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3. Medical Practice under Segregation
- The University of Alabama Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
3 Medical Practice under Segregation The daybook I kept when I started my practice shows that the very first day I was open for business, I had four patients and made eleven dollars. The second day, I had seven patients and made fifteen dollars. By the end of the month, I was seeing twenty to twenty-five patients a day and bringing in between forty and fifty dollars. By the end of my second year, I was seeing fifty to sixty patients a day, sometimes more.1 Most mornings, I’d be awakened by the phone at five, five-thirty, or six o’clock—so-and-so is sick, can you come by and see her before you go to your office? Or maybe two calls, and then, after I got hospital privileges, which was about sixty days after I had opened, I’d make rounds in the morning, and frequently I didn’t get to the office until eleven-thirty or twelve.Then I’d work for two or three hours and take a lunch break, which sometimes was two-thirty or three, and then come back in thirty or forty minutes, and work till five or six. Now, you have to remember that a good part of a doctor’s practice in those days took place outside the office. The office was used mostly for histories and physicals,injections,minor lab work,blood samples,and urine samples to check for sugar and protein. The rest of my time was spent making house calls. You could always count on three, four, five, even a half-dozen house calls after you closed your office. You’d take your medical bag filled with your stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, thermometer, catheter, and syringes, and you’d also carry gauze and sponges, a tourniquet, some type of antibiotic, an emesis basin to catch the vomit, cortisone, female hormones for bleeding, headache tablets, and sleeping pills. Over the course of my career, I did thousands of house calls. I would go to some of the poorest black neighborhoods in the city, like Cavalry Hill, and downtown, near Big Spring Park, and along Adams and Franklin streets and near Councill School. Some of the places I visited were nothing more than shacks, and the first thing you’d notice is that there would be six, seven, maybe 56 / Chapter 3 nine people living in a place with just two bedrooms.The roofs would leak, and many places had outhouses—no indoor plumbing whatsoever, just a single faucet connected to city water out in the front yard. If there was interior plumbing, it was often not working. I remember many times not having a place to wash my hands. I’ve made house calls until well after midnight, I sure have. I remember one night I made nine or ten house calls, some of them in outlying areas like Gurley , fifteen miles east of town, and Harvest, about ten miles north. And it was strange, if you had a house call to go to Harvest, you almost never got one in nearby Toney also. They’d almost always be at opposite ends of the county. You’d get one in Harvest, then you’d get one out in Madison west of town, half an hour’s drive from Harvest. Or you’d get one in Chase out to the northeast, and then you’d get one out on Indian Creek Road to the northwest. That’s the way I spent a lot of that first year, doing house calls. Of course, most of the doctors didn’t like doing them, though there was no danger of being attacked, like today. Nobody was lurking in your automobile. We’d go to the patient’s house, leave our cars unlocked, and go in there and treat the patient. If we were in a housing project or something, almost everyone in town knew the doctor’s car, and sometimes when I’d come out of a house call, there were people standing by my car to ask me to come see Aunt Suzy or to go two blocks down and see Grandmother. So if you went to a community and you parked your car, you would get one or two additional house calls right in that same community. Ninety percent of the time, they’d pay you right then. At the office, they might say they’d pay in two weeks and then...