Twelve-year-old Uriah Smith’s left leg became seriously infected and his doctor determined it should be amputated.

The boy was stretched out on the kitchen table of his home.

With no anaesthetic except holding his mother’s hand, the boy endured the doctor’s cutting through the flesh, sawing through the bones and closing the wound with stitches.

The year was 1844 A.D.

Uriah’s wounds healed and he lived another 59 years.

In the year 1800, the average life expectancy at birth was 32 years.

By 1850 that life expectancy had increased to 41 years.

By 1900 it had increased to 50 years.

Currently, life expectancy for women is about 80 years and slightly less for men.

The presently increased life expectancy is the result of better health habits, sanitation and health care. The “good old days” were markedly fewer in number.

On page 162 of his book Lest We Forget, George E. Knight notes, “Bathing habits, for example, also were unsatisfactory. Most people seldom took a bath, and some authorities claim that average Americans of the 1830s never took a bath during their entire life. Even as late as 1855 New York City had only 1,361 bathtubs for its 629,904 residents. And in 1882 only an estimated 2 percent of the homes in New York had water connections.”

New York City had thousands of free-running unchaperoned hogs running the streets.

There was no public disposal of garbage and most of it ended up in the streets as hog food.

Horses deposited an estimated 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine onto the streets daily.

The streets were mostly unpaved ooze in wet weather and the source of pungent dust in dry.
For most, use of the out-house was de rigueur.

Contamination of the water supply was very common.

Robert Koch, who is credited by some as being the “father of modern microbiology,” did not graduate from university until 1866.

His isolation of several disease-causing bacteria did not occur until the late 1870s and early 1880s.

Death-dealing epidemics were not uncommon.

In 1878 an epidemic of yellow fever in Memphis, Tenn., killed 5,150 out of a population of 38,500. In 1853 New Orleans lost 7,848 to the same disease.

A trip to the hospital was essentially a death sentence. Sanitation was unknown.

A medical degree could be earned at one of America’s diploma mills in four to eight months even if the person had not been through high school.

One who earned such a degree quipped of his experience that the physician in charge “is a villain, the Hygieo-Therapeutic Clinic is a humbug and the Old Doctor Mill ought to be tipped into the Delaware” River.

Against this background of ignorance and malfeasance, John Harvey Kellogg founded in Battle Creek a medical practice and sanitarium established on more enlightened principles.

But that story will have to wait for another day.

Bill Bradford retired to the rigors of a small farm in Pokagon Township.
He has served as director of clinical laboratories in physician group practices and hospitals.