Lyman's History of old Walla Walla County, Vol. 1 / Embracing Walla Walla, Columbia, Garfield and Asotin counties

by William Denison Lyman

Many times when I was called to a country home to see a patient, to dress a wound or reduce and dress a fracture, I frequently went out to a hole in the ground dignified by the name of well, to wash the dust from my face and hands. We got along almost "any old way" those days, and did not seem to mind so very much the inconveniences either.

In those days we did not have telephone lines running everywhere over the country and to nearly every home, as now. When a member of a pioneer family suddenly became sick, or when someone had been "bucked" from a horse and got a leg or arm broken, or the baby had a collection of wind crosswise in its stomach and was howling "loud enough to raise the rafters," then there was a sudden demand for someone to go, from three to twenty-five miles, for the doctor. They could not step to a phone and call him up and ask advice, or request him to start at once. The program was to rout out the hired man or one of the boys, or send to a neighbor, and have him saddle a horse and start to town for the physician.

It is remarkable how much worse green plums and cucumbers affect the internal apparatus of a "kid" in bad weather, and what a predilection colic has for attacking the "in'ards" of a baby on dark, stormy nights. It always seemed to me that the children of the early settlers passed by the "moonshiny" nights and selected the very worst possible weather for their birthdays. This seems to be one of the inscrutable arrangements of providence, and bears indisputable testimony to the early age at which human perversity begins.

In those days the time required to get word to the doctor and secure his attendance was so great that the patient sometimes died or recovered before the physician could possibly reach him. During all this time the patient and friends were kept in an agony of uncertainty and suspense.

In retrospection, some of my long, hard night drives through darkness, freezing cold, snowdrifts, rain, slush or mud, are still like memories of a horrible nightmare.

There have been several epidemics that swept over the country since the beginning of its settlement. The first was smallpox. It is a remarkable fact that many physicians diagnosed the disease as chickenpox, until it began to slay many of its victims. There was at that time quite a controversy among the physicians and a part of the people in regard to the nature of the disease.

In the spring of 1888, epidemic cerebro-spinal meningitis appeared in Garfield County and the surrounding country. It came suddenly and the symptoms were so violent, and the results in many cases were so rapidly fatal that it created consternation among the people. The physicians over the country generally had not previously met the disease nor had any experience with it, and were puzzled both as to diagnosis and treatment. The writer had, during the epidemic, an experience that was enough for a lifetime. The disease prevailed more or less for about two years. In Garfield County there were a large number of cases on the upper and lower Deadman Creek, Meadow Gulch, Mayview, Ping, along the Snake River and in Pomeroy and Pataha. It is probable that Garfield County, in proportion to its population, had more cases than any county in the state.

The attacks of the malady were of all shades of severity and the symptoms of the greatest diversity. It attacked, for the most part, young persons from the age of three to twenty years, but there were numerous cases older and younger. In some instances the person was taken instantly, while apparently in ordinary health, with agonizing pains in the head and spine, with or without vomiting, and in a few minutes he became wildly delirious, with convulsions, muscular contractions, rigidity of the neck, head drawn far back, and was soon unconscious; and in some cases, died within a few hours. In other cases, the patient lingered on for many weeks or even months, halting between life and death, with excruciating agony, only at last to die, worn out and reduced to a skeleton. Others slowly emerged from their desperate condition to regain complete health, while others were left partially paralyzed, with distorted and shrivelled limbs or impaired mental powers.

I witnessed many harrowing scenes among my meningitis cases, and when the epidemic was past, I fervently thanked God and wished I might never again have to pass through a similar experience.

Following up the meningitis scourge, there came along soon afterwards a notable epidemic of influenza or la grippe. The symptoms it produced were very characteristic of and came near to answering the description of epidemic "Russian influenza," graphically pictured in old medical works. Whole communities were prostrated in a few hours. It seemed to spread through the medium of the atmosphere, and was also very contagious, passing from person to person. Many were stricken and overpowered almost or quite as suddenly as the meningitis cases, while some exhibited meningeal tendencies that made the diagnosis doubtful at first.