A Southern Practice: The Diary and Autobiography of Charles A. Hentz, M.D.University of Virginia Press, 2000 - 646 páginas As a physician practicing in the rural South in the years leading up to and through the Civil War, Charles Arnould Hentz (1827-1894) lived in the midst of enormous changes in southern society and medicine. A Southern Practice includes the diary that Hentz kept for more than twenty years, beginning with the river journey his family took from Ohio to Alabama when Charles was eighteen. This vividly depicted trip--people, places, and sensory details--sets the stage for Hentz's record of his life through middle age: his apprenticeship and decision to pursue a medical career while a youth in Alabama; maturing as both a man and a doctor while at school in Kentucky; and establishing a general practice--and a large family--in the rough society of the Florida Panhandle. This edition also includes Hentz's autobiography, written at the end of his life, in which he reviews his past as doctor, southerner, and family man. Taken together, Hentz's diary and autobiography dramatize with unusual clarity and realism the demanding work of a physician in an age before medicine could reliably cure patients. The rural doctor's work plunged him into the center of his community's life. He attended patients enslaved and free; worked one day with the challenges of childbirth, another with desperately sick children; treated the victims of stabbings and shootings; and faced the looming threat of epidemic fever. By telling what he liked to call his "professional stories," Hentz also gives a relatively rare picture of the feelings and experiences of a middle-class southern white man. His work, religious faith, and social relations with neighbors, slaves, and strangers are described. In their frankness, sharp observation, and good humor, Hentz's writings illuminate nineteenth-century medicine in its full social setting, thus revealing a fresh portrait of the Old South. |
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... father's urging he tried medicine by appren- ticing himself to Dr. Reuben Searcy . Nicholas Hentz had studied medicine as a young man , and his interest in the natural world was something he had shared with his son throughout Charles's ...
... father's generosity in financing his medi- cal education , and he carefully notes his mother's praise . He hopes he is worthy . Even so , in diary and autobiography Charles does not linger over Caroline and Nicholas ; he approaches them ...
... father's habit of " ejaculatory prayer " but what the girls called " bumping " : Nicholas would suddenly press his ... father does not emerge , one suspects , trailing the full array of his ec- centric trappings . An occasional ironic ...
... father is in bed & asleep so I have disturbed no one by this outpouring of a surcharged heart . " No one , that is , except Charles . When coming to live with Charles and his family not long before her death , Caroline found contentment ...
... father's slave Daniel write a love letter . Slaves were everywhere , but most of them were no one in particular ; they were part of the world but not part of social relations . This is most fully seen in Hentz's brief accounts of his ...
Índice
1845 | 41 |
1846 | 77 |
1847 | 149 |
1848 | 177 |
1849 | 222 |
1850 | 267 |
1851 | 270 |
1852 | 272 |
1853 | 293 |
1854 | 302 |
1857 | 303 |
186O | 320 |
1861 | 353 |
1865 | 369 |
1869 | 388 |