Texas Surgeon: an Autobiography Page: 82
xii, 180 p. ; 21 cm.View a full description of this book.
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But whether he'd make a living at it remained to be seen. The
other one hadn't.
In the morning's watery sunlight, for rain clouds still hung
in the north, I found that Bonanza proper consisted of twenty
or thirty unpainted frame buildings, most of them scarcely
better than shacks, straggling along either side of a dirt road,
now a sea of mud chewed up by horses' hoofs and wagon tires.
Within a radius of ten miles perhaps one hundred and fifty
families lived, numbering some eight hundred souls all told. My
heart sank a little.
Bonanza was in the blacklands of Central Texas, a region of
rolling terrain and open landscape, except for small stands of
trees here and there, mostly by the creek banks and the swampy
places. In my day most of the people were from Georgia,
Alabama, and other southern states. They had come to seek
their luck on Texas soil in the I870's and I880's, when the rail-
roads were put through. Later, I understand, there was another
wave of migration from the Midwest. But not then. The people
were southerners in speech and folk habit.
It was natural for them to raise cotton for a living, and the
blacklands were the place for it, providing there was a market.
But it was a risky thing, as had been the case ever since the Civil
War. From their tiny cotton plantings most of these poor
migrant folks could not hope to do much better than survive.
I got out my volume of differential diagnosis and my pharma-
copoeia and propped them up on the little table my landlady had
provided. I looked over my instruments-a few lancets, scalpels,
forceps, a bone saw, and the like. I sent off an order to Dallas
for some simple drugs, including chloroform and ether for the
surgery I fondly hoped to perform. Then I waited.
Four days later the first call came. As I had feared was
virtually inevitable, it proved to be a delivery. In Louisville I
had assisted meagerly at several parturitions at City Hospital.
But I could not have said on oath that I had ever myself
82
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Atkinson, Donald Taylor. Texas Surgeon: an Autobiography, book, 1958; New York. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth143566/m1/94/: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting University of Texas Health Science Center Libraries.