Is There a Southern Doctor in the House?

Abstract

Doctoring the South does not go down easily, but a patient reader will benefit immeasurably from this brilliantly conceived and thoroughly researched book. Stephen Stowe has penetrated the scientific and cultural world of southern physicians during the mid-nineteenth century, showing how white doctors made meaning of their lives as they struggled to gain mastery of the sickly bodies of others. The confrontation between patient and physician, between sickness and health, reveals what Stowe calls the country orthodoxy style of southern practitioners. Country orthodoxy inextricably tied a doctor's understanding of what it meant to be a professional to his local community. It was within a specific locale that the day-to-day reality of practicing medicine gave shape and meaning to the art of healing. Stowe's emphasis on country orthodoxy does not result in a detached, scientific examination of doctors at work. Rather, country orthodoxy enables Stowe to bring the reader into the college medical classroom, to hear the words of the instructors, to read the notebooks of the students, and to walk the hospital rounds with medical interns. Country orthodoxy also takes the reader to the backcountry road circuit, where newly minted physicians fought hard to secure clients while seeking membership into their communities as men of learning. And country orthodoxy brings the reader into the sickroom where a doctor earned his reputation by conquering the hidden enemies of disease, communicating to patients who were suspicious of science talk, and compromising with family members who demanded to have a voice in the healing process. Stowe does not limit country orthodoxy to the descriptive; he shows how country orthodoxy created a dilemma in the self-identities of physicians. On the one hand they needed to detach themselves from their own communities if they were to live up to the idea of a scientific professional, but this desire for exclusive status risked social alienation from the very people who determined a doctor's public reputation and private sense of self-worth. The author argues