Humboldt County Historical Society

On May 14, 2006, the New York Times reported that clinics for routine health care are springing up in drugstores all across the country. In one example, Take Care Health Systems, who opened their first walk-in clinic in a Portland Rite-Aid, plans to open 1400 such clinics by 2009. In areas where the clinics exist, people boast that instead of waiting in doctors' offices and emergency rooms, they can travel a block or two to the drugstore for vaccines, throat cultures, and other routine treatments.

While the days of doctors making house calls will probably never return, it does appear that medical care may be getting closer to home. Let's hope it doesn't get too close, I couldn't help thinking, when, just a few days later, I happened to open a 1965 Humboldt Historian to an article entitled, "Surgery in the Home in 1905."

As one would expect, early doctoring in Humboldt County involved daily heroics on the part of doctors and patients alike. Up into the forties, house calls were a routine part of a doctor's life. The image of an early-day doctor cracking his carriage whip or tooting his horn as he races through town on his way to an emergency is familiar to all. In 1904, Doctor C. C. Falk sped through Eureka in a sporty Reo, beeping his outboard brass horn, while Dr. Marshall cut a fine figure in his Lozier. Dr. Ottinger made a show of whipping his horses through Eureka streets as though on an emergency call, but people suspected him of shamming.

In his 1979 piece "Once Upon a House Call," published in The Way it Was, Samuel P. Burre, M.D., tells of Dr. Seth Foster, who, in about 1910, was attempting to make the transition from his trusted horse, Charley, to his new but unproven automobile, a Stanley Steamer. His ultimate trust in Charley saved his life when he chose horse over horseless carriage for a house call made one night during a downpour. At the top of Ryan's Slough Hill, Charley absolutely refused to budge, in spite of the Doctor's insistence. Suddenly an explosion shattered the air: the bridge across Ryan's Slough had been torn loose by the torrential flows awaiting horse and rider at the bottom of the hill. Some things just cannot be mechanized.

In 1933, Dr. Sam Burre himself won widespread recognition when he made a house call to Showers Pass through snow that was the deepest in sixty years of local memory. Ralph "High Rock" Gordon had foundered in the deep snow as he tried to make his way to secure provisions for his family. When he fell, his hip-side revolver discharged, the bullet lodging in his leg. Showers Pass mailman Dave "Barbed-Wire" Cassidy sent out the call for help. When word reached Dr. Burre in Eureka, he immediately set forth. Two miles from Bridgeville, he had to abandon his snowbound car. He may have been thinking of Dr. Seth Foster when, for the first time in his life, Dr. Burre mounted a horse for the seventeen-mile trip to Showers Pass. "High Rock" Gordon was brought to Eureka for treatment and made a full recovery.

When people in outlying areas could not make the trip into a Eureka hospital, prevented by their tenuous medical condition or by travel constraints, surgery was indeed performed in the home. In 1905, young Ferndale resident Clyde Morrison suffered an acute attack of appendicitis, requiring emergency surgery. The Morrisons' dining room table was thus made ready for the operation. Austen Miller, just out of medical school, was assisted by veteran H. S. Delamere. Things got problematic when Clyde's appendix could not be located by either doctor. The incision was lengthened for a better look around, to no avail. Finally, a third doctor was called in to help find the organ.

Because the operation was taking so long, another complication became imminent: Ferndale's new electric power plant was turned off between midnight and dawn to conserve fuel. The central telephone office was already closed, so Clyde's father hoofed it to the power plant, readily persuading the operator to keep the power going through the night. Meanwhile, in order to quell her mounting anxiety, Clyde's mother, who had been banned from the dining/operating room, went outside, stood on a box she placed against the house, and peeked in at her son through the window. Clyde recovered without any ill effects, and a very impressive scar.

Another instance of home surgery occurred in 1920, when the Nels Leen family of Orick was stricken with diphtheria and quarantined in their home. Dr. Joseph Walsh came to their house and removed the youngest child's tonsils, utilizing the ironing board as an operating table.

There must have been many cases of home surgery in these early years. Today, of course, vaccines and antibiotics protect us from many of the communicable diseases that once devastated entire families, and in emergencies patients can be airlifted to hospitals. Yet some of the old problems do remain: how to make health care available to all; how to conserve energy in order to keep the power on through the night.