N.C.’s Country Doctor Museum: Preserving the Legacy of Rural Health Care

Written by Jaymie Baxley, North Carolina Health News.

Bloodsucking leeches, coffin-shaped tablets and a mechanical “lung” are among the more than 5,000 items on display at The Country Doctor Museum in Nash County.

The museum’s collection, spread across two renovated doctors’ offices from the 19th century and a building that once held horse-drawn carriages, is filled with quirky artifacts and crude instruments from the early days of modern medicine. It was founded in 1967 by Gloria Flippin Graham and Josephine Newell, local physicians who came from families of doctors.

“They created this museum to preserve that history that they grew up with of doctors making house calls, which by then was a thing of the past,” said Jan Gwaltney, the museum’s site manager and one of its regular tour guides. “They saw how medicine was changing, and their goal was to preserve that time.”

The museum was donated to East Carolina University in 2003. Although now part of the school’s Lapus Health Sciences Library in Greenville, it continues to operate at its original site in Bailey—a town with fewer than 600 residents that’s about 50 miles southwest of the university’s campus.

On its website, the facility touts itself as the “oldest museum in the United States dedicated to the history of America’s rural health care.” Here’s a sampling of what’s inside.

Iron lung

One of the museum’s largest items is an iron lung that was used during polio outbreaks in the 1950s. The machine simulated natural breathing in patients, who were encased from the neck down in a cylindrical tank while electric motors and bellows alternated positive and negative pressure to their chest.

“It was really the only breathing apparatus available before ventilators were invented,” Gwaltney said. “Before the iron lung, if you had trouble breathing there was no way to make you better at breathing.”

Many patients spent most of their lives in the metal cylinders that hummed as bellows ran around the clock, while some post-polio patients slept in them at night to help their breathing.

Martha Mason, a Cleveland County resident who used an iron lung for more than 60 years after contracting polio as a child, appeared in an Oscar-nominated documentary about the disease and wrote a memoir with assistance from a voice-activated computer before her death in 2009.

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The museum’s iron lung came from Charlotte. Its hatch is decorated with vintage postcards and photographs, giving visitors a sense of how patients passed the time while confined to the machine.

Nurse’s grades

College-based nursing schools are a relatively new concept. Before the early 1970s, most American nurses entered the profession through diploma programs at local hospitals.

“Nurses, if they were in one of those programs, couldn’t be married, they would have to live in a dormitory next to the hospital and they would be required to work but as an apprentice, pretty much on-duty, while doing their studies,” Gwaltney said, adding that hospitals “often didn’t hire” women after they graduated. “A lot of times they would go into private duty nursing for families that could afford to hire their own nurse.”

A 1932 “report card” in the museum’s collection underscores how demanding the diploma programs could be. In addition to their professional performance, aspiring nurses were graded on “cheerfulness,” “sense of humor” and other personal traits.

Completing the three-year program was in many ways more difficult than obtaining a medical degree. In the late 1800s, medical students only had to sit through a couple of years’ worth of lectures to graduate.

“Medical school was two years of lectures that you’d purchase tickets for,” Gwaltney said. “You showed the tickets proving you attended the lectures, and you got a medical degree.”

The lecture ticket system was gradually phased out as medical education became more structured and standardized in the early 20th century. Today, nearly all medical schools in the U.S. require applicants to have completed an undergraduate degree.

Bone splint

Modern splints are molded from synthetic materials such as fiberglass and plaster, which wasn’t widely available until the mid-19th century. Before then, physicians sometimes used the bones of animals to support broken bones as they mended.

Early European settlers in the U.S. crafted handmade splints from the skeletal remains of livestock and wild animals, a practice they adopted from Native Americans. Doctors in rural areas, where materials were often difficult to come by, continued to make orthoses out of animal bones into the early 20th century.

The arm splint on display at the museum was most likely created around that time. Gwaltney doesn’t know what animal the bone came from, but she suspects it might have been a cow based on the splint’s length.

Coffin pills

Among the museum’s more macabre artifacts is a glass box containing tablets shaped like burial caskets. Their ominous design was meant to prevent accidental overdose, according to Gwaltney.

“A lot of medicines would use a little toxic something to purge the system, with the idea being to make the patient throw up or have diarrhea,” she said. “But a lot of people didn’t read back then, so pharmacists had to come up with other ways of getting the message across that the medicines were dangerous.”

Coffin-shaped tablets of mercury bichloride, a highly poisonous compound used to treat diseases such as syphilis before the advent of antibiotics, could be purchased without a prescription in most U.S. pharmacies until the mid-20th century.

Leech jar

Squeamish visitors may want to skip the museum’s exhibit on bloodletting. Widely popular through the early 19th century, the practice was built around a now-discredited theory positing that ordinary illnesses were caused by an imbalance of bodily fluids.

The exhibit features a cabinet filled with spring-loaded lancets and other bladed devices used by surgeons to draw what they believed to be excess blood from patients. Barbers also offered bloodletting services, which is where the red and white stripes on barber poles originated.

An ornately decorated jar on top of the cabinet is home to a trio of wriggling leeches, another common method for bloodletting.

Leeches are still used for some medical procedures, thanks in part to a powerful anti-clotting agent found in their saliva. The aquatic parasites were even approved as “medical devices” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2004.

“They don’t need to eat very often,” said Gwaltney, who feeds the leeches every few months. “I have found that they like to suck the blood out of chicken livers.”

Other highlights 

Horse-drawn buggies, rare medical textbooks and a human skull inscribed with a doctor’s reference notes are among the many other items in the museum’s collection.

From May to August, visitors will also find a garden featuring more than 50 species of plants traditionally used in medicine and natural therapies. Modeled after a centuries-old medicinal herb garden in Italy, the outdoor exhibit was added to the museum’s grounds in 1971 with help from a small army of community volunteers.

“Dr. Newell had judges and doctors and everybody toting bricks to make this garden,” Gwaltney said of the facility’s co-founder, who died in 2014.

Graham, the museum’s other founder, was named Doctor of the Year in 2015 by the North Carolina Medical Society. The award came with a $5,000 prize, part of which she donated to erect an educational kiosk in the garden in Newell’s memory.

In 2018, Graham attended an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the museum she and her friend created. Gov. Roy Cooper recognized the milestone with a proclamation honoring Newell and Graham, who died three years later, for their efforts to highlight the “ingenuity, compassion and dedication of country doctors in service to their communities.”

This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.