought it for me. Two of them came over from home with it and gave it to me yesterday. That note was with it. I picked up the note that lay on the table by his bed. It was a simple, friendly greeting signed by all the men who had been in his freight train crew.

As I think of that incident, I realize anew what happiness can be brought to a bedridden friend by such acts of kindness. How many times have I seen a weary soul lifted up by the thought that someone cared enough to send a post card or a tiny gift or a letter.

Toward the end of his stay at the hospital, in spite of all that could be done, Tom had to be moved from the ward to a private room because of the odor emanating from his bedsores and his unconscious bowel movements. When he was told he would have to be moved, he broke down; for the second time in those long months he cried. I tried to explain that the change was really necessary. Oh, I know that, Doctor, I know that. I can stand it. It's just that Sister Thecla can't take care of me any more; she's been so good to me. He knew that the Sisters were not supposed to act as special nurses for private male patients.

When I assured him that a special dispensation had been granted in his case and that she would still continue to take care of him, he smiled through his tears. Even before those tears were dry his great courage and cheerfulness came back to him.

When we wheeled him out of that ward the other patients felt that they were losing a friend, for he had made himself an inspiration even to them. And the nurses hated to see him go. More than once in those months had he been outspoken in his criticism of other patients who had been unfair in their demands on the nurses.

So he went into the private room. There Sister Thecla continue to care for him, to dress his sores, to keep him clean. Time and again she refused to be relieved of her arduous task. Surely a mere sense of duty could not have sustained her thus; she must have had divine help, for her devotion and her ideal of service were more than mortal. In those last days she worked almost unceasingly and on March 27, 1098, her patient smiled his last smile, closed his eyes, and went from this life.

Sister Thecla, utterly exhausted by those months of toil, was given a few weeks to regain her strength. Then, perhaps in recognition of her remarkable work, she was promoted to become the manager of another hospital operated by the Sisters. She had been in her new place only a few months when she was stricken with apoplexy and died.

And thus the peace of death came to those two great souls; those two who are living today in the hearts of many, who have never ceased being an inspiration to me: he whose indomitable spirit rose above horrible injury, whose smile failed but twice; she who gave herself in service to others, who ministered tenderly, patiently as long as life itself remained.

Chapter 30 (Modern Conveniences)

A dear old German friend came to my office one day. An examination showed that he was suffering from an affliction which only a severe operation could possible relieve.

After thinking it over for a number of weeks, all the time getting worse, he finally found himself in such a condition that he knew the operation would have to be performed. So he came to my office and told me that he had decided to do as I had recommended, that he would be operated on as soon as I thought we could get him ready. I promised to make all arrangements at the hospital where he was to meet me the following afternoon at four o'clock.

That night about nine o'clock the telephone at my home rang and the old gentleman's voice asked me if I were coming to the office that evening. After I told him that I hadn't intended to, he pleased that he would like very, very much to see me and wouldn't I please come over; he wanted to ask me a question, a very important one, that he had forgotten to ask when he was talking with me during the early part of the day.

Can't you ask me over the phone? I said, I could probably answer it right now.

He demurred, giving me to understand that it would be a great favor if I would come to see him; so I consented.

When I arrived at the office he was waiting for me, seemingly glad to see me but nervous. I tried to put him at least by telling him that I would try to answer his question.

Probably we better go into your private room, he said. So I unlocked the door to my consultation room and invited him in. He sat down.

Is the door locked? he asked. I assured him it was.

Are we all alone?

Most certainly we are, I answered.

By this time my curiosity was very much aroused and I wondered what was on the old man's mind. Finally, with furtive glances about the room, he repeated, You're sure we are alone here? Again I assured him we were, that he could go ahead and say anything he felt he wanted to say.

He came up very close to me and almost whispered, Doctor, the question that I wanted to ask you was when I go to that hospital tomorrow can you get me a room with a backhouse in it?

Chapter 31 (A Friend in Need)

A lad who lived about eight miles out from town was helping with the chores one day when he was squeezed against the side of a stall by a horse, the pressure breaking his lower jaw. An effort was made to set the jaw but the ends wouldn't stay together' so I was called to see if I could do anything.

It was a terribly stormy night but I had to try to get there. I hired a livery rig and started with a good team and a light bobsled. I took a man along to help because I expected trouble in getting through the drifts.

We made about three miles before anything happened. Then the runner struck a large rock in the road and broke. It happened that we were near a farmhouse and the farmer generously offered us his sled which was much like the one we had broken. We took the sled and continued on our way. We hadn't gone far when we encountered deeper and deeper drifts. The horses tried to lunge through, but on one exceptionally hard pull the doubletree broke. Again we asked help of a farmer and again we got it. He brought us another doubletree, coming down to our crippled rig with a lantern.

We were ready to go on but the farmer shook his head. You'll never get through there without somebody to show you the way. I'll go ahead with the lantern and the horses can follow me.

I tried to argue that we would make it all right, for I knew it would be almost criminal to let any man fight his way on foot through that storm. But he insisted.

For two long miles he plodded along ahead of us, lantern swinging to show the way. Leaning into the bitter wind, he pressed on, sometimes knee deep but often hip deep in the drifting snow until at last we came to a turn in the road.

He stopped. There, now you'll make it. Just keep on down this road. Then he gave us the minutest details to avoid the worse drifts and find the best track.

Words seemed such puny things in the fury of that storm to show our gratitude. I took his hand. I hope he knew how I felt. I believe he did for he clapped me on the back, Oh, that's right, Doc, I'd do that for a friend any time!

We followed his directions and got to the farmhouse about eleven o'clock. The physician who had had charge of the case was there waiting when we arrived. With him to give the anaesthetic, I succeeded in reducing the fracture and placed wires about the teeth on either side of it to hold the bones together. (The boy came out of it better than we had dared hope. We got a good union without any deformity.)

It had taken us six hours to drive the seven miles out; so when we started home I cheered my companion by suggesting that with the wind to our backs we could surely make the return trip in much better time. But we were hardly outdoors when we realized that the wind had swung completely around so that we had to face it going home, too!

We had gone about two miles when I yelled to my man who was riding in the back seat. Getting no answer, I yelled again, thinking that perhaps the first time my voice had been entirely muffled by the storm. Again there was no answer. So I turned around. The sleigh was empty!

To say the least, I was bewildered! Out there all alone in the storm it was a bit peculiar to have had my companion simply disappear.

