A Southern Practice: The Diary and Autobiography of Charles A. Hentz, M.D. (review)

Steven M. Stowe, ed. A Southern Practice: The Diary and Autobiography of Charles A. Hentz, M.D. The Publications of the Southern Texts Society. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. x + 646 pp. Ill. $64.50 (0-8139-1881-2).

The diaries of antebellum women are fairly common, but those of men are noticeably rarer. A notable exception is Charles A. Hentz, who kept a detailed diary for much of his adult life. In later years he began writing an autobiography, for which his diary was a major source; it remained unfinished at his death. Together, these volumes portray a remarkable man's life and his attempts to make sense of it. A union of description and commentary, they are the author's life stories--his experiences, thoughts, wishes, and worldview. Steven M. Stowe has skillfully edited each for publication.

Hentz was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1827. His father, Nicholas, was professor of modern languages at the state university. His mother, Caroline, also a teacher, was to achieve recognition as a novelist. Nicholas Hentz was an academic nomad: in the decade and a half after Charles's birth, the family moved three times before settling in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It was here, in November 1845, that Charles began his diary; he was to keep it on and off for the next quarter-century. At his father's insistence Hentz decided to study medicine, first as an apprentice with a local physician and later, in 1846, as a student at the Louisville Medical Institute, the South's largest medical school. Upon completion of the required two-year course, Hentz sat up practice in West Florida; he was to spend the remainder of his life here as a respected physician and successful family man. Only the Civil War interrupted his comfortable existence--but the largely apolitical Hentz avoided conflict, spending the war years as an attending physician at a local medical center, and as soon as the hostilities were over he quickly put them behind him and got on with his life. He died in 1894.

There is much in this volume for the historian of medicine. Hentz entered medicine at a crucial transitional period in its history when it was slowly being transformed from a craft into a science. Because of its difficulties in treating routine health problems and failure in combating epidemics, the profession was under strong attack from a host of irregular practitioners. Hentz chose to pursue a traditional practice. His training in Louisville sheds important light on antebellum medical education, student behavior, and the role that shared experiences played in preparing students for practice. Hentz chose sparsely settled West Florida to launch his career, and his efforts to build a practice, where one early failure could spell disaster, are as informative as they are interesting. The pleasures and pain of the rural antebellum practitioner are vividly portrayed--a regimen of routine and troubling cases; inspiring successes and disappointing failures; long hours on horseback that, while arduous, nurtured an appreciation of the natural world; and the frustrations of attempting to collect fees. While he embraced allopathy, Hentz was not dogmatic: his singular goal was to bring relief to the suffering, even if it meant utilizing a mixture of therapies. In a similar practical vein, he understood the social dimensions of disease and spent much time learning about his patients and taking their personal histories. For Hentz, then, medicine was not just a livelihood but a calling from which he derived a great deal of personal and intellectual satisfaction and a sense of public-spiritedness.

Succinctly stated, Hentz's diary and autobiography represent the self-portrait of a unique individual who immensely enjoyed what he was doing and was comfortable with his world. Stowe is deserving of high praise for making his instructive life story available. Scholars and general readers...