Paul Minor

Delving Into Yester~Year

Local historian and writer Paul Miner takes items from The Republican’s Yester-Year column to develop an interesting, informative and often humorous article.

To the Editor: Before The Republican, or even the Danville Advertiser, which launched in 1846, other out-of-town newspapers carried news from and about Danville.

I learned the name of the county seat’s first physician from Parke County’s Wabash Herald; it reported Dr. Caleb Garrett, an “eminent and highly respectable physician” had died at his Danville residence on Aug. 21, 1831.

The 1914 county history had no information about the man other than his last name and that he was Danville’s first doctor. The good doctor surely deserved more than that. The son of Quaker farmer Welcome Garrett, a large powerfully built fellow with gray eyes, Caleb was one of 13 siblings, with four step-siblings. Born on March 20, 1778, Caleb lived but 53 years, cause of death unknown. An older brother, John, was accidentally killed, age 14, by a falling door during a storm.

Welcome moved to Indiana in 1834 when he was 76, first to Wayne County, then Hamilton County near Westfield the following year.

Caleb was born in Surry County, North Carolina. He owned land there. He ran into trouble with his fellow Quakers, however. Records of Aug. 2, 1813, show “he was complained of for not attending meetings and for deviation from plainness.”

A little over a month later, a committee visiting him reported, he was “not appearing disposed to make satisfaction.” The Quakers disowned him. Caleb then identified with the Christian (Campbellite) church until the end of his days. He was a farmer, physician and gospel preacher. I’ve not learned where he picked up his medical skills.

He moved to Washington County, Indiana, in 1816. On Sept. 5, 1825, he exhorted his younger sister, Beulah, and brother-in-law, John Starbuck, to embrace his unyielding faith, as “this and nothing but this, will give you courage to face a frowning, gain-saying, surmising, evil speaking, backbiting, scoffing, sneering, blaspheming multitude.”

This zealous faith would enable them to resist “the allurements – the temptations, to run with a multitude to do evil.” They would pick up the required fortitude, too. There would be adversity, and “the devil and his agents” to deal with. As of his letter writing, Caleb had seen his brother, Isom, the first time in 11 years.

Isom lived 135 miles away along the Wabash River.

Caleb practiced medicine there until 1829, when he moved to Danville. He died two years later, but I’ve not learned where he is buried. He was twice married. After his first wife died in 1820, he married a much younger woman, but she died of consumption, age about 28, a day after his demise. He fathered 13 children.

I’ve no idea how many people calling Danville home in 1831 needed a doctor. The earliest Census data, from 1850, puts the number at 386. Clearly, though, if Dr. Garrett couldn’t heal, he was bound and determined to save souls.

The state of medicine at the time is largely unknown to me. Tales from 30 years later during the Civil War, of disease and infection, gangrene, brutal amputations without anesthetic and adequate sanitation provide a general idea.

The 1829 illness and painful death of a 32-year-old Lawrenceburg magistrate offers some insight of the time: “His disease was lingering, violent and obstinate, baffling the power of medicine and skill of the most eminent physicians.”

In 1800, U.S. child mortality rate was 463 deaths per thousand births, or more than 46 percent never made it past their fifth birthday.

A respected doctor of the era who had studied extensively in Europe complained of “a want of truth in all our systems of the medical science.”

I learned the names of 13 other early county doctors. County history calls them all allopathic, meaning they believed in science, but I’ll not delve into their histories unless I discover one or more were blood-letters like Theodoric of York, the barber-surgeon.

Paul Miner Lizton