Then I recalled that we had almost tipped over in a deep drift a while back, and I figured that probably my man had been dumped out. The snow was too deep for me to turn around; yet I couldn't go on without him. So I just sat there in the howling blizzard and waited for something to happen. In about fifteen minutes it did. Out of that storm lurched my man, out of breath and snorting mad! I asked him why he hadn't hollered to me when he fell out.

Holler! My lord, I hollered my head off. But by the time I got myself out of the snowbank so I could yell, you were so far away and the wind was blowing so loud that I couldn't make you hear. So I got up and walked. And here I am!

He climbed into the sleigh, but this time in the front seat with me.

And, strange as it may seem, we got all the way home without another thing happening!

Chapter 32 (Blessed Event)

Lest it appear that all my interesting experiences happened in winter storms, let me tell of a day of contrasts, a glorious day in June.

The whole outdoors was fresh and sparkling after a delightful night shower; the birds were singing; the flowers nodded their brightly colored heads in the gardens. Nature was happy. The spirit of the morning became mine. I felt so refreshed and jubilant that I walked to the office instead of riding, the better to breathe in the beauty of the morning. In the office, when I arrived, were a man, his wife, and their fifteen-year-old daughter waiting for me. I asked them into my consultation room, and no sooner had I closed the door than they all began to weep.

The father falteringly told me that they were in serious trouble, that his daughter was pregnant but not married. They asked me what they should do, and I told them that an immediate wedding was the best solution.

He promised to marry me if I got in trouble, the young girl volunteered between sobs. But when I told him, he didn't do anything, and he left town on the train this morning.

She knew where he was going; therefore I suggested that they consult an attorney, who possibly could have the young man brought back immediately; his destination was only twenty-four hours away and he might be apprehended as soon as he arrived there.

"It happened that things worked out just that way. The marriage took place and now, these many years later, the couple are still living together, happy with the nice family that they have.)

With that dark beginning for such a beautiful day, I almost hesitated to see my next caller who happened to be an attractive sixteen-year-old girl. She marched into my consultation room. There was nothing of the shrinking little violet about her; she was mad. With utter lack of restraint, she brazenly announced that she had come to see me because she had not menstruated for three months.

I was shocked! What, I wondered, is this world coming to! Two such cases in one morning!

I asked her if she had done anything that would make her worry about not having menstruated for three months. She answered promptly, I should say I have! I've been married since March!

I am quite sure the young lady didn't know why I looked so amused nor why I was so relieved. Suffice it to say that after she had left, and I had had a good chuckle, the June morning again was quite a thing of beauty. But for a long time thereafter, I should say I have was something of a by-word with me!

Chapter 33 (Not Three!)

Few things that happen to an ordinary family are more dramatic than having a baby. And when that birth is a multiple one, you really have drama, as witness these triplet tales:

Dr. H. C. Habein of Rochester told me this one. It was related to him by a practitioner friend. It seems that the old doctor had been called on a case of confinement in a German family living in the country. A baby arrived. The old grandmother, elated, began laying out its clothes. But, before she had time to dress the baby, the doctor told her that there was another one coming. She still was happy; just to think of twins for her only daughter's first confinement. So she bustled around and got more clothes ready, tenderly taking the second child when it arrived. For, although the family was poor and the layette very limited, there were enough things to cover the two babies. She was just beginning to dress the second baby when the doctor said, Well, Grandma, there will be another one in just a few minutes. Whereat the grandmother threw up her hands in horror and cried, Och, Doktor, vas haben vir gethan das die lieber Gott uns so bestraft? (What have we done that the dear Lord should so punish us?)

And then there was the politician whose wife went to the hospital to be confined. In due time, he received a telephone call from the nurse that it was all over. Your wife and three sons are all fine. In his astonishment he answered, What! Three! Nurse, I demand a recount!

Dr. C. H. Graening of Waverly told me of the reaction of a farmer whose wife gave birth to triplets. When the first baby came the father said, Thank God for this blessing. When the second baby came he exclaimed, The Lord be praised! But when the third baby arrived he cried, Dear Lord, we feel thou has sent us sufficient blessings for one day.

Chapter 34 (The Great Physician)

Since he is present at so many of life's great crises, a doctor more often than not finds himself in a situation where the presence of the Almighty is keenly felt. Yet few times in my experience have I ever been more conscious of that than I was once years ago as I ministered to the needs of a very old lady.

I had taken care of her at various times over a period of years but in the last weeks of her life, when she became bedfast, I saw her daily since it was necessary that I administer hypodermics to make sure of her rest and comfort at night. For a number of weeks, before I retired, I would call on her. One evening when I went to see her she asked me to sit down.

I have a very special message for you, Doctor, she said, as she laid her thin hand on my arm. Tears came to her eyes, yet she smiled. You have been so good to me, so very good, and I want you to know that I have appreciated it. In these last weeks, while I have been lying here, I have thought of you often, of the times you have come here, and the way you have stayed to cheer me even though I knew you didn't have the time to give. I know some nights you have been so tired you could hardly move, yet you have to come to help me, to give me that medicine so that I could sleep. You have done everything you could for me; you have done all that any doctor could.

She hesitated, then went on softly, almost apologetically, But I am afraid that only the Great Physician can really help me. So don't feel badly when I go. I may go tonight. If I do, you will know that I shall be happy. You must be happy, too. You have done what you could.

Without another word we parted. The next morning I was called to her home. As I entered her home this couplet ran through my mind: Tread softly, doctor, as you enter now. Someone has been here greater than thou.

Chapter 35 (The Ministers)

By the nature of our professions, ministers and I have had many contacts through the years. I have worked shoulder to shoulder with the leaders of many faiths. While I ministered to the body, they ministered to the soul, they brought peace to the troubled heart, they gave courage to broken spirits.

Yet all the situations in which I have found myself dealing with these clergymen have not been without humor.

Once when I was operating, two priests were present: the one an older man, the other very young. During the operation I noticed that the younger one was sitting in a chair near the operating table, his head in his hands. From my heart I was grateful to him, for I felt that his prayers were very truly helping me. When the operation was over, I made bold to mention that help. Me praying? he asked, a little startled, I'm sorry, doctor, I wasn't praying. I was just so sick I couldn't hold my head up!

Another time I was going to operate on a patient in the country. When I arrived I found that the minister was already there. Oh, you got here before I did, I said by way of opening conversation. With his fact, long and sad, he answered, Yes, when I heard you were going to operate, I came over early to get the patient ready.

