When duty house calls

Abstract

A neurologist conducts her first "house call" during the Covid-19 pandemic: the quaint nostalgia of a bygone era and seeming anachronism meet the conveniences of modernity and uncover the timeless qualities of medicine.The phrase "house call" conjures up nostalgia for an era most of us have never experienced, painted with cheerful and tender Norman Rockwell-style strokes. The avuncular physician, likely a man, clad in a crisp suit, with a capacious leather satchel filled with tinctures of now-illegal substances clinking in glass bottles. The cherubic child clad in a white nightgown, tucked under a patchwork quilt, curls against the pillow, clutching a beloved doll. The worried parent, likely a woman, hovering over the bedside with a cool compress against the fevered forehead.While I have only sepia photos and phonograph recordings to inform me of such a time, my patient Mary actually lived through it. She was born in the thick of such a period, in the 1930's, an era when 40% of physician encounters were house calls. When I had established care for dementia in her 80's, she still had a razor wit, mischievous grin, and twinkling blue eyes. I could tell she had been a kind, but firm, schoolteacher, likely not one to have put up with tomfoolery.