BLACK BAG
Most doctors, years ago, hand-carried a small, black bag of leather with them whereever they went. It measured, perhaps, ten inches long, five or six inches wide. About four or five inches high - on the narrow side, sturdy and it had a good suitcase handle and a lock with a small, pressed metal key. Our doctor kept the key on the dangling , tassel-end of his pocket watch fob. It was there when he needed it; but he seldom locked his bag, as I recall. When he did lock it we knew he was carrying something special; something for limited use.
That small bag was his professional sanctum. .It was his local drug store. He was his own pharmacist.. It was his source of many of curative wonders brought to us in the mountain country to keep us well and active.
That era is gone, of course by I remember talking with a younger doctor who was “taking over”, you might say, as they died off one-by-one. He marveled at the number of cures the older doctors could bring about using just those six “ingredients” mixed with various types of “bedside" manners and TLC. I've been trying to remember what the six items were, and I've decided one had to be calimine loition, zinc oxide mixed with some ferric oxide; a bottleozf menthal- smelling linament and some iodine. More modern ones might have kept supplies of aspirin, they had to be a laxative powder of some sort and every last one of the old timers carried a bottle of liquid which had to be red in appearance. Patients, universally, seemed to be firm in their opinion that cough syrup had to be red in color to be effective. That came to mean that anything that was red was, automatically, became a cure for a cough or cold.
The basic six had to be there, and each doctor had a few specials that he was expected to carry. They may be a selected herb or two respected locally as a sure cure and, perhaps, a small bottle of peach or apple brandy for “nerve conditions” although that was more often a home preparation made in sufficient quantity to serve as an anesthetic if the illness or injury was sufficient to pose a need for surgery of any kind. I remember reading of one such doctor who was famous locally for his special ability to cure any form of rash or skin malady using what he called his secret “Indian Powders”. After his death, his son discovered a stock of homemade bread jammed like mortar between limestone foundation stones in his damp basement wall. He powdered the bread mold and tinted it various shades with dried leaves. He cured countless patients with skin ailments with a medication which would not be “discovered” for another hundred years or so when it would named “penicillin.”
Folklore entered into the practice of medicine in those days, too. The success of such a family doctor, then, resulted very much from the growth of the young doctor as he became a physician. So much of his success in curing human illness depended on his ability to assure the patient that the cure was in that little black bag or in his own brain. There was a close connection between doctor and patient – less obvious, perhaps, today but still very much present. Much of the “cure” was then, is now, I insist; was, and is, in the patient's head and in the the doctor's heart. Curative action prevails.
The mysterious little black bag contained all the physical help a doctor had in those days. The rest was up to what he knew about how to talk to, and reason with, the people he serve. The “black bag” is bigger now –-a pharmaceutical galaxy - but the element of concern remains critical to its best use.
A..L.M. January 18, 2005 [660wds]