Quite an ordeal, my operations!

Once again, when I was returning to town after having been called into the country by the death of a patient, I chanced to meet the minister who was going to the same place. Shaking his head, after I told him of the death, he said, First you, then me.

Not so long after I saw him on the street in town and we began talking. I told him I had just delivered a fine baby at the house of a couple he had married a year before, and then, just as he had said to me, I concluded, First you, then me.

In these later years I have been led to a series of new and happy experiences by a young minister, Rev. John Clinton, now of Fayette, Iowa. When he came to our town some years ago he organized, among other things, a Boy Scout troop. He drew me into the work until one day I found myself figuring on how I could give the boys a meeting place in my home. I managed to arrange things so that I built a fireplace in one of the basement rooms and turned that room over to the boys. What fun I had with the boys! In fact, I enjoyed them so much that I began dreaming of something even bigger: a building for the boys! With the help of friends in Rotary I engineered that project so that just a few years ago we brought back John Clinton to help us dedicate a log cabin on the river bank, a cabin for the Scouts and for them alone.

On dedication day we built a log fire in the huge fireplace of the cabin and I stood before it, stretching my hands toward its inviting warmth. Yet I did not need the fire. Within my heart was a joyful glow which warmed me and thrilled me, for I had dreamed a dream and that dream had become an actuality, a cabin with doors and windows and a fireplace, a room where boys might come to gain knowledge and character. And it all began with a Methodist minister!

Chapter 36 (Her Time)

Years ago I was called into the country and found a young married woman very sick of pneumonia. The husband, seeming to realize the gravity of her condition, said to me with feeling, Now, Doc, I want you to do everything you can for this woman. You know, I would rather lose the best horse on this place than lose her!

It wasn't easy for me to keep a straight face; yet I realized that the poor fellow as, in his way, paying his wife the supreme compliment. I assured him I would do all I could. I asked for a trained nurse, and even though this was in the time before trained nurses were employed very much in rural communities, Hans consented. The nurse and I worked unceasingly and in due time the patient recovered.

I was making my last call, for I found that without complications everything would be all right. I told Hans that the nurse should stay for a few days but after that time they ought to be able to get along alone. As I left, I told Hans that he should be commended for having done everything I asked and that we were very fortunate in his wife's recovery.

Dryly and without emotion Hans commented, Oh, well, Doc, her time hadn't come. That was all. And that was all the credit anybody got!

Not long after I was called to the same neighborhood to attend a similar case, but this time the patient died. I tried to comfort he husband. You have done everything you could, I said. You provided her with every comfort' you got a nurse; you did all I asked.

Well, Doc, that's all right. Nobody could help it. Her time had come and she had to go.

Chapter 37 (Dumb Animals)

My friend who would rather lose the best horse on his place than have his wife die somehow reminds me of another man who called me to his farm to do something for his injured leg.

Arriving, I found that he had a fracture and I asked how he got it. He glared at me, evaded my question, gave me to understand that what he wanted was his leg fixed and that it was none of my business how he hurt it. But I insisted on knowing, explaining that if I knew the type of accident I could better attempt the treatment.

He hesitated stubbornly. Then he blurted out, It was that damned old brindle steer. He kicked me! His face flushed. You know, Doc, if I had been kicked by a decent horse or a respectable mule, I wouldn't mind so much. But a steer! Utter contempt curled his lips.

After some weeks his leg healed. His injured pride? I couldn't say.

Speaking of pride. One day Schmidt came to my office with a very fine black eye. What on earth hit you? I asked.

Vell, ven I vent to der creamery dis morning, Hans and Klaus vas talkin' awful loud. I vent up to dem and vanted to know der drouble und Hans said dat Klaus said he vasn't fit to sleep mit der hogs. Vell, I couldn't take dot. Hans is my friend. So I turned to Klaus und I said, 'You can't talk like dat about Hans. He is my friend. You say he is not fit to sleep mit der hogs. I say he is!' Und den, vould you believe it, Klaus hit me!

Chapter 38 (Unethical Advertising)

We were at an Austin Flint Medical Society banquet, and in the after-dinner program Dr. Amos Babcock of New Hampton was introducing Dr. Clark of McGregor. Said he: Clark and I have been friends ever since we started to practice in Iowa. His success as a country physician and surgeon places him in the top rank of our doctors. But there was a time when he was charged by a member of his county society with unethical advertising. A murmur went around the table.

Yes, Dr. Babcock resumed, it was back in the days when we used boiled shirts for emergency dressings. One Monday morning a competitor noticed that Dr. Clark's wife hung out on the clothesline, in the family wash, two collar bands and four cuffs. And that, my friends, could hardly be called even subtle as an advertisement for an extensive surgical practice. Two shirts in one week!

We roared. But Dr. Clark was equal to the occasion. He got to his feet and with much dignity replied, This canard, my friends, was, I assure you, made from whole cloth, not boiled shirts.

Chapter 39 (English as She is Spoke)

These things actually happened.

There was the student nurse who had learned that one of the first responsibilities of a nurse is to make the patient feel that everything will be all right; in short, to reassure the patient. In an examination she was asked, What is the fist duty of a nurse in preparing a patient for an operation? And this was her answer: The first duty of a nurse is to insure the patient.

Then there was the lady who had had an abdominal operation and who, at a later date, was reporting on her condition. She complained of some pain and the doctor asked her where it was. She placed her hand on the scar, saying, It's right here, doctor, right here where you made the insinuation.

My assistant once was sent to the wait upon a young lady while I was ill. Explaining the case to him, I told him that she had come to town to take lessons in sewing. After he had been told the nature of her illness he said, Sewing? It sounds to me more like reaping.

A lawyer friend shared this gem with me. In trying to make an adjustment concerning a mislaid note a farmer suggested, If gif you a new note if you write someding on de back dot say if der loss note vas found den dis von iss not guilty.

I was at a banquet in Burlington and was to introduce Dr. McKitrick, a great obstetrician, who in his earlier days had performed, as was the custom, scores of circumcisions. I had not decided just what to say when the speaker before me began quoting Shakespeare. That was the inspiration I needed. When my turn came I begged that I, too, might quote a little Shakespeare, a passage which the work of Dr. McKitrick always brought to mind:

There is Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.

Chapter 40 (I Beg Your Pardon!)

It was during my early years of practice that I was called to attend a confinement. I was urged to hurry so I rushed to the place without delay.

