Books: Kitchen Surgeon

THE HORSE AND BUGGY DOCTOR— Arthur E. Hertzler—Harper ($2.75).

While publishers jump at almost any book about doctors, seldom have they published them as rapidly as they have the last three doctors’ autobiographies: William N. MacArtney’s Fifty Years a Country Doctor, Chevalier Jackson’s autobiography, Arthur Emanuel Hertzler’s The Horse and Buggy Doctor—the possible beginning of a trend that may yet make the late boom in foreign correspondents’ memoirs look sick.

Founder of the 150-bed Halstead, Kans. (pop. 1,367) hospital which he gave away in 1933 to the Sisters of St. Joseph, “Pop” Hertzler, now 68, is a lanky, Ichabod Cranelike surgeon whom a Civil War veteran described as “the homeliest man I seen since I saw Old Abe.” During his farm boyhood his favorite reading was Dr. Foote’s Family Physician, and Hertzler recalls with satisfaction the time when he walloped a mean teacher with a slate—it pointed to “the ability to act quickly, accurately and energetically.”

In picturesque contrast with modern medicine was Hertzler’s three-year course at Northwestern. Later he supplemented his education by correspondence courses and two years’ study in Germany. His quaintest Americana are his adventures in kitchen surgery. Paying sick calls was no cinch. Horse & buggy covered 20 miles in half a day, while “Pop” shot rabbits and fence posts, read, slept, fought blizzards and dogs that were as bad as the roads. As standard instruments he carried a six-shooter for the dogs, wire cutter, shovel and hammer to cut through fences when he got lost in blizzards. No farmer ever complained.

But once in the kitchen, ready to operate, “Pop” was content. While the instruments boiled, he tried to josh the patient into feeling as confident as he did, sometimes had them offering to sharpen his tools. When one kitchen was too small, he set up his plank-&-barrel operating table under an apple tree. But despite these primitive conditions, says Hertzler, post-operative infections were not more frequent than in modern hospitals. The secret of successful operations, says Hertzler, is not a fancy operating room but thorough knowledge of anatomy and speed. In his own clinic, built with many a headache, he dispensed with masks. According to “Pop,” they only make the operating room look like a harem, give esthetic delight to the modern surgeon who rides to the hospital in a limousine, does nothing more strenuous than change his pants when he gets there.

Hankering after the good old days, but grateful for modern medical advancement, Hertzler’s main grievances are against neurotic female patients, most assistant surgeons, meddling parsons, quacks, lawyers (malpractice suits “are dependent on the presence of a lawyer in a state of malnutrition”), believers in mental healing. During a tumor operation, when a patient’s friend stood by repeating “You think you see something, but there is nothing there,” “Pop” held himself in till he finished, then slammed the gory ten-pound tumor on her feet.

In an “intimate” closing chapter on those ailments requiring sympathetic understanding rather than medicine and surgery, Hertzler, the country doctor, sounds not unlike William Allen White, the country editor and prairie philosopher. Here the reader gets the clearest picture of the gap between the old country doctor and his sophisticated successors.