THE SYMBOLS OF MEDICINE

THE DOCTOR'S BAG

the blog about the medicine and surgery of yesteryear

Dr Keith Souter  aka Clay More

It is almost a year since I last wrote a post in The Doctor's Bag. I thought that after Cheryl and Livia  published my book over at Sundown Press that I had said all that I needed to about past practices in medicine and surgery. My recent research activities, however, have convinced me otherwise, so I've packed the bag once again to tell you about other aspects of the medical art. 

The practice of medicine is something that every culture has developed. When people are unwell they inevitably try to do whatever they can to regain their health. It is not that we have an innate knowledge of how to regain our health, but we will seek out individuals who have knowledge of things that will help and we will put our trust in them and in their ability to heal.

            

These two things, knowledge and trust underpin the practice of medicine. Although no single culture can truly claim to have discovered medicine, yet the appearance of a recognised healing art seems to have gone hand in hand with the development of societies. At first in tribal communities the shaman, medicine man or woman would provide a proto-medicine which would be mainly based upon magic and a communication with the deities who were perceived to control the world. Then as civilisations developed and the organised worship of state gods was introduced, so would we see the rise of the priesthoods. It was natural that they would provide a rudimentary practice of medicine and the priest-physician or doctor would appear.

            

Although the origins of these priesthoods are buried back in the mists of antiquity, yet thanks to the development of writing, on stone, clay and papyrus, archaeologists and historians have been able to piece together a substantial body of evidence which shows that even in the earliest of cultures doctors were developing principles and practices that had some validity as medicines. We know also that bone-setting, assisted births and surgical practices such as trephination, the boring of holes in the skull, were practiced in even earlier times.

The symbols of medicine

If you look at the symbols that are used to depict medicine today, you will see that they form a direct link to antiquity. In the west the caduceus is generally thought to be the symbol of the medical and related professions. There is confusion about this, however, since there are in fact two symbols used by different medical organisations, and other health-related organisations have made adaptations of their own to indicate a particular feature of their calling.

                                              

                                                                

The caduceus

The Latin word caduceus refers to the wand of the Greek god Hermes, known to the Romans as Mercury, the messenger of the gods. Caduceus was also an old name for epilepsy. This is interesting, since in ancient days it was considered to be a sacred disease. 

Mercury's wand

The caduceus is represented by a staff with two wings and two snakes coiled round it. In Roman days a white caduceus was used as a symbol of peace. From the sixteenth century it has been used as a symbol of the medical profession and it is now the adopted symbol of the US Army Medical Corps.  It is also used by the Catholic Medical Association and the Royal College of Radiologists. 

US Army Medical Corps

The Catholic Medical Association

The Rod of Asclepius is the other symbol and consists of a forked staff or rod with a single snake entwined about it. Asclepius was the Greek god of healing, whom the Romans adopted and called Aesculapius. The snake seems to have been a symbol of wisdom, fertility, regeneration and healing in Middle and far Eastern countries dating back to at least 2,600 BCE. 

The rod of Aesculapius

The snake associated with Asclepius is a species of rat-snake, Elaphe longissima, which is native to south-east Europe and Asia Minor. It is also found in areas of Germany and Switzerland, where it is thought the Romans introduced it at various health resorts.

The Royal Society of Medicine, The British Medical Association and the American Medical Association use the rod of Aesculapius and a single snake as their logos, as does the World Health Organisation and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. 

The Royal Society of Medicine

American Medical Association

World Health Organisation

The British Society of Medical Acupuncture have modified the rod of Aesculapius to show a needle with a single snake, on the background of the Yin and Yang symbol. 

The British Society of Medical Acupuncture

Talking of the Yin and Yang symbol, medical practice in ancient China, of course developed differently over the centuries, possibly owing to its isolation from the rest of the ancient world. Their medical practice was very much based upon a philosophical model, in which everything in nature was associated with polarity, the two opposites of Yin and Yang. Health was a state of balance between those opposites. The great polarity is the symbol of traditional Chinese medicine.

                                   

            There are many ways of looking at history. With this initial look at the symbols used by the medical, surgical and allied professions we can see that there are links or threads that we can follow across the centuries to the days of antiquity itself, and even to the symbolism of mythology.

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THE DOCTOR'S BAG - MEDICINE AND SURGERY OF YESTERYEAR has been published by Sundown Press, available on ebook or paperback.