Knocking on the door, I was ushered in by the maid who took my hat and coat and motioned me into the dimly lighted sitting room. There on the couch lay a woman. I sat down by her.

And how often are your pains coming now? I asked.

She sat bolt upright and in a voice that would have frozen icicles anywhere, she answered, I beg your pardon. I am the school teacher who boards here. The patient is upstairs.

Chapter 41 (Complaining Patients)

After all, a doctor is human. While he tries to be guided always by that credo which says that every patient is deserving of tolerant consideration, there are times when he feels himself wavering ever so little. And those times usually come when he is treating a chronic complainer.

I was making a consultation visit with a physician friend, one of the best and most successful country practitioners I have known. While we were driving to the patient's home he said that the old lady would expect me to listen to her tale of woe for at least an hour. In fact, you'll be lucky if you get by with just an hour.

True to his advance warning, she talked incessantly, detailing a long list of symptoms, making explanations of her own to account for her ailments, giving her opinion than most of her shortness of breath and swelling of legs was due to the fact that she was strangely afflicted with venous blood in her veins.

I listened as patiently as I could. On and on she talked. It seemed hours before were out of that house again. Going home, I asked my friend how he could stand to listen to her as he had had to do day after day, in all the weeks he had attended her.

Well, he answered with a twinkle in his eye, at first I pretty nearly gave up, but than idea struck me. All the time she is enjoying herself airing her medical opinions and recounting her maladies, I repeat over and over to myself, 'She is paying me for this. She is paying me for this.'

Chapter 42 (My Friend)

Of course all our patients are not the complaining kind. As a matter of face, they are usually scattered through our cases just often enough to make us appreciate the many find people who come to us, the many friends who go out of their way to make our work easier.

I am thinking of that farmer who came to my office one night to ask me to make a call at his home. When he got there he found that I had gone into the country on another call but that I was expected back soon.

Which way will he be coming? he asked.

By the main road east of town, he was told. It happened that this road joined the one which went to the farmer's home, the junction point being about three miles out of town but only about a mile from the farmer's home. I'll go wait for him, my friend told the office attendant and with that he drove to the crossroads and began his long vigil. The night was cold' the wind was blowing, piling the snow in ugly drifts. But the farmer did not give up. For more than an hour he tramped around at the corner to keep from freezing until finally I came along.

And all that sacrifice for me so that I would not need to retrace those three miles on that stormy night! The unselfishness of that simple act, a plain farmer man suffering through an hour of wicked cold because he wanted to help me, has stayed with me all these years as something of an ideal in friendship.

Chapter 43 (All Kinds of Devotion)

Sometimes there is an ironically funny side to the devotion of patients. Dr. D. S. Bradford, who practiced medicine at Janesville fifty-four years, told just such a story in a speech he gave at dinner of the Bremer County Medical Society honoring Dr. Ford of Plainfield and Dr. Bradford. As nearly as I can recollect them, these are the doctor's words:

One day last winter, I was called up after midnight and, on going to the door, found Mr. J who asked me to go with him to his house about half a mile distant. He offered to carry my bags and we started out. I thought of the many trips I had made to the J house in the last thirty-five years.

I reminded Mr. J that I had attended his wife in her confinements in his home where their five children were born; his daughters when they came home to be confined; and this time I was starting on the next generation, for I was to attend the granddaughter in her confinement.

I told him, These services have extended over a period of more than thirty-five years and none of you has ever paid me a penny. Then J replied, But, gee whiz, Doc, just think how we've stuck by you all these years!

Yes, the whole country stuck by the dear old doctor in much the same way. But unselfishly he served his community, and at his death there was barely enough insurance money to life the mortgage on the home left to his widowed companion.

Chapter 44 (A New Kind)

Dr. Bradford's story reminds me of one in my own experience. A widow with seven children to support, but without funds, was my patient. So I took care of the whole family without any compensation save a head of cabbage, a few tomatoes, or a chicken occasionally. I knew this pay was the best she could do; therefore I cheerfully answered all calls.

She succeeded in rearing her children to more or less useful lives. As the children grew up and had families, there was a natural increase in the calls and responsibilities which I had as their family physician; but I made no charge, having grown accustomed by now to expect no remuneration from them.

One of the widow's sons died not long after his return from the World War, leaving his mother a substantial life insurance policy which the government paid in monthly installments.

Shortly after this I happened to meet the widow in another physician's waiting room. She spoke to me but seemed a little fussed. Apologetically she explained to me that she was visiting this other doctor because she thought she would try a pay doctor once.

Chapter 45 (Mud!)

It was before Iowa got out of the mud, before there was much paving, that I made what I still consider my prize trip.

About seven o'clock in the morning I started out by automobile with my chauffeur and two nurses to perform an emergency abdominal operation.

We found the roads were worse than we had thought. When we had gone about sixteen miles, the car mired down hub deep in the mud. Calling on a farmer for aid, we were driven in his lumber wagon over four miles of almost impassable roads to a stretch of pavement. From here we telephoned to the county seat for an automobile to take us the six miles into town.

At the garage in town we found that a man had made the trip ahead of us the day before and that he would help us, for he knew where we would have to have help getting through. On his advice we telephoned farmers at these points along the route to have their teams ready to pull us out. We needed every one of them, and with their help we finally arrived at our destination.

After the operation, so that we might get home in time for work at the hospital the next morning, we flagged a train in the small town where we had done the operating. And the train, remarkable as it seemed to us that night, got us home without trouble.

By the end of the trip we had used eleven different conveyances and twenty hours of time—at the slight cost of forty-two dollars!

Chapter 46 (Behold Your Child)

A young woman was dying. Tuberculosis was eating away her larynx slowly, a little more each day, until now she could talk only in a whisper. Inevitably it would soon choke her to death. And so that she might be nearer her home folks in those last horrible days, she was bought to the Waverly hospital from one farther distant and I was called in to see her.

She was a pretty little thing with a strangely beautiful smile. A happiness was hers; although she knew that death was clutching at her body, she knew also that within her was life. She was with child.

She whispered something to me and I leaned down to catch the words. I am going to die, Doctor, soon. I don't mind that. I have only one request before I go. May I see my baby? Is there any way?

I hesitated. What was there for me to say?

Please, Doctor, I won't mind being hurt. I wouldn't mind anything if I could only see my baby. Her frail hand clutched my sleeve feebly, frantically.

