Medicine: Company Doctor

In Lafayette, Colo., a thin, recently tuberculous young doctor from Pennsylvania hung up his shingle above the general store one day in December, 1900. Lafayette (pop. 900) was a rough-&-ready coal-mining town. Dr. Victor Welsh Porter gave it rough-&-ready medicine.

By horse & buggy he got around to miners’ huts and farmers’ sickbeds. He went down mine shafts after many a mining accident, delivered three generations of babies, as often as not without being paid. When a Caesarean seemed indicated, Dr. Porter, no surgeon, did the best he could without operating. When women standing around during a tough birth got hysterical, Dr. Porter shouted: “Shut up or I’ll throw the whole goddamned bunch of you into the road.” During one delivery of a young mother with gonorrhea, he picked up an infection, lost an eye.

Sometimes he had to lead his horse by lantern light over muddy mountain trails. When autos came along, he bought a Reo, which ran sometimes, but “mostly I just cranked and cranked at the damn thing and then went and hitched up the horse.” He was also the company doctor. During the bitter 1910 Colorado coal strike, miners stoned his children. Doc sent his family to Denver, strapped a six-shooter on his hip, grimly made his rounds.

Recently, at 79, he decjded he had had enough, retired. He took with him his hard-boiled attitude about medicine. Said he: “I don’t know any other profession in which you’ll find more ignorance, but then if we cured them all the world would be overpopulated.”

Last week Lafayette’s miners did something that met with their longtime doctor’s deep disapproval. They trooped into Bermont’s hardware & grocery, and Alderson’s clothing store and dropped dollar bills and 50¢ pieces into a box to give him a trip around the world and to sign a citation: “To a grand old man, with the best wishes of a grateful community.”

Gruff old Doc harrumphed: “I don’t really care if I take a trip or not. I’m damned if I know what I want to see.”