Those Good Old Time Diseases
Why nobody gets dry bellyache or bucket fever these days
I was a first-grader at Van Nuys Elementary School the first time I came into contact with the medical system and its old-time diseases. As a healthy kid, the only thing that slowed me down was the occasional off-color weenie on “Hot Dog Friday.” None of the hair-netted ladies behind the steam table thought for a minute that I could have something as serious as ptomaine poisoning and wouldn’t have been able to recognize it even if I had. Instead, one of them took off her apron and marched me downstairs to the nurse’s office where she laid me down on an old army cot that smelled of other six-year-old kids.
After feeling my forehead and poking around my mouth with a tongue depressor, she wrote off my symptoms as a 24-hour case of summer complaint — also known as the backdoor trots, Montezuma’s revenge, tourista, or when all else failed, “just being a kid.”
A brief history of diseases
Up until the 1950s, diseases always had colorful names: bilious fever, chin cough, crop sickness, dry bellyache, grocer’s Itch, and bucket fever that sounded far more serious than tendonitis, hay fever, or influenza. According to my parents, half my family suffered from lumbago or consumption, while my great uncle Bert was leveled by apoplexy. Two of my aunts passed away when their grippe progressed to fatal decrepitude. The rest succumbed to dandy fever, English sweating disease, or stupid fever. One was hospitalized for months when her milk leg got the best of her after giving birth to a beautiful mope-eyed girl. We never knew what any of those meant and neither did our doctors, but those were the medical terms they used. It was strangely comforting to know that our loved ones succumbed to something far more serious than “just feeling a little off.”
We hardly see anyone with blackwater fever anymore, although I’m sure it’s still around. Penicillin, antisepsis, and germ theory have eradicated most cases of bad blood, bronze john, and jail fever. But who’s to say? I can’t remember the last time I was quizzed on a medical history form, “Are you now, or have you ever suffered from canine madness, the cooties, dropsy, dog bark, dancing mania, Winterbottom’s sign, softening of the brain, or Egyptian inheritance?”
Certainly, standardizing the names of diseases and their treatment is one of the things that has contained the cost of health care. Once upon a time, a simple case of commotion was the same in Boston as it was in Twin Forks, Nebraska — and it was always treated at home with a week of bed rest followed by liberal doses of Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, containing more than 65 mg of morphine. In fact, most cases of noodlepox, goiter, and Philippine itch were treated with Dr. Bonker’s Celebrated Egyptian Oil, heroin tablets, and Mack Mahon’s Rattle Snake Oil Liniment. Patients struggling with obesity could look forward to a prescription for dehydrated tapeworms or their eggs.
It wasn’t until later that people started running to physicians’ offices for simple cases of schistosomiasis, scorbutic fever, and scrumpox instead of patiently waiting for them to come to their homes. There, family physicians could better treat nasty cases of frog tongue, nerve pang, and scald head with more sophisticated approaches like bloodletting and applying leeches to suck out the bad body humours.
Health insurance changed everything
When health insurance started to be included as a standard job benefit, people immediately began abusing the medical system by running to the emergency room for things as simple as catarrh, shinbone fever, or Scrivener’s palsy. And, instead of treating their patients with proven, inexpensive compounds like cocaine throat lozenges, morphine sulfate, chloroform, codeine, heroin, powdered opium, or cannabis indica, physicians drove up the costs of care by ordering new fangled procedures like x-rays, biopsies, laboratory tests, and magnetic resonance imaging.
To make matters worse, everyone has become a medical expert. Thanks to the internet, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s World, Redbook, and all of the other quality medical references in the check-out aisles of supermarkets, people now have a better understanding of their diseases and how to talk to their doctors.
Gone are the days of simply accepting that their Mexican trench mouth is responding well to the bloodletting. Today, every Tom, Dick, and Harriet insists on learning exactly how they came down with their Japanese flood fever, sinking chills, or sanguineous crust. They want to know why after multiple electrical shock treatments, they’re still hearing voices coming from the television.
Thankfully, we’ve grown into a kinder, gentler society when it comes to treating our medical complaints, even though it’s caused the cost of medical treatments to exceed our reach. We no longer amputate gamey legs and psychiatrists stopped performing lobotomies in 1967. But, pharmaceutical leeches do appear to be making a comeback to help heal wounds and enhance circulation in narrowed veins.
That is, once you’ve met your annual deductible.
