Coshocton County, Ohio - Chapter 18: The Medical Profession - Changes in a Century, 1909

Need For A Hospital

In all its hundred years the community was never without those members of the medical profession maintaining always the highest ethical standard. The enlightened public understanding in later years has aided materially in discountenancing methods intolerable to the legitimate practitioner. The physician or surgeon giving first consideration to the welfare of the community is unrelenting in opposing the unscrupulous element which exploits healing qualities that do not heal.

What progress there has been here against quackery may be inferred from such circumstances as that eye-glass humbug who paid for local newspaper endorsements of his treatment of eye troubles and who, when he happened to call at a home where a victim was absent, cheerfully asked for a photograph on which he could fit the glasses just as well. At least that particular fraud would not find Coshocton money quite so easy in these times.

The fraudulent use of the title of doctor has misled victims in the county whose health as a result has suffered untold misery; and cases are known where lives were sacrificed. But people are coming to learn that no honorable physician need travel over the land, inviting the sick, the lame and the halt to come to a hotel for free consultation. That word free is the luscious bait at which ignorance was ever wont to nibble.

The hardships of long drives through winter and storm at all hours of the day or night are incidents in country practice known to the profession of the county today as they were known to physicians in the past. For the public the coming of the telephone has brought with it the added feeling of security that in sudden illness the doctor

All systems of medical treatment are represented here. The regular practice' or allopathy, prevails. The eclectic system is followed by some physicians, and the homeopathic school ranks next in number. |

The city needs of Coshocton include especially a hospital, the institution which the community at large would find advantageous, while particularly serviceable in the accident cases attending the present extent of manufacturing and other industrial operations in the county. Dr. Jesse McClain, with all the facilities for surgical cases which can be handled under existing conditions, impresses the advantage that would come with hospital appliances and equipment for treatment of cases compelled to undertake dangerous trips in enfeebled condition to distant hospitals.

One of the most wholesome changes in public sentiment is the disappearance of the oldtime prejudice against going to a hospital. People have come to realize that the sufferer's welfare is to be trusted to the care of an institution where everything is especially provided for the sick, and where trained nurses prove an efficient auxiliary to the doctor's care.

The Coshocton County Medical Society, organized in recent years, meets quarterly in the Carnegie Library. Dr. E. C. Carr is President. His is a medical family. His son is practicing in Chicago, and his father, Dr. J. G. Carr, has been longest in the practice of any of the present physicians in the county.

Local members of the profession have been called to fill various public offices, as told elsewhere. The office of coroner, now filled by Dr. J. D. Lower, has been assigned to doctors for years.