I took a break from researching, writing, and querying my novel over the past several weeks to undergo very successful spinal surgery. Less than eight weeks later, I am, so to speak, back in the saddle again!
My genius surgeon, Dr. Stephen Swinford, of the Southeast Neurology and Spine Institute, looks like a teenager, and the techniques he used have all been perfected in the last 10 to 20 years, since the development of advanced imaging methods and minimally invasive techniques. That all led me to wonder, what would it have been like if one of the family members in my novel, “When He Was Gone,” had been afflicted with a painful back problem like mine.
By the time the Garraux family lived in Greenville, there were about a dozen physicians in town as well as a few pharmacies, but there was no hospital.
Before the 1900s, pharmacists were often also expected to help sick people manage their illnesses at home. Sometimes the remedies were safe and beneficial, but sometimes they could make patients sicker.
Doctors typically traveled by foot or horseback to patients’ homes, where they treated everything from toothaches to sick livestock to fatal diseases, all with the small number of items that could fit in a handheld case or saddlebags. Popular treatments included bloodletting, baths, enemas, purging and the use of herbal pills and poultices.
Chemical techniques in the 19th century had led to the development of morphine, codeine, and heroin. In the late 1800s, Bayer Pharmaceutical Products marketed heroin as a cough suppressant and a non-addictive morphine substitute.
Surgery remained fairly rare until the mid-1900s, with the most common operations before that time being the amputations of seriously injured limbs.
The Ladies Hospital Board and the Greenville Hospital Association acquired an old sanatorium on property between Memminger, Mallard and Dunbar streets, and finally opened City Hospital in 1912, four years after the main character in my novel, Elizabeth Garraux, had passed away. The facility would later be renamed Greenville General Hospital in 1935.
Laminectomies — the spinal surgery that relieved a painful nerve impingement for me — had only been attempted a few times in history, largely unsuccessfully, until 1828. Dr. Alban G. Smith, a surgeon from Danville, Kentucky, performed a laminectomy on a young Shaker who was paralyzed after a fall from a horse. In a gruesomely described surgery that involved a saw and tooth forceps, Smith successfully removed part of the man’s spine. He wrote later: “I saw him a week afterwards. The ulcers in his gluteal muscles, which were produced from lying on his back were healing up; and he had some additional sensation in his hands. Feeling has now gotten down into his thighs. You never saw a creature so overjoyed in your life.”
Having woken up after my recent laminectomy with a complete absence of pain I had day and night for four months, I can understand the joy of successful back surgery!
And after reading about medicine and surgery in the 1800s, I am very grateful for the great medical care available in Greenville today!