Mary Belk: I remember when doctors came to see me

There’s one reason I wouldn’t mind being president. He doesn’t have to sit around in the waiting room of a doctor’s office.

I saw my share of doctors when I was growing up due to a set of sickly tonsils. But in those days I didn’t go to the doctor. He came to me.

Used to be, doctors made house calls. There was no dragging a limp, sweaty body out of bed, struggling into clothes and riding x number of miles to sit in a crowded waiting room. My mother simply picked up the telephone and dialed the doctor.

And I’d go back to sleep in my blue cotton pajamas until I heard old Dr. Thomas clomping rheumatically up the stairs or a much younger Dr. Sims take the steps two at a time. Mama was always close behind wiping her dishwater-wet hands on her apron.

The doctor would sit on the side of the bed and root around in his black bag with sure un-fumbling hands, extracting a stethoscope, thermometer and pine-scented tongue depressor. He’d ask brief questions, poke and prod. Then came an uncomfortable silence. And suddenly with a burst of enthusiasm, he’d ask, “Can you take a pill?” and the examination was over.

The first physicians didn’t have offices. They were horse and buggy doctors, traveling along God-forsaken narrow country roads. I can picture the cabins they visited sitting in the middle of broad and lonely fields solidly matted with brush, through which barefoot children had worn necessary paths. The houses were ramshackle but not disreputable. There were heavily starched mismatched curtains at the windows and a great many vigorous children climbing or running all over the place, lean, brown, and barelegged.

Those early doctors carried a medicine case and an instrument bag. But just as important to the country doctor traveling in a farm wagon or on horseback were a Colt “Peacemaker,” hammer, lantern, shovel and wire cutters.

Operations were practically unknown in those days, but when one was done, it was usually on a kitchen table. And when no anesthetic was available, speed was the mark of a good surgeon.

Later, a doctor set up an office in the front room of his home. In one corner of the consulting room stood the tall medicine cabinet. Patients watched the doctor with keen interest when he went to the expanse of built-in shelves and filled a bottle with tonic or capsules or a quarter’s worth of “them little liver pills.”

And while the doctor made house calls, his wife dealt with endless troubles, listening with gentle polite attention even though the pot roast was burning and her feet hurt.

It’s not that way nowadays. New York psychiatrist Herbert Kuhn recently became a stand-up comedian. One night after a performance, a man approached him and said, “If you’re really a doctor, do something medical.”

“So,” Kuhn said, “I made him wait 45 minutes and handed him a bill.”

Mary Belk lives in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.