Information Sheet

 

 

R         Yates, Paul Christian, 1836-1907.

648                                    Journal, 1880-1905.

One volume.

 

MICROFILM

 

 

 

This is a journal diary kept by Dr. Paul C. Yates, a physician in Newton County, Missouri.  Included are narratives of individual cases (particularly maternity “calls”), notes for addresses to meetings of medical associations, and a few personal items.

 

Paul Christian Yates was born in Randolph County, Missouri, on 01 March 1836.  In 1861 he graduated from Pope’s Medical College in St. Louis.  During the Civil War he was a Surgeon in the 5th Missouri Infantry (C.S.) and the 38th Arkansas Infantry (C.S.).  After the war he married Alice Levie (1846-1923), a native of South Carolina, and established a medical practice at Jack­sonville in northern Randolph County.  In 1880 he moved to Neosho, the seat of Newton County, where he practiced and lived until his death on 18 February 1907.  A Good Templar, a Democrat, and a founder of the Newton County Medical Society, Paul C. Yates is buried in the IOOF Ceme­tery at Neosho.

 

Dr. Yates’s journal affords excellent illustrations from the practice of a small town/country doctor in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries.  Although antiseptic regimens were just coming into use, Yates lacked the antibiotics, surgical facilities, and technical appara­tuses, such as x-rays, that would soon revolutionize the medical profession.  His medicines, al­ways carefully described as to formulation and dosage, consisted mainly of narcotics, stimulants, anodynes, and astringents.  He could relieve pain and perform basic manipulations, but he had lit­tle curative power.  Nevertheless Dr. Yates assisted his patients to the best of his knowledge and ability.  The journal shows that he kept up to date with medical literature and that by the later years described here he was aware of the microbe theory of disease, although except for very basic antiseptic precautions he had few weapons at his disposal.

 

A large portion of the journal (pages 66-141) is devoted to an essentially chronological list of Dr. Yates’s “calls” to cases of childbirth.  While many accounts are brief (“natural labor male child both did well”), more complicated cases are described in considerable detail.  Without fa­cili­ties for Caesarian surgery, care for premature infants, or treatments of hemorrhages and subse­quent infections, many of these more difficult cases had unhappy endings.  Many instances of self-induced or spontaneous abortions are also noted.

 

The journal has been typescripted, except for a few pages which had nothing to do with Dr. Yates’s practice.  The entries were made in an almost-unused ledger printed for the North Mis­souri Railroad Company.  This journal will be of considerable research value to medical and social historians of the period.

 

 

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