as the most important man in the northwest, second only to Dr. John McLoughlin.
With this picture of the doctor, let us look a little more closely into his medical activities from the time he became part and parcel of old Oregon. But first let us give this a proper setting with a brief consideration of the medical knowledge and practice in this country one hundred years ago. Let us recall that the relation of bacteria and other micro-organisms to disease was entirely unknown. Leeuwenhoek had discovered the world of microscopic forms in the seventeenth century, but not until Louis Pasteur, from 1863 and on, demonstrated that many of these minute organisms produced various types of disease, was it possible to devise effectual means of combatting them. Based upon the discoveries of Pasteur, Koch, and their contemporaries, scientific knowledge, as we have it today, of the causes of disease has been erected.
When Whitman treated Fontenelle and his men for cholera, at Bellevue, in 1835, he knew nothing of the organisms taken into the intestine with the water the men drank. The origin of the disease was so obscure and its onset so sudden as to strike terror into the heart of the bravest and strongest, for who could fight or escape so unseen an enemy. In England, in 1832, the mortality had amounted to one-third or one-half of those attacked, and in many cases, two-thirds had fallen victims.[1]
The favorite remedies in England[2] for cholera were: "blood-letting, emetics of ipecac and tartrite of antimony, or of mustard; purgatives of castor oil, or of rhubarb, or of jalap, or of jalap and calomel, or of calomel with capsicum; alteratives, of calomel and opium; dry heat applied in bottles of hot water rolled in flannel or heated bricks, or sand, bran, etc.” Portable medicines made up in doses were advised which the physician could administer on his first call on a patient. Here is a list: "compound emetic; one grain of tartrite of antimony, with twenty grains of powder of ipecac; mustard emetic; composed
of two drachms of powdered capsicum; jalap powder, twenty grains of jalap with four grains of ginger; calomel with jalap,
