University of Texas at El Paso ScholarWorks@UTEP Combined Interviews Institute of Oral History 4-2-1970 Interview no. 41.1 Leon C. Metz Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.utep.edu/interviews Part of the Oral History Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Interview with Leon C. Metz by Unknown, 1970, "Interview no. 41.1," Institute of Oral History, University of Texas at El Paso. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Institute of Oral History at ScholarWorks@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Combined Interviews by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. UNIVERSITYOFTEXAS AT EL PASO INSTITUTEOF ORALHISTORY IiiITERVI EI'JEE: LeonC. Metz Ii\ITERVIEI'IER: PROJECT: Soeech '1970 DATEOF INTERViE|I: April 2. TERI4SOF USE: Unrestricted TAPENO.: TRANSCRIPTIIO.: 41A TRAI{SCRIBER: DATETRAI1SCRIBED: BI0GRAPHICALSYNOPSIS 0F IIITERVIE1,^!EE: Southwestauthor and Library Gift Coordinatorat UTEP. SUi'li'iARYOF IiiTEiiVIEi.J: Speechgiven to the Women'sAuxiliary of the El PasoCounty Medical Societyon folk medicine. Transcript; 8 pages. Leon C- Metz Talk given to Womenls Auxi I iary of the El Paso County Medical Society April 2, lwa- Therels been alnxrst nothing written on oldtime or frontier medicine. You can find manybooks about little pills and frontier doctors but they real ly do not say muchabouf the practice of medicine. They talk a little bit about the things theytve seen and the things theytve heard. They rarely menfion, for instance, how they take a bul let out of a man or how they took an arrow out of a man. I think that in most cases they either left it in there or cut it out one way or another. Whenthey pulled it back out the hole certainly wasnrt smaller than when it had gone in. ln old times were big rrthumbbusfersrr thatrs what they used to cal I them because if a manwasnft careful when it went off he got his thumb caught on the hammerand then it busfed his thumb. They shot a great big lead ball which tended frequently to shatter whenever it hit or sliver off. lt rarely went through the head, and it rarely went through ihe body. lt was in there, and if they probed for this thing and how they got it out, other than reaching down with their finger and extractingit, lrm not quite sure. Frequently it would sliver, anyhow,and bits and pieces would go off into various parts of the body. There were no established medical schools in the frontier West or af least no place West of the Mississippi in early times. Consequently,what we know abouf early medicine in El Paso is frankly just very fragmentary; things we pick out from newspaperarticles. The Lone Star in particular: itrs editor, SimeonNewman, was constantly railing against the administration becauseof fhe pest house here which housed primarily smallpox victims. We read that most people comehere for their health, but apparently this was a good place fo catch smallpox. At one time there were thirteen cases in El Paso all at once few' The and for a town which had no more fhan 5OOpeople this was quite a who oest house was located on the outside of fhe town. Apparenfly tