One of the big stories nowadays is health care. Just a few days ago the Affordable Health Care Act was upheld as constitutional by the SCOTUS. I still need to digest the whole thing and find out how affordable it is or if it’s actually going to cost me more. I’m currently uninsured. I’d had insurance for years but changed jobs and figured I’d buy private insurance. Right. Turned down. So anyhow, health care is on my mind.
The health care I remember from my childhood was quite different.
First of all, we didn’t make appointments to see the doctor. We had two family doctors: Old Doc Swartz or Young Doc (also known as “Ollie”). Old Doc had an office just up the street from our home, a big corner house with a waiting room and examining room built in. I’ve been trying to find a photo of the house — should have just taken a photo on my own while I was in Middletown on the 4th — but no luck. However, I did find some interesting info, including that it was once the Rife home and had a tannery behind it, and that an airplane from Olmsted Air Force Base once crashed into it and set the porch on fire. The only real history of that home that I remember — aside from doctor visits there — was when a deer found its way into town, tried to leap the fence, and was impaled on one of the wrought iron spikes.
Back to doctor visits. . .
At Doc Swartz’s, the waiting room was just that: a place for waiting. Early in the morning (I have no idea what time, I’d assume 7:00, 7:30, 8:00 — whenever), I’d leave my house, carefully cross at the corner, and hopefully be the first person waiting on the steps next to the office door. At the designated but un-remembered time, Mrs. Swartz would open the door and let me — and whoever else happened to be on the steps — into that waiting room. I think that I remember leather furniture and magazines. And ashtrays. Yep, smoking was allowed. After all, this was before those warnings on cigarette packs and if you were an adult and visiting the doctor, you probably smoked a few to calm your nerves. Once in the waiting room, I’d wait. Maybe I’d bring a book, maybe look through the magazines. Eventually my mother would join me — if the required examination was for my brother, she’s bring him along, but otherwise he’d stay with my great-grandmother, who conveniently lived right next door to us. If for her, I’d leave and go back home. If for me, I’d stay.
Precisely at opening time (again, I don’t remember. 8:00? 9:00?) Doc Swartz would open the door and usher us in. If all went well, we’d be first.
We weren’t seen in an examining room: we were seen in Doc’s office. Again, I was young and don’t remember everything clearly. It was a big room. Big. He had a large desk and cupboards full of jars and bottles and instruments. Yes, we had a pharmacy nearby, but most treatments were handed to us right there in the office, so the source of those treatments were right there. Doc always wore a suit, because that’s how doctors dressed, right? There were chairs next to the desk, straight-backed wooden things. And I assume that there was an actual examination table, though I don’t remember it. My most common ailment was “the cold.” Considering nowadays, I probably had allergy problems. Doc sat on a stool — one with wheels that I’d have loved to ride on but it was his — and had me open my mouth, say “ah,” listened to my heart and lungs with his stethoscope, checked my ears and nose. I’d leave with something: pills in a paper packet with directions written with a fountain pen, an ointment or salve in a squat metal cylinder with an cardboard disk inserted in a groove on the top (again with inked directions). I especially remember the salve, pungent smelling, pasty, and to be applied to my nose: no soft tissues in those days, just cloth hankies, laundered without fabric softener (really? What was that?) and sure to leave my nose raw from wiping.
Sometimes it was Old Doc who saw us, sometimes Young Doc, but it’s Old Doc I associate with that office. Mom paid him in cash, extracting the money carefully from her wallet, leaving little behind.
Young Doc I associate with the street and our house. I’d see him in the mornings, striding up Spring Street in his suit and tie, leather bag in hand. He’d always say hello, knew the names of all of us.
He’d also stop by if one of us were sick. Yes, those were the days of house calls, and we were on the route for morning and evening visits, if warranted.
And they were warranted, at least during one period of our lives. You see, in those days we didn’t have immunizations. There was the smallpox vaccination, something that was required to enter first grade. I had to go to the office, to see one of the docs — I don’t remember which one — before that first day at Emaus Street School and have that huge needle stuck in my arm. The sore was covered with gauze and eventually scarred over — “Don’t pick at it, Vickie — it’ll heal better if you let it fall off on its own.” — before falling off and leaving the characteristic “vaccination scar.”
No, that’s not my scar: I tried to take a photo of it but now have a dozen blurry arm shots on my camera. It’s still visible, barely, but it’s there. We had to show those, show those scars, to prove that we had the vaccination and were eligible to enter school. A few years later my family also had the polio vaccine. That one was an oral vaccine, and we stood in line — I think at the community building — for our turn to drink it down. I was very glad for that: thanks to an episode of either Dr. Kildare or Ben Casey, I was pretty sure that I had polio — all those aches in my leg, you know.
Anyhow, back to those house calls. My brother and I both had measles. No shots for them at that time, just the disease. My mom will still tell you that we had “fever so high they were delirious.” Putting it bluntly, it was probably touch and go: we could have died. But Young Doc, Ollie, stopped by to see us each day and each night, both when we were feverish and afterward. That’s what doctors did in those days.
We also had mumps and chickenpox. We may have had whooping cough but I don’t remember that. It was just the way it was: kids got sick.
Fortunately, we had doctors nearby, doctors who stopped by and checked on us and reassured our mother that we’d probably be ok.
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