THE DOCTOR'S BAG

The Thrill of the Sale by Robert Vaughan

          

The Thrill of the Sale

Robert Vaughan

I sold my first book when I was 19.  At the time I was PFC in the US Army, and an instructor in the helicopter crew-chief’s course at Ft. Rucker, Alabama.  I was hard at work on a Civil War novel.

          The commanding general issued a “request” that all permanently assigned officers should write an article for Aviation Digest, a magazine dealing with army aviation.  The lieutenant I worked for knew I liked to write, so he gave me $25 to write an article for him.  The article was accepted, won best article of the magazine, which was a prize of $25.  To the lieutenant’s credit, he gave me that money as well, then brought other officers to me…and for about three months, I was making more money writing articles for Aviation Digest than I was from my army pay.

          It was at the Aviation Digest that I met William E. Butterworth, now better known as WEB Griffin.  I learned that Butterworth had actually had books published.  I had never before met a published author, and I was thrilled.

          “I’m going to have a book published someday,” I told him.  (How many times in the last 60 years have I heard those words…spoken to me by aspirant writers with the same degree of hope and determination)

          “What are you writing?” Bill asked.

          “A civil war novel.”

          “We need another civil war novel like we need another hole in the head.  Write something like this.”

          Bill tossed me paperback book, Hell on Wheels.  I read it that night, and said, “Heck, I can write something like this.”

          I wrote Girls of Carnation House in about five weeks and took the manuscript to him.

          “Why are you showing it to me?  I can’t publish it for you.”  He suggested that I go to the corner drugstore and find books similar to the one I had just written, get the publisher’s address, and send my story to them.

I did just as he told me, and sent off my completed manuscript…no cover letter, no synopsis, just the manuscript and my address which, at the time was:  PFC Robert Vaughan, RA27520287, HQ and HQ Company, USARV, Fort Rucker, Alabama.

          Notice there was no zip code…there was no such thing as zip codes then.

          Amazingly, I got an acceptance letter back from the very first publisher I sent my manuscript to.

          “Dear PFC Vaughan, we would very much like to publish your story.  Contract to follow.”

          I was walking on air...I HAD SOLD A BOOK!  Hemingway, James Jones, Harold Robbins had nothing on me!

          A sergeant I knew was about to lose his 1958 Impala.  I agreed to take over the payments for the car.  Payments were $92 a month, and I was making $121 a month, but hey….I HAD SOLD A BOOK!  I would probably just pay the car off as soon as I got my contract from Saber Books.

          The contract arrived about two weeks later.

          For all rights Saber Books will pay Robert Vaughan, (hereinafter referred to as author) $100.00 advance against a royalty rate of ½ cent per book.  Author attests that the work is his, and agrees to hold Saber Books blameless for any lawsuit arising with regard to plagiarism, liable, or any other injury.

It had a place for me to sign my name.

          One hundred dollars?  This is a book!  It will be on bookshelves everywhere and I get only one hundred dollars?

          If you are thinking I didn’t sign the contract, you are mistaken.  I signed the contract in a heartbeat!  I WAS GOING TO BE PUBLISHED.

          Oh, and the 1958 red and white Impala?  I got to drive it for three months, then I found someone else to take over the payments.

          When all the royalties for the book were paid out . . . my total compensation, counting the initial one hundred dollars, was $123.54, which was only about 20% of what I had made writing articles for the Aviation Digest.

          And by the way….except for the author’s copies they sent me.  I never saw the book on any rack, anywhere.   They did, however, publish four more books for me, and the amount paid for each book increased with each contract, and, for the last one I did for them, I received six hundred dollars.

          There have been over 400 books since then, including a few six figure contracts…..but nothing has ever quite matched the thrill of that first sale.

WAR HORSES (Part One) By VONN McKEE

“This one isn’t just any old horse. There’s a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be?”

––Michael Morpurgo, War Horse

War is a controversial topic, especially these days, yet world history has been undeniably defined by conflicts between humans. Since the earliest recorded war in Mesopotamia around 2700 B.C., societies have fought for independence, religious or ethnic reasons, and desire for riches, revenge, political power, natural resources, and land.

Nations clash with each other and sometimes clash from within. There are guerilla wars, people’s wars, world wars, cold wars, bloodless wars…even forgotten wars. Arising from these conflicts are stories of heroism, cowardice, betrayal and loyalty unto death. War heroes, especially, seem larger than life and we honor them by commissioning statues and paintings of them, profiling their lives in books, and naming cities, parks and streets after them.

When a military figure is immortalized in paint or stone, he is often shown along with his dearest comrade in arms–his horse. A mounted leader commanded from above the fray of battle–moving about the field and directing his troops, who were no doubt inspired by the sight of their courageous officer on a fearless horse. Obviously, it took a special horse to withstand the rigors and violence of war. Equine casualties were enormous. It is estimated that, for every soldier killed in the Civil War, five horses met the same fate. Here are profiles of a few notable horses who "served" during the War Between the States.

Gen. Forrest and King Philip

Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest claimed to have had twenty-nine horses shot from under him. They had heroic names like King Philip and Highlander. Most well-known was a big chestnut gelding named Roderick. 

“At the March, 1863, Battle of Thompson’s Station, Tennessee, Roderick had been shot three times and removed from the front, but he jumped three fences to return to his master’s side, where he suffered a fourth and fatal wound. As the legend goes, Forrest knelt and wept beside his dying steed.”     ––History.net

A statue of Roderick was erected in Thompson’s Station, near the place where he fell.

Jackson and Little Sorrel

After General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s death by friendly fire in Chancellorsville, Virginia, his beloved horse, Little Sorrel, was captured by Union forces on three different occasions. Eventually, the tough pony, described as homely and dumpy, was returned to the Confederacy and went on to become a hit attraction at festivals, including the New Orleans World’s Fair in 1885. Little Sorrel’s taxidermied remains are on display at the Virginia Military Institute.

Gen. Lee and Traveller

The most famous of all Confederate war horses was General Robert E. Lee’s Traveller, a handsome Saddlebred he bought for $200 and described affectionately as being "Confederate grey." At Lee’s death in 1870, Traveller walked, riderless, in the funeral parade with his master's empty boots backwards in the stirrups. Traveller died just a year later.

Gen. Grant and Cincinnati

On the Union side, General Ulysses S. Grant rode several horses into battle: a dark bay named Egypt, a stockinged chestnut named Old Baldy, and his favorite, Cincinnati, a thoroughbred Grant described as the finest horse he had ever seen. The general was an expert equestrian from the time of his youth. His mother, Hannah Grant, said of him, “Horses seemed to understand Ulysses.”

Egypt

Egypt was quite literally a "gift horse." A group of Grant's admirers in southern Illinois (near the town of Egypt) bought and delivered the powerfully built thoroughbred stallion to the general, who was camped near Chattanooga. Grant promptly named the horse for the Illinois town.

General William Tecumseh Sherman, who wrote the book on “total warfare,” owned Dolly and Sam, among others. Sherman sat astride a leggy bay named Lexington during his deadly “March to the Sea” campaign in 1864. Sherman was another who lost several mounts in battle. Three of his horses were shot during the Battle of Shiloh (Tennessee)–two of them killed as an orderly stood holding their reins. Unlike Grant, General Sherman was not so comfortable in the saddle.

Gen. Sherman and Lexington

     "General Sherman was a nervous and somewhat careless rider. He wore his stirrup-leathers very long, seeming to be almost all the time standing in the irons. This appearance was intensified by his habit of rising in the stirrups on reaching a turn in the road or some advantageous point of observation. While always careful of his animals, Sherman did not appear to have that fondness for them that is so common among good horsemen."
 ––"Generals in the Saddle: Famous Men in Both Armies Who Were Good Horsemen" from The Rider and Driver (1892)

We’ll pay tribute to more famous war horses during my next Western Fictioneers blog (February 26).



All the best,

Vonn 

2015 Western Fictioneers 
Peacemaker Finalist (Short Fiction)

2015 Western Writers of America
Spur Finalist (Short Fiction)

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Gunsmoke: Chronicling Dodge City, from Radio to Television

Troy D. Smith


Boy- how about that John Meston?

Some of you are nodding silently. Many of you, though, have never heard of John Meston. Not many people have, anymore, or know what a big influence he had on popular culture.

Meston started working for CBS radio in the 1940s, initially in the program practices department and soon thereafter as a writer. By the early 1950s, Meston and his friend Norman MacDonnell (a director and producer) set out to create a new kind of radio program: a western, but not one like The Lone Ranger and other popular shows aimed at kids. The two men, both in their late 30s at the time, were charged by their boss Hubell Robinson (CBS programming chief) to do a western series for adults, a serious drama rather than a melodrama.

They discovered a project that had been shelved for three years, meant to be a cross between westerns and hardboiled detective stories starring a tough lawman named Mark Dillon. They kept the "hardboiled" approach, and made a slight change to the hero's name: he would be Matt Dillon, and the program would be called Gunsmoke. It would be a tough, hard-bitten show, reflecting the rigors and vicissitudes of frontier life. Sometimes the innocent would suffer. The hero would be brave, but flawed in some ways and afflicted with occasional self-doubt and a good bit of cynicism (like any good hardboiled detective). The germ may have appeared in earlier scripts that never made it to the airwaves, but everything else was created by Norman MacDonnell and John Meston. This included the supporting characters: Doc Adams, Miss Kitty, and Chester.

Gunsmoke debuted on the radio in 1952, and was a hit. It was praised for its realism; it was one of the most explicit (for the time) programs on radio. McDonnell produced and directed, and Meston was the head writer. He wrote roughly 80% of the scripts in the show's first four seasons, fleshing out the characters (other episodes were written by McDonnell, Les Crutchfield, Kathleen Hite, John Dunkel, and a handful of others... Marian Clark would later also join the team and write many episodes).

What little the audience learned about Matt Dillon came from the mind of John Meston. Matt had been a wild young cowboy who spent several years on the border in Arizona and New Mexico. He could easily have become an outlaw, considering the company he kept -many of his old friends did- but he was inspired by an older lawman, who turned him onto the right path (in those early years it was common for Matt to meet old friends from his border days, and they were always extremely surprised that he had become a lawman.) Another marker of a Meston story: he often found ways to work his home town of Pueblo, Colorado into the dialogue. A surprising number of guest stars were on their way to or from Pueblo.

CBS decided to turn Gunsmoke into a television show, which debuted in 1955 with an all-new cast (and a new last name for Chester, who went from Proudfoot to Goode). The radio show continued simultaneously, and would run until 1961. Meston and most of the other radio writers started producing scripts for the TV show as well, many of them adapted from past radio episodes. This was relatively easy to do, as both the radio and TV versions ran for 30 minutes, Sometimes the radio origin of a TV episode is obvious in the title; the updated versions often changed the names of guest characters who appeared by their original names in the title.

MacDonnell, however, did not get to run the TV series, at least not at first: the netork hired Charles Marquis Warren as producer (and director of most episodes), with MacDonnell subservient to him. Except MacDonnell was NOT subservient to him, and the two feuded vigorously, leading Warren to quit halfway through the second season, at which point MacDonnell took over the reins completely.

The radio program was canceled in 1961, after nine seasons. The TV version underwent major changes at the same time: with season 7 (1961-1962), they expanded to a full hour. This meant the stories were no longer as tight, and in the eyes of many, no longer as dramatic and affecting. More emphasis was put on the guest-star-of-the-week, and gradually some of the show's hard edge wore off. The stories no longer tended to be as dark and somber as they had been in the first several years. Another notable change: Marshal Dillon no longer moped around the graveyard as much. During the half-hour era, many episodes started with a voice-over monologue by the marshal as he wandered through Boot Hill. We learned more about Matt's internal life and thought process in these scenes, probably, than in the rest of the series put together. Turns out Matt was cynical, and even bitter at times. He seemed to hate his job, and the necessity of killing so many people and dealing so much with the ugly side of human nature. He also had a pretty low opinion of the riff-raff with which he was forced to fill up the cemetery. Of course, those monologues added to the hardboiled atmosphere and helped set the dark tone for the stories. If one were to view the series from the inside out, as a progression of stories instead of a TV production subject to external forces, I think it would be safe to assume that the fact Matt quit going to the graveyard and agonizing so much over his part in filling it indicated he had either found internal peace and accepted his role, or that he gradually became more hardened to it.

In all, Meston wrote 183 of the radio episodes (out of 413). He went on to write 196 (of 635) TV episodes. That is 44% of the radio shows (mostly in the first four seasons) and nearly a third of the television episodes... plus 64 more that were adapted by someone else from his original radio stories. The very first episode of the TV show ("Matt Gets It") was a Charles Marquis Warren adaptation of a Meston radio script; the last episode of season ten was the final original teleplay by Meston ("He Who Steals," which centered on Festus). The first half of the show's 20-year run, and the entire Chester era, bore the heavy mark of Meston, who died in 1979. Norman MacDonnell, who also left Gunsmoke in 1965, passed away in 1979 just a few months after Meston.