I will try, I said and with that I left the room, shaken, realizing the enormity of my problem. But that little white face, that whispering voice would not let me say no. What could I do! I went to my colleagues and talked it over with them. They agreed that we had no precedent to follow, that any operation was virtually out of the question. But we finally decided on an unusual thing—our only chance—a Caesarian operation under a local anaesthetic.

I told my patient and her family, explaining the hazards of such procedure. But the little patient would hear of nothing but that we try; her happiness was touching. And her family, realizing that the operation was the only way of giving her one desire, consented.

So the next day, assisted by Dr. Kern, and with Dr. Graening to watch the condition of the patient and care for the child, I began the operation. I injected the anaesthetic and made the incision without any special difficulty, taking from the dying mother a fine, healthy baby girl.

The mother rallied nicely. When they brought the child to her, great tears welled up in her eyes, trickled down her hollow cheeks. Oh, my baby! My little girl! she whispered with joy and pain so intermixed in her words that they cut us to our hearts. She looked up at me. Thank you, Doctor. God bless you. I can die now and be happy. I have seen my child. She's a lovely baby, isn't she? and she patted the little rosebud fists of the sleeping child.

As we had expected, scarcely forty-eight hours after the operation the mother died, choking her life out.

And the baby? She thrived and few under Dr. Graening's care. She is now a woman and a mother.

Chapter 47 (Sleep)

Sleep! That is one of the things a doctor often has to get along without.

During the influenza epidemic in 1918, when doctors worked day and night, one of my colleagues was called to see a patient. He knelt down by the bed and put his ear on the lady's chest to listen to her breathing. Utterly exhausted, that attitude of relaxation was too much for him and he actually fell asleep.

After some little time the patient stirred, startling the doctor out of his slumbers. I'm sorry, Doctor, said she, for I know you're worn out, but I'll have to ask you to move. I just must change my position.

I am happy to report that both the doctor and the patient recovered.

But all patients aren't that thoughtful. I remember one who visited me on a bitter cold night in the middle of winter. I hopped out of bed to answer the knock on my door, shuffling into my bedroom slippers and putting on my dressing gown. Opening the door, I saw a man wrapped up like an Eskimo in fur coat, felt boots, fur cap, heavy shawl, and bit mittens. My wife's going to have a baby, he said, standing there. Can you come out?

It was only eighteen below that night and the wind whipped through that door chilling me to the marrow. Won't you come in? I shivered. At least I could get the directions to his place without freezing to death if I could shut the door. But with the most innocent and slightly startled look he replied in a slow drawl, Never mind, I ain't cold.

And many times our sleep is broken needlessly. Take this case, for instance. I had seen a child one morning, had diagnosed his trouble as bowel complaint, and had suggested that he should not be nursed until the mother reported to me again.

About one o'clock that night the mother telephoned, saying that the child was crying and that she could do nothing to stop him. Learning that his temperature was normal, that the vomiting had ceased, and that the bowel had quieted down, I said that the child's trouble was probably only hunger and that he should be fed. Then I went back to bed.

An hour later again the telephone rang, jolting me out of a sound sleep. It was the same mother. You were right, Doctor, she said sweetly. He was hungry. He's asleep now.

I wonder if she thought I had been sitting there by the telephone waiting to find out if the baby was hungry or not!

Chapter 48 (The Expert Witness)

Most doctors, at some time in their careers, have been called in as expert witnesses in court trials. I remember very vividly two such incidents: one in a friend's experience, one in my own.

This friend was an expert witness in a case in which a doctor was being sued for not operating. The expert was asked how many times he had had cases of the kind in question. He answered, Three times. I operated on two.:

And, said the attorney, did they recover?"

Yes, my friend answered.

Then why, continued the attorney who was trying to show that operation was the proper treatment, didn't you operate on the third?

Because, my friend answered dryly, at that time in the progression of the malady, the patient changed doctors.

I was called to a neighboring county to testify in a case of insanity. The facts presented were that the defendant, a man past middle life, a farmer who had always taken great pride in doing his work well, who was kind to his family, who was economical and frugal, had within the last number of weeks lost interest in his farm and in the manner in which his work was conducted, and was unreasonable with his family. His whole disposition was shown to have changed. Also, instead of being agreeable with his neighbors he was so unreasonable that he was having difficulty with them.

With that situation to consider, I was asked if the circumstances would indicate that the man was abnormal. I answered that I thought he was.

The attorney then said, You base your opinion on the facts that this man changed in his attitude to his neighbors and his family and changed from being a man of good economical practice to one careless in financial matters? I answered that I did.

He then said, Well, doctor, following that line of reasoning, consider the case of a gentleman, well dressed and dignified in appearance and demeanor, walking along quietly, then suddenly dashing down the sidewalk and out into the middle of the street among moving vehicles, apparently heedless of what might happen to him. Because of that change in his conduct would you say that he was insane?

Quite the contrary, I answered. The gentleman was probably chasing a new hat.

The cross questioning ceased at this point.

It just happened that the attorney who was cross questioning me was a friend of mine who had told me that very story himself only a few weeks before.

Chapter 49 (When the Bridge Went Down)

A passenger train left the Great Western station in Waverly. When it was passing over the bridge across the Cedar, something gave way and the last cars were thrown into the river. As the accident happened a young man and an older one were standing on the rear platform and both of them went down with the car into the water.

The younger one was thrown against the bridge piling; the older one was dumped right into the water. Being unable to swim, he struggled helplessly. The younger man, hearing his companion's cries, swam to him, grasped him, and towed him to shore. Once there they both got out on the river bank.

The older man paled as he look at the youth, My God, man, your arm!

Blood was streaming from an empty torn sleeve; the youth's arm was sheared off just below the elbow, and yet he had not known of the injury until that moment. He had not even missed his arm as he saved his companion.

They brought him to the hospital where his injury was dressed—not a hard job since the member was amputated neatly. He made a good recovery. As if to render his convalescence the more enjoyable, a romance budded between him and one of the nurses before he left the hospital.

Chapter 50 (The Stoic)

Accidents do terrible things to the body, but more often than not they bring out a courage and pluck in the character of the injured which is almost beyond belief.

In comparatively recent years I was called to take care of a little boy, about seven, who had fallen into a ditch-digging machine. The sharp shovels and grinding chains had mangled his small body and broken both legs and one arm.

I got into the reception room of the hospital a very short time after the child arrived, and was just in time to see one of the most touching incidents of my whole life.

