Illustration of the spine from "The Cottage Physician."
In 1900, the United States had a fair number of physicians — licensed and otherwise — operating within the various states. Still, people living in rural areas or the urban poor could not expect to be able to take their ailment or injury to a practising physician, whether due to location, cost, or some other barrier.
To try and fill this gap in some fashion, Doctors Thomas Faulkner, president of the Royal Medical Council in London, England, and J.H. Carmichael of the American Institute of Homeopathy put together The Cottage Physician: Best Known Methods of Treatment in all Diseases, Accidents and Emergencies of the Home, with a modest subtitle: prepared by the Ablest Physicians in the Leading Schools of Medicine: Allopathy & Homeopathy, etc., etc.
Allopathy and homeopathy, along with other forms of alternative medicine, had been struggling with each other for at least a hundred years by the time this book was published in 1892. Allopathic physicians often saw the eradication of alternative medical traditions as something of a public service: homeopaths, for example, were not licensed through the same methods as allopaths and could not be controlled by the same state or local boards and systems. Alternative medical practitioners were tarred as quacks or outright liars, trying to mislead the public to their own enrichment and the detriment of those who chose to believe their promises. Non-allopathic practitioners, on the other hand, argued that allopaths could be unnecessarily interventionist, and depended too much on chemical or surgical treatments where a milder treatment might be just as effective, but less spectacular. The two clashed badly over such issues as vaccination and, during the several bouts of smallpox which struck across the United States at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, each side used current events as a soapbox from which to abuse its opponents.
The publication of this volume, however, is a joint venture, promising a dual look at whatever ailments or wounds might need treatment. Faulkner and Carmichael start their text with a lengthy and detailed chapter on anatomy, cast in layman’s terms and illustrated throughout with color and black-and-white drawings and diagrams to point out the various features of the human body and internal processes, such as digestion. The doctors then move on to describing causes and ways to get and retain good health and then to the meat of their text: diseases and how to cure them.
Each condition receives description and treatment; in some cases, such as barrenness in women, causes are discussed, too. For most ailments, the treatment is given without comment — for some, there is an additional “herbal” treatment, but without much comment as to the potential for success or failure of either. Some groups — including women and children — get special chapters of their own, with “extra” diseases listed and discussed. Bone breakages and dislocations, sprains, and other injuries that might require bandaging are strapping are discussed and illustrated. And, towards the back of the volume, Dr. Carmichael and the homeopathists get a special section to list treatments for the diseases that have already been listed earlier in the book.
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