and you got sick, you had three health care options.

One, find a doctor, and hope their strange potions

numbed your pain.

Two, figure out how to cure your own ailment.

Or three, die.

Of course, if you were able to find a doctor,

you'd probably die anyway, because they sort of just

winged it as they went along.

Today, we're going to discover what

it was like going to a doctor in the Wild West.

But before we cut into this here story,

we reckon you subscribe to the Weird History Channel

and holler at us about a Old West thingamajingins you'd

like to hear about.

Now, take a swig of whiskey, and bite down on this here rag.

We're going to go see a doctor in the Old West.

Now, you have to remember the state of medicine

in the Old West.

It wasn't so much of a science yet

as it was a way to make money.

Sure, you had a lot of doctors in it for altruistic reasons,

but for the most part, medicine was a cutthroat business.

When a new physician established an office in a smaller

town that already had a doctor, things

could get ugly fast, as they'd usually become territorial.

Two doctors in one town meant they'd have to split profits.

One of the more infamous incidents of dueling doctors

took place when a Dr. Edward Willis

moved to Placerville, California, which

was then called Hangtown.

Upon his arrival, Dr. Willis pitched

a tent that would serve as his home and medical office.

He then hung a sign above his door

announcing his services as doctor and surgeon.

None of this was cool with Doc Hullings, the first doctor

to open a medical practice in the burgeoning mining camp.

Hullings immediately walked over to the new doctor's tent

and ordered him out of town.

Dr. Willis calmly told Hullings he wasn't going anywhere then

turned his back on him, and then ordered him out of his tent.

Incensed, Hullings stormed out and came up

with a plan, which wasn't so much of a plan

as it was just him showing up several days later

with a backup of several well-armed Hangtown gold

miners.

Hullings demanded Willis produce a diploma, which he promptly

did.

Hullings tore it in half and tossed it to the ground.

Mr. Paul Clam, a friend of Dr. Willis,

was there and witnessed the exchange,

and then punch Doc Hullings.

Hullings escalated the fight, challenging Clam and Willis

to a duel with pistols.

This duel was held in an abandoned mining pit.

After the Sheriff yelled "Fire," both men shot,

and both men went down.

Clam was badly wounded from three body shots.

Doc Hullings was slightly more wounded.

He was dead

According to miners' law, any man

who abandoned his claim also gave up all rights to his land.

Since Doc Hullings was dead, He had technically

abandoned his claim, and Dr. Willis instantly

became the town's sole physician.

His first job was to save Mr. Clam's life,

and his first official act was to sign Doc Hullings's death

certificate.

Doctor was an extremely vague title people gave themselves

in the Wild West.

While some had formal training, one

didn't need a fancy degree or any real formal hands-on

experience.

All you needed was a bag full of unsterilized surgical tools

and the ability to convince people

you knew what you were doing.

And because there was a shortage of medical professionals

on the frontier, becoming a doctor

was as simple as calling yourself a doctor.

For example, in 1827, a janitor performed the first cesarean

section in the West.

John Richmond worked as a janitor at a medical school,

and while he was there, he'd listen in on lectures

and take mental notes.

Eventually, he quit his janitorial gig,

then called himself a doctor and performed a c-section

without ever observing one or cutting into a human body,

for that matter.

Richmond wrote, "Finding that whatever was done

must be done soon and feeling a deep and solemn sense

of my responsibility, with only a case of common pocket

instruments, about 1 o'clock at night,

I commenced the cesarean section.

The patient never complained of pain

during the whole course of the cure."

That said, Dr. Richmond might have exaggerated a bit,

as the accounts of the c-section has been debated.

While the woman survived the shady procedure,

the child did not.

And in her 2018 book Cesarean Section, An American History

of Risk, Technology and Consequence,

Jacqueline H. Wolf wrote.

"The mother begged him to stop.

She couldn't endure the pain."

As barbaric as Richmond's attempted c-section was,

it's the first published account of an attempted

to cesarean performed in the United States.

For every John Richmond, there were formally

trained doctors who had an idea of what they were doing.

But even these medical professionals

relied on dangerous and highly-experimental treatments.

Dr. Daniel Drake, a founder of Ohio's first medical college,

strongly advised bleeding for patients whose

pulse is nearly imperceptible.

If the doctor's lancet couldn't induce blood flow from a vein,

Dr. Drake recommended cutting the jugular vein in the neck.

Yes, the majority of patients who

underwent blood letting through their jugular

had a prognosis you'd probably predict.

They perished.

Blister treatments were another one

of the more confusing treatments these doctors regularly

performed.

This questionable practice called for a doctor

to cover a portion of the skin with crushed chili

peppers to produce hyperemia.