The boy was half sitting, half lying on the davenport and by him sat his father, sobbing as though his heart would break. Don't cry, Dad, the child said in a shaking voice. It might have been worse.

In the long weeks of the losing battle that followed, the lad kept that attitude. When infection developed in those ugly cuts which had been ground full of dirt, and shock and internal hurts finally took his life, that little boy left for all of us a precious legacy: the great bravery of a tiny heart, a stoicism which had prompted him to reach over and pat his Dad's arm and say, Don't cry, Dad.

Chapter 51 (Happy Birthday!)

I was a member of the Iowa Clinical Surgical Society as long ago as the first decade after the turn of the century and at that time we used to meet with various members, the host each time giving a clinic. When it came my turn I gave my clinic and, after the discussion period, invited my friends of the society to the house for dinner.

Mrs. Rohlf had gotten up a tasty home-cooked meal, and after a hard day's work we were quite in the mood to relax and enjoy it. After we had finished eating we had some after-dinner speeches. In one of thee a friend, rising gallantly at his place, said that he had had such a good time that he, for one, would be back. I'll see you on your birthday! he added.

His jest was of course all in the spirit of fun, and merely his way of telling me he had had a good time. But it set me to thinking. Why wasn't his idea a good one? After all, I would be having a birthday soon and what better way would there be for me to celebrate it than to give a real clinic and devote that day to charity. There were so many sick people, worthy and in need, who would be benefitted.

So when January fifth came around, a couple of months later, my first birthday clinic was a reality. It was a success from many points of view. In the first place, I did charity work for many good people, people of my own and people who were sent by doctors who were in the habit of referring surgery to me. Then, in addition to the satisfaction of knowing that we had been of service to these unfortunates, in addition to feeling that happiness and humility which accompany such giving of self, we had the pleasure, after our work was done, of renewing friendships and recalling other happy times. And in a doctor's life, as in the life of most professional men, such contact with colleagues gives satisfaction and inspiration.

The next year and the next I cerebrated my birthday with a clinic. Mrs. Rohlf each time prepared a fine meal, and our home on January fifth rang with the hearty laughter of our guests. The clinics grew; even the dinners were better if that were possible. We had nine-course meals. We had wines and champagne. Once we had a whole roast pig.

The clinics kept on growing. Finally we outgrew our home and had to have the dinner at the hotel.

Birthday Banquet 1915
Birthday Banquet 1915

From the standpoint of renewing acquaintances and honoring our eminent colleagues I believe the 1921 clinic still is the memorable one. That was the time that I invited many of the pioneer doctors from around Waverly to be special guests; most of them came, others sent greetings.

There was Dr. D. F. Ford, of Plainfield, a man who was a seasoned practitioner when Queen Victoria died and who remembered the introduction of ether as an anaesthetic. The concluding thought in his speech was an inspiration to us all. He said, I have seen great changes. When I began, Lister had just started to practice and teach antisepsis in surgery. In the next fifty years still greater progress will be made…

Most of all, I hope that progress will be made in recognizing medicine as a great social preserving and preventing force and that the day will come when the doctor will be regularly paid and chiefly engaged in keeping people well, not in curing them after they are impoverished and wasted by sickness.

Dr. Amos Babcock, of New Hampton, confined to his home by illness, sent his greetings. Rather than bemoaning the fact that he had been suffering with eczema for a year, he sent us a chuckle as he wrote: God will reward that man who discovers a specific for itching.

Another honored guest was Dr. D. S. Bradford, of Janesville, then over eighty years old, of whom it was truthfully said that there was never a road so bad, never a night so dark, never a storm so severe, but that when a call came—regardless of whether the patient had money or not—he answered it. In fact, there never was an occasion, except when he was sock with pneumonia and had a temperature of 104, that his wife was able to keep him from going night and day in the fifty-five years of his practice on any sick call he ever got. And Dr. Bradford, a twinkle in his eye, concluded his remarks with a very sober Thank you, Doctor, and all the doctors for the courtesy they have sown me, even though a youth; they have treated me very nicely, as if I had had age and experience behind me.

Dr. H. T. Walker, who was to Riceville what Dr. Bradford was to Janesville, responded briefly to his welcome: Gentlemen, I am better at practicing than preaching. I came to Riceville thirty-two years ago and raised ten children, giving them a fair education. (He put them all through college.) I am honored to be here tonight and I want to thank you one and all for this occasion.

Dr. C. S. Chase, another honored guest who then occupied the chair of pharmacology at the State University of Iowa and was known to many of his younger colleagues as Dad Chase, turned the tables on me and told about my life story instead of his own, ending with a touching tribute. In the course of his talk he gave us a quotation which I have carried with me since:

True worth is in being, not seeming,--
In doing each day that goes by
Some little good—not in dreaming
Of great things to do by and by.
For good lieth not in pursuing,
Nor gaining of great nor of small,
But just in the doing, and doing
As we would be done by, is all.

We had other special guests: Dr. Ely of Des Moines, Dr. Brinkman of Waterloo, Dr. Kennefick of Algona. It was Dr. Kennefick who recalled that he was in Iowa City when I arrived there to enter the University in 1889, and it was he who gave us a review of medical history in the years since. He said he could remember when Des Moines, a city of 50,000 had no hospital; that was in the day that the whole state of Iowa had only two hospitals, one at Davenport and one at Dubuque. At that same time Minnesota had no hospitals outside the Twin Cities and Winona.

Fellows of the age of Dr. Rohlf and myself, he said, have seen the evolution of this whole surgical game. It was really a joke, the surgical things we had at Iowa City when we entered. And to think of the handicap of Dr. Rohlf going up without any special training in surgery, without any opportunity to attend clinics anywhere, to evolve and bring about this work himself…A little hospital like this (Waverly's) is doing a remarkable thing. The work you do here is great.

Dr. Buchbinder of Chicago was present and so was Dr. Bierring of Des Moines, the man who preceded me a few years as president of the Iowa State Medical Society and who has since served as president of the American Medical Association. Dr. Bierring, who was a medical student with me, made me very happy when he complimented the idea of group medicine as we had it in Waverly, of grouping together for the best possible work, and I think when the history of this town is written, it will be of that inspiration which Rohlf and these men about him have given in the way of a stimulus to real medical progress that will be his greatest moment.

Then Dr. Call of Greene spoke, and Dr. F. A. Osincup of Waverly paid tribute to the late Dr. Jungblut of Tripoli.

