Allegan County, Michigan - Chapter 12: Medicine Akd Surgery, 1907

The history of Otsego and Gun Plains opens with the enterprise of two physicians. Dr. Samuel Foster and Dr. Cyrenius Thompson. They are deserving of mention among the founders if not the founders of the village of Otsego and the settlement of Gun Plains, and were active workers in the affairs of those places through their pioneer history. But neither of these men, though so prominent in other affairs, took an active part as medical practitioners in this county.

The first active physician was Dr. Linsford B. Coates. of Otsego, a man of nnusual versatility and power. As a physician he rode the country for miles around, attending to the sick and distressed and from his saddlebags furnishing medical relief to all who called him. Pioneer doctoring was a simple matter in comparison with modem practice. Yet it involved hardships on the practitioner that are almost inconceivable at this time.. There were no well-made roads over which to find the way by horseback at night. The patients often lived twenty miles or more from the doctor's home, and there were no telephones to summon him to their aid. The physician's life was one of constant toil and anxiety, and yet in the case of Dr. Coates he was one of the most prominent men of affairs in the southeastern part of the county.

Successors of Dr. Coates in his part of the county were Erastus N. Upjohn, the first resident physician in Gun Plains excepting Dr. Thompson, and who practiced from 1840 to 1855; Dr. Charles W. Hawley, who practiced for many years following 1850 in Gun Plains and vicinity and in 1875 took up his residence at Plainwell, and J. D. Peters, who began practicing in Otsego in i860 and the following year located at Plainwell.

At Allegan the first physician was R. M. Bigelow, who was here from 1836 to 1847, but the one best remembered, both for his prominence in the profession and as a citizen, was Dr. Osman D. Goodrich, who came to the village in March, 1836, and lived here until his death in 1887, He was the last of the early physicians to pass away, and his career of fifty years ranked him among the foremost of the pioneers. His early practice, like that of Dr. Coates, took him all over the county, on most arduous horseback rides from one home to another, and his exertions finally broke his health so that he was compelled to return to the east, where he remained ten years. In the meantime he studied medicine in the homteopathic school and on his return became the first homceopath in this county.

Another prominent physician of Allegan was Dr. IL S. Lay, who began practice in the village in 1849 and with brief exceptions practiced in the county over thirty years. A contemporary of his was Dr. Abram R. Calkins, who began his preparation for medicine with Dr. Coates at Otsego . and after graduation from a medical college in New York located in Allegan during the forties. His was also a pioneer practice, and for thirty years he was one of the best known citizens of Allegan. He served as surgeon in the Seventeenth Michigan Infantry during the war and took part in local politics and public affairs. He died in Allegan in 1873.

Other pioneer physicians of the county who deserve mention were Dr, C. C. White, of Martin, already mentioned as a pioneer and who, like Drs. Foster and Thompson, was more active in developing the country than as a physician, and Dr. Chauncey E. Goodrich, who practiced in the western part of tiie county from 1843 until his death in 1879, first at Saugatuck and then in Ganges.

Ky the provisions of a recent law tlie county clerk keeps a register of the licensed physicians in the county. Accordhig to this record (from which, however, some names are missing) the Allegan county physicians, with the date of registration of each and residence, are as follows: