This research concerns the work of doctoring in the mid-nineteenth-century American South and the experience, resources, and mentality of the physicians who gave drugs, set bones, consoled, and in emergency or otherwise laid on hands in an effort to heal. The research describes and interprets the ordinary, country doctor's social world as it shaped his daily routine and his feelings about it. It also places into historical context the moments of doctors' self-discovery in their work, times of tension and satisfaction which reveal much about the significance of medicine in this time and place. The study will, first, shed much-needed light on the work of ordinary doctors in the South, a craft about which we know relatively little. Drawing on sources from all over the region, the study will characterize physicians' training, skills, relations with patients, professional life, and the meaning found in their work. From this basis, the study will interpret the physician's relationship to the values and interests of the larger society. Here the doctor is seen as a unique social witness to the significant patterns of southern social relations, 1800-1880. Race, gender, and social class all helped to structure sickness, caring, and the burdens of each. The study will describe how doctoring shaped and was shaped by these larger realities. Finally, there will be much attention to physicians' intellectual and emotional experience, interpreting how their work and their relation to society led them to see certain relationships of intimacy and power, and to neglect others. Throughout this study, there will be a focus on the writings of medical doctors, and an analysis of the forms and voices of physicians as they are heard in diaries, letters, clinical writings, published work, and memoirs. The diverse forms of written expression were both a professional tool and a personal release for doctors, and they need to be appreciated as such by students of their history. The genres of medical writing are an untapped source of both the shared mentality of medical practitioners and the social relations in which they did their work.
