Chapter 17 cont. ANTOINE LE CLAIRE A PATIENT. "To return to the subject of my first patient, Dr. Bardwell asked me to give Mr. LeClaire my attention, by a system of prognosis best know to the trade.  To quote his language, 'I have been examining him for about a week and have come to the conclusion that it is a plain case of abdominal dropsy, and, thinking it expedient to be in time, I have brought along my box of instruments with the intent of relieving him of a gallon or two of water by tapping.'  I proceeded to the examination of the case and asked if I might see Mrs. LeClaire.  She came into the room and gave me the history of the case.  Then the council  commenced, by my saying, to my mind it was an unmistakable case of inflammatory rheumatism, and the tapping had better be done in the arm.  The difference of my opinion so far as related in the diagnosis did not seem to create any surprise, but my suggestion of bleeding astonished greatly.  He asked if I was candid in my view of the subject.  'Most certainly I am,' was my reply.  Dr. Bardwell then spoke thusly:  'Mr. LeClaire, here are two doctors, one may be taken and the other left, which will you have?'  Mr. LeClaire's reply was, 'Dr. Burrows may bleed me.'  I did bleed him and Dr. Bardwell was kind enough to hold the bowl, and then hurried off to the ball.  From that day forward to the day of his death, twenty-six years later, the patient was mine. "I made twelve visits, in as many days.  The sequel was most satisfactory, for within ten days from my last visit Mr. LeClaire rode on horseback from Davenport to Rockingham, and without asking for my bill, handed  me a handful of silver, interspersed with gold pieces, saying, 'I will pay you the balance some other time,' then bade me good-by, for he had not dismounted, and rode off.  The sum given me was $1.50.  He did pay the balance, besides contributing annual payments for small service.  On my removal to Davenport, in the spring of 1843, he presented me with a deed of out lot No. 31, then called four-acre lots, saying to me:  'If you don't want that lot, sell it; I felt that I had never paid you for your services.'  I attempted an acknowledgment, but he said, 'Don't say anything, for I owed it to you.'  I did sell the lot subsequently for $1,000.  It was the one upon which Sargent's row is built.  The population on January 1, 1837, of the domain now known as Scott county, was below 200, after which immigration set in with great rapidity. "During this summer Dr. A. C. Donaldson, from Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, located in Davenport as the first resident physician.  He was well qualified for a successful practice of the profession; was eminently upright in thought and act and deserved a better recompense for his medical ability and his moral worth than the world afforded him.  He remained in Davenport but two years, or perhaps three, removed to St. Louis, and subsequently to California, where death overtook him. "During the summer and autumn of 1837 a few cases of bilious remitting fever occurred, but yielded readily to treatment.  The winter following several cases of bilious pneumonia demanded prompt attendance and special vigilance in the observance of changes indicative of greater danger.  These were the diseases, and the principal ones, which called for medical help up to the year 1849.  Since that year, or from that period, the summer and autumnal fevers ceased to be epidemical and pneumonia became less frequent.  It may be well to mention here that the fevers of 1849, after the third of fourth day, assumed a typhoid character, the remission hardly observable, and the nervous depression occasioning great anxiety.  Old citizens well remember that year, for in it occurred the death of David Hoge and Miss Sophia Fisher. "I think it was Dr. Rush, of Philadelphia,-a great name up to about 1825-who said the lancet was a 'sheet-anchor' in all inflammatory diseases.  So it might have been said of quinine, as used in remittent and intermittent fevers, in both the Mississippi and Missouri valleys from 1830 up to 1850.  During that period 120,000 square miles west of the Mississippi and north of St. Louis became populated, and all of it more or less malarious.  In some of these years the demand for quinine was so great that the supply in the American market became exhausted.  'Sappinton's pills' were indirectly the power which worked steamboats up the river from 1835 to 1843.  They were, verily, the 'sheet-anchor,' not only aboard but in many households.  Dr. Sappington was a regular allopathic aboard boats but in many households.  Dr. Sappington was a regular allopathic physician of considerable ability, residing up the Missouri rive, who thought it would be a benefaction to the new civilization of the west to prepare quinine, ready to be taken, in the form of pills.  The boxes contained four dozen each, and the pills two grains each.  The direction on the box was to take from two to twenty, as the urgency of the case seemed to require, without reference to the stage of the paroxysm. Debbie Clough G-erischer G-erischer Family Web Site http://gerischer.rootsweb.com/ Assistant CC, Iowa Gen Web, Scott County http://www.celticcousins.net/scott/ List Manager for: IASCOTT-L * G-erischer-L * D-encker-L Fitzpatirck-L * V-lerebome-L * Huntington-L * Otis-L * Algar-L EIGS-L * Pickens-L * McNab-L * Patris-L - Rankin-L