Doctor’s Journal Offers a Glimpse Into the Past

NEWARK, N.J. — Tattered and water-damaged, a New Jersey country doctor’s daily journal from the 1820s provides a fascinating, sometimes gruesome, glimpse of medicine long before anesthesia, antibiotics and formal medical training.

The daybook Dr. Seymour Halsey kept from 1824 through 1827, when he practiced in Sparta, Sussex County, was recently discovered in a basement and donated to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey Libraries.

“He did a lot of bleeding,” said Barbara S. Irwin, managing librarian of the libraries’ special collections, referring to a procedure then believed to relieve many ills by removing toxins from the body.

Bleeding, often done by pressing a heated glass cup against the skin until the cup filled with blood, cost 23 cents, according to Halsey’s records. His bill rose to 63 cents for the procedure if he made a house call--which Halsey did for most cases.

Unfortunately, Irwin said, “They [the doctors] didn’t wear rubber gloves. People became infected and died.”

Other mainstays of Halsey’s practice included giving emetics to induce vomiting, cathartics to trigger bowel movements and dispensing other popular medicines of the day, from snake root and castor oil to quinine, expectorants and various salts. Halsey also gave many patients laudanum, a solution of opium in alcohol, to treat nervous disorders.

Because dentistry was not yet a specialty, he also did minor dental surgery, including extracting teeth, again for just 23 cents.

The prices listed next to each patient’s name and case description are just as remarkable as the treatments when compared to today’s prices. Tooth extraction, for example, now costs an average of $80, according to the American Dental Assn.

Delivering a baby--described in the journal partially in Latin by the words “abstract foetus ex utero”--cost $3, and Halsey billed the charge to the husband, with the notation “for wife.” Today, a noncomplicated vaginal delivery costs $2,064 and a caesarean section costs $3,483 on average in New Jersey, according to the New Jersey Hospital Assn.

Halsey charged patients 50 cents for follow-up house calls; today, house calls are pretty much priceless.

Born in 1802 in Monroe, Morris County, Halsey studied medicine as an apprentice in Morristown before opening his own practice in Sparta in 1824 at age 22. Five years later he moved to New York, where he “attended a course of lectures at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, graduating in 1830,” according to a local history.

After working briefly in a New York hospital, he took up practice in Newark for a few years before friends persuaded him to move to Vicksburg, Miss. He served as a surgeon in the Mexican War, suffered a foot wound during his two-year service, married a widow in Vicksburg and died there in 1852 at age 49, according to other documents in the libraries’ New Jersey Medical History Collection.

Halsey’s daybook joins thousands of other historical medical documents and items in the collection in Newark, from a 1725 edition of Andreas Vesalius’ “The Fabrica,” which is credited with turning anatomy into a science, to two boxes of 19th century homeopathic remedies and texts about New Jersey notables such as Rutgers microbiologist Selman Waxman, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the cure for tuberculosis.

“What we’re trying to do is document the history of medicine in New Jersey,” Irwin said recently. “Things that happened in New Jersey have impacted the nation.”

Among the firsts credited to New Jersey physicians and researchers are the development of rehabilitative medicine and of the Apgar scale, invented by Dr. Virginia Apgar, to rate a newborn’s health.

More recently, Dr. James Oleske of New Jersey Medical School was among the first to identify pediatric AIDS, and colleague Patricia C. Kloser there established the first women’s AIDS clinic at University Hospital in Newark.

Although Halsey’s daybook contains nothing so dramatic, it gives an interesting picture of the average physician nearly two centuries ago. He or someone else apparently considered the journal unimportant, pasting poems and other writings on top of the book’s first pages.

Irwin said those are being peeled off, and that a paper conservator will remove mold from the journal before it is placed in an acid-free binder for display.

For more information on the libraries’ collection, visit its World Wide Web site at www.umdnj.edu and look under special collections.