The end of the party was at hand when Dr. Chase asked if I would repeat Dr. Guthrie's eulogy to the medical profession, the eulogy which I had heard as a student at Iowa City. My pulse quickened as I gave again those thrilling words.

As the last guest departed I began looking forward to the next January fifth. And as it approached I realized anew each year what a beautiful task my mother had set for me, how pregnant with meaning were those words of hers that day long ago on the farm when she had taken my hands in hers and had patted them saying, They are the hands of a helper, son. I hope they will be—always.

At the clinic in 1930, Dr. Leonard West, who had worked with me in Waverly and who was then practicing in Des Moines, by some strange coincidence gave another expression of my mother's words when he said in his after-dinner speech: …And intimately connected with his life have been his hands. There is something distinctive, individualistic, characteristic in Dr. Rohlf's hands. I have looked at them and watched them many times. Mrs. West painted a portrait of the doctor, and the thing that pleased me more than anything else about the portrait was the doctor's hands. There is something about them that reflects the personality of a surgeon. Ida Norton Munson has written a little verse called 'The Surgeon's Hands' to which I have added a little for your birthday:

Your Hands at Sixty-Three
(with apologies to Ida North Munson)

Your face? I know not whether it be fair,
Or lined or grayed to mark the slipping years.
Your eyes? I do not glimpse the pity there,
Or try to probe their depths for hopes or fears.
Only upon your wondrous hands I gaze,
And search my memory through so fittingly
To voice their loveliness. In still amaze
I bow before their quite dignity.
They make the crooked straight and heal old sores;
The blind to see, the war-torn clean and whole.
Throughout the suffering world they touch the doors
That open wide to life. The bitter bowl
Of pain they sweeten till the weary rest,
As though the hands of Christ had served and blest. 'Your hands I clasp each birthday morning,
And then, all sorrows flee,
May your hands work on, each day at dawning,
I honor them at sixty-three!

Chapter 52 (The Birthday Cake)

The Perfect Host
The Perfect Host

No birthday party, even though it be part of a clinic, is complete without a birthday cake. And mine was no exception. Yet I believe the story of my birthday cake is a little out of the ordinary.

It began more than twenty years ago when I answered a telephone call at midnight. Dr. McDanell was calling from his home in Nashua: his little daughter was sick and would I take the train over in the morning to see what I could do? I asked the symptoms. He told me.

Acute appendicitis? I asked.

I wasn't waiting for any train if that was the trouble. I got my driver and together we went the twenty miles to Nashua, facing a blizzard from the northwest with the thermometer at eighteen below zero. Arriving, I found that the little girl did have acute appendicitis, and I thanked God that I had made the trip when I did instead of waiting until morning.

I suggested to the doctor that we operate immediately; so we got ready. And with a colleague of the doctor to give the anaesthetic and the colleague's wife to assist, I removed the children's appendix which was very acutely inflamed. We were all done by five o'clock. The child rallied nicely and made a fine recovery.

Both Dr. and Mrs. McDannell thanked me again and again, and in the years that have followed they have shown their gratitude in countless ways. But to me the most touching is Mrs. McDannell's remembrance for each birthday. An excellent cook, and truly an artist in frosting and decorating food, she bakes for me each January fifth a birthday cake. At first, when my clinics were smaller, the cake was more of a family-size creation. As the clinics grew so did the cakes, until in later years they have become culinary masterpieces of design as well as of taste. Sometimes they have been tiered, sometimes a number of smaller cakes artistically grouped, always beautifully frosted in color, often enhanced by living flowers wreathed at the base. Always there have been candles, and the right number; always there was enough for everyone even though in the later years more than one hundred guests were served.

After we got the Boy Scout Troop established here, it was the happy privilege of a group of those boys to present the birthday cake at the clinic dinner.

These years, when my health has made it unwise to hold a clinic, Mrs. McDannell hasn't forgotten me. Each year the cake comes, clinic or no clinic. This year she quite outdid herself, making me a little Hansel and Gretel cookie house, an enchanting creation which served as the centerpiece of the children's table at my family birthday party.

Chapter 53 (My Cup)

The telephone rang and my office girl answered. Is Dr. Rohlf in? the voice asked.

No, he's at the hospital, she answered. To her surprise the person on the other end of the line asked, Oh, is he sick?

There have been two times in my career when that second question wouldn't have been foolish, for twice I have been at the other end of a surgeon's knife. Both times I learned a sympathy for the ills of others, something which is more important than even the gain in physical health.

In my first illness, an acute gall bladder infection, in 1913, I was attended by Dr. H. M. Richter who came out from Chicago to help me. After he removed the stones and drained the bladder, I made such good recovery that for ten years I was well.

When I did get sick I more or less made up for lost time. I was attending a meeting of the American College of Surgeons in Chicago, took sick at midnight, was in the hospital at one o'clock, and was operated on that morning, when my gall bladder was removed by Dr. Richter and Dr. Buchbinder. I had a stormy convalescence by severe phlebitis, but I came out all right and shall not soon forget the kindness of the doctors not only to me but also to Mrs. Rohlf.

I was finally able to come home, but as the winter wore on I knew that my birthday clinic would have to wait until another year. The disappointment of having to skip that year was made a little easier when my brother, Dr. Edward L. Rohlf of Waterloo, invited me to his home for a birthday dinner.

Arriving at the appointed time at his home, I was a little surprised to find no dinner ready; but he explained that he had decided to have the meal downtown at Black's Tea Room. So I accompanied him downtown, went to Black's, and stepped into the dinner room just as he flicked on the lights. There seated before me were all the doctors who would have been at my clinic! They cheered, they shouted, they clapped me on the back while the tears trickled down my cheeks unashamed and my mouth tried to find to find words for the emotions I couldn't express.

During the dinner I got hold of myself a little and heard how this great banquet happened to be. Dr. John Brinkman of Waterloo had written my office girl for my clinic list and had sent out invitations to everyone. This was the response.

Rohlf Loving Cup 1924
Rohlf Loving Cup 1924

After the dinner there was a toast program. Knowing that I would probably be called upon, I steeled myself; yet when the time came I was lost for I hadn't known the rest of this banquet story. The toastmaster produced a magnificent loving cup filled with folded pieces of paper. He explained: When the invitations to this dinner were sent out, there was included in them the suggestion that we buy something for you, a token of esteem to give you tonight. That token is this cup. In it you will notice many pieces of paper. Those are the letters which came back in answer to the invitations. We had had no notion of keeping these letters, but as they arrived it became more and more apparent that in each was something which really belonged to you: a sincere personal tribute to you. We felt you would enjoy reading them. It is my privilege to present them to you in this silver loving cup.

My trembling hands closed over the cool, smooth handles of the cup, gripping them as if for support. I tried in vain to choke back the tears, my throat was tight; yet somehow I heard my own voice, as if it were miles away and belonging to some other person, thanking my friends for the cup; I heard myself telling a silly story about Ole and Katrina, in which Katrina hurried Ole with his proposal for she had had the answer ready a long time; I heard myself saying that I wished I, too, had an answer.

I couldn't see my friends' they were a blur in front of me; my heart pounded and my voice seemed far, far away.

But within me my soul cried out in exaltation, My cup runneth over with joy.

Inscription: Presented to our esteemed and loveable colleague Dr. W. A. Rohlf on the anniversary of his fifty seventh birthday, January Fifth - 1924, by fellows of his former birthday parties and clinics.

Chapter 54 (I Am Happy)

Here I shall end my story. As I look back I am happy to have lived in a most romantic and progressive age in medicine and surgery. A wonderful epoch!

I began the study of medicine when bacteriology was revolutionizing the ideas of the causes of disease. The words of Pasteur, Lister, Koch, Behring and others have solved many problems in medical science and to them is due the honor of having made possible the marvelous progress in surgical achievement and preventive medicine.

Some of the reflections that crowd into my mind suggest sober realities, some awaken cheerful memories. I find renewed sources of continued contentment through my friends who share their companionship.

I cannot refrain from expressing my gratitude to my professional associates and to my efficient office force who have rendered such loyal service. I feel that I am leaving my work in hands more efficient than mine have ever been; for, in addition to Dr. Rathe, there is Dr. O. Hardwig, another Waverly boy, who in January of 1936 took over the surgical work of the firm. His natural ability and his training in a modern university and a large city hospital have fitted him eminently for his work.

And I cannot overestimate the contributions my wife has made to our life together, remembering her watchful waiting for my return from work day or night, and her unselfish devotion during the times of my past and present physical afflictions.

May the reader have garnered from these pages some memories of heroic yesterdays, of cheerful todays, and of hopeful tomorrows!

Epilogue

Does His Good Deed Every Day
Does His Good Deed Every Day

Cheerful todays and hopeful tomorrows!

As Doctor Rohlf finished his book he little knew the great happiness that would come to him on one of those tomorrows—the afternoon of June twentieth, 1937. He had been invited to the river bank park near the Scout cabin for a vesper service which was to be in charge of the Fayette Boy Scouts and their leader, Rev. John D. Clinton.

We want all you Beaver Scouts there, Scout Commissioner A. E. Chandler of Waverly had urged. So Doctor donned his Beaver Scout badge and arrived at the appointed hour for the services in company with Mrs. Rohlf and John, the younger of Dr. and Mrs. Herbert Rathe's sons. Dr. Rohlf was not surprised to find the Waverly and Fayette Scouts and a number of friends there including the other Beaver Scouts of the Wapsipinicon area: The Rev. Mr. Clinton, Father J. C. Weineke of Cedar Falls and Judge George W. Wood of Waterloo.

Opening with vesper verses on Bible banners, the ceremonies continued with the unfurling of the United States banner by the Fayette Scouts.

Then Father Weineke addressed the group. His talk, however, was not about the flag. Simply and briefly, he reviewed the Doctor's work with boys, pointing to the Scout cabin as tangible evidence of that interest, earnestly stressing the fact that in so many ways the Doctor had looked to the future of the children who were to guard the Flag, who would be the citizens of tomorrow.

As one word followed another, there came over Doctor a realization that the flag ceremonial had been but a preface to something for him! Tears of joy filled his eyes, so touched was he by this friendly gesture of appreciation. Little John saw his tears, and asked Mrs. Rohlf if the man was talking about Uncle Bill. He was assured by her nod that that was the case. To John a tear was a tear and in his childish mind there was no knowing a tear of joy from a tear of sorrow; so he quietly moved over to the Doctor and patted him on the shoulder, whispering to him words of comfort.

Father Weineke had finished speaking. The Scouts moved to a tent which was near the cabin and the group gathered closely about. Then the tent was opened to reveal a rugged boulder. From a bronze plaque on its side these words gleamed in the afternoon sun:

In Honor of
BEAVER BILL ROHLF
A Friend of All Boys
1937

At the base of the boulder was a rim of soft concrete. Gently the Doctor was led before the tablet. There he knelt and impressed his palm in the concrete; others, Scout leaders and friends, did the same until the base of the boulder was encircled by a ring of palm-prints.

The four Beavers had placed theirs side by side below the plaque, yet quite without plan Dr. Rohlf's—the hand of a helper—was directly beneath the word Friend. — D. M.

Beaver Scout Boulder
Beaver Scout Boulder

Colophon

William Rohlf was born on January 5, 1867 in Davenport, Iowa. He received his MD degree from the University of Iowa in 1891. He practiced medicine and surgery for nearly 50 years serving various Iowa communities. His autobiography, Good Morning Doctor!, was written with the assistance of journalist Dorothy Moeller. The seven original illustrations were drawn on a prescription pad turned sideways. The 169 page book was published by the Torch Press of Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1938. Dr. Rohlf died on February 17, 1941 at age 74. Long out of print, Good Morning Dortor was reissued electronically by Dr. Rohlf's Great Grand Nephew Richard Rathe, MD in 1995.

Dorothy Moeller was a pioneering journalist who edited two Iowa newspapers and wrote many books. She is credited with doing the early research that lead to the Newspapers in Education program that now includes almost 700 newspapers and 65,000 schools. Dorothy Moeller died on October 20, 1995 at the age of 92.

This text was transcribed from a printed copy by Margie McGarva, proofread by Diana Pray, and published by Richard Rathe. All but three of the photographs are from the Rathe Family Archive. The portrait of Dr. Guthrie is from the University of Iowa Archive website. The portrait of Dr. Middleton is from iagenweb.org. The Little Vial photo is from WikiCommons.

The banner graphic is from the lithograph Family Doctor by Grant Wood (1891-1942), a copy of which hung on my Grandfather's office wall when I was a child.

This edition was rendered into an HTML booklet using KIST.

There is also an eBook version I published in 2011.


External Links
 https://mdpaths.com/rrr/projects/kist_markup/kist_guide/index.html

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