Physicians are esteemed professionals and arguably the most respected profession in America. Doctors earn more, on average, than any other profession and enjoy more respect in popular culture. Becoming a doctor is a difficult journey. Few people have the stamina, brainpower and resolve to become physicians. To become a doctor, one must get high marks throughout grade school and high school. Successful candidates must attend a university with a GPA of 3.7 or higher and score well on the MCAT entrance exam. Even that is not enough. One must also illustrate some type of community service, such as volunteering at a hospital or soup kitchen. Increasingly, successful applicants must mirror the progressive, public health viewpoints of their liberal professors. Critics claim that candidates should scrub their social media accounts of anything damaging or signaling right-of-center thinking.
It was not always that way. In the early 1800s just about anyone could claim to be a doctor regardless of medical training. Texas Co-op Power wrote about three doctors on the Texas frontier in the days before it became a state, saying:
Becoming a doctor was a lot simpler in frontier times, when you didn’t have to go to school for a long time or even know much about medicine. You could just call yourself a doctor. And if your first consideration was to cause no harm and you were blessed with at least a modicum of common sense, other people would call you a doctor too.
Dr. John Weber was an early Texas settler and took on a tobacco smuggling operating inside Mexico. He used the cover of being a doctor to avoid scrutiny for his wagon load of contraband tobacco he and his colleagues were smuggling. The following is from Texas Co-op Power:
In one town Webber advertised his services as a physician. Smithwick was fairly fluent in Spanish, so he accompanied the “doctor” as he tended to patients. “With an air of importance that would have done credit to a professional, Webber noted the symptoms, shaking his head, knitting his brows, and otherwise impressing the patient with the seriousness of his condition,” Smithwick later wrote.
“The doctor’s fame went abroad, and he soon had a large practice, same as imposters of the present day,” Smithwick wrote.
Before becoming a dairyman, Gail Bordon Jr. also offered his services as a physician in San Felipe before moving on to Burnet County. Borden is best known for inventing the process of making condensed milk. Borden reportedly once said:
It is no use to be a doctor unless you put on the airs of one,” he said. “Nine times out of 10 sickness is caused by overeating, or eating unwholesome food, but a patient gets angry if you tell him so; you must humor him.”
Another early Texas physician was Johnson Calhoun Hunter. Dr. Hunter had actual medical training, or at least he had a diploma in medicine that he got at age 18, around 1805. He went on to do a lot of things around what is now Harris County (i.e., the Houston area). He fathered 11 children but also:
Hunter “could deliver a baby, ride a plow, go hungry, trade with the Indians, run a traverse, pilot a scow, adjudicate a case … cut a bull, teach a school … and deliver mail.”
Writer, Clay Coppedge, concludes by saying, “They don’t make general practitioners like that anymore.”
The era when these physicians practiced was hardly a generation past when former President George Washington was likely bled to death to remove bad humors from his blood. The humoral theory of medicine was the defining principle of Western medicine from antiquity until the early 19th Century. By the early part of the 19th Century allopathic medicine was just beginning and it was slow to make its way to the frontier. Few medical schools were equipped to teach scientific medical theory for many years. It would be another 100 years before the Flexner Report began closing substandard medical schools, a move that is still controversial to this day due to its effect on access to care, especially in communities of color. Medical science was primitive up until the early 20th Century.
Read more at Texas Co-op Power: Doctoring Reality