The chili paste would produce a very powerful

counter-irritation so that the pain of the blisters

would override the painful condition being treated,

sort of like hitting your head with a hammer

if you had a stomach ache.

Purgation was another go-to treatment

these Old West doctors liked to suggest to their patients.

If a doctor suggested you purge, you

would be ordered to swallow calomel, a mercury-based drug

that made you evacuate your bowels

with the velocity of a broken frozen yogurt machine.

The hope here was that the purging would get rid

of the black bile in one's stomach,

but it rarely healed anyone.

As medieval as medicines seemed in the Old West,

it's no surprise that common folk

were alarmed by some of the practices

these new doctors sprung on them.

When doctors sliced open human bodies

or performed unorthodox surgeries

to save patients' lives, it really freaked people out.

One frontier doctor reported that he

opened the throat of a child choking with diphtheria

and kept the windpipe open with fish hooks.

Now, imagine it's 1875, and you see this.

You'd probably flip out, too.

It's no surprise that some people

believed doctors were performing satanic rituals.

In another case the famed surgeon Dr. Ephraim McDowell

performed a messy operation on a 45-year-old Kentucky

woman named Jane Crawford.

McDowell was summoned to the Crawford farmhouse

to assist in what was thought to be a long overdue childbirth.

McDowell soon found that Crawford wasn't pregnant.

She was suffering from a massive ovarian tumor.

Dr. McDowell then suggested the removal

of the tumor, a surgery that had never been attempted before.

Eventually, Dr. McDowell was able to extract Crawford's ,

tumor all 22 pounds of it.

That said, he had a difficult time

with some of the townsmen, who thought he was

doing the work of the devil.

Superstition and taboos contributed to the talk

that McDowell was doing something otherworldly

in his office.

His patient survived a 25-minute procedure without anesthetics,

but accusations of satanic practices

followed most surgeons of the era, even when they

saved the odd life.

While the majority of the frontier's doctors were men,

the Old West provided lots of opportunities for women.

Yeah, there was some basis of facts

from Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

In 1874, Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair

studied at the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania

and in 1874 earned her MD from the University

of Michigan's medical school.

She moved to Oregon, where she practiced medicine

in Portland and Astoria.

As Dr. Owens-Adair described, practicing medicine in the west

was a major challenge.

"I carried out my professional work as best I could in that

out-of-the-way place.

And at no time did I ever refuse a call, day

or night, rain or shine.

Through trails so overhang with dense undergrowth

and obstructed with logs and that a horse and rider could

not get past, and through muddy and flooded tide lands

in gum boots."

Interesting fact about Dr. Owens-Adair,

she was a big proponent of the eugenics movement.

In 1909, she supported a bill to sterilize

criminals, epileptics, the insane, and the feeble-minded.

The bill actually passed the Oregon legislature,

but the governor at the time refused

to sign it into law, although the bill became law

eight years later.

A similar bill became law in nearby Washington State

in 1909, largely due to the doctor's efforts.

While many untrained frontier doctors got into medicine

to turn a quick profit, they really

didn't make a whole lot of money.

Not in the small towns, anyway.

Doctors of the era usually charged $0.25 for a visit,

while extended visits, including overnight care,

might cost up to a dollar.

However, many patients couldn't afford

to pay doctors in legal tender.

Instead, these cash-poor patients

paid for their medical care in goods or services,

usually in the form of a bundle of wood,

produce, a side of beef, eggs, blankets,

or other items of value laying around.

Some doctors even offered a discount

on medical services on house calls

if their patients fed their horses.

Frontier doctors didn't just treat patients, a lot of them

also had side hustles as drugists.

Yep, even these physicians weren't formally schooled,

they often made and sold their own medicines.

While some settlers living on the open range

in the middle of nowhere usually had to grit their teeth

and suffer through their malady with whiskey,

settlers in developed towns were able to visit

their local apothecary, the drugstore of their day.

The drugists at these apothecaries

diagnosed problems, gave advice, and sold

their homemade remedies.

Remember, most drug laws in the US

never came into effect until after 1900,

so these drugists were free to sell whatever they think

might cure their patients.

Medicines made by frontier drugists

were usually based around raw herbs, leaves, and roots.

If you study the ingredients of these early serums,

you'll note that many of them have

foundations and remedies concocted by Native American

Indians.

Of course, many frontier doctors looked down

on Native Americans.

Naturally, they rejected anything associated with them,

even though their natural plant-based serums were

derivative of what the Native American Indians had been

practicing for generations.

While advanced medicine was making great leaps and bounds

in other developed parts of the world doctors, in the Wild West

just didn't know what the hell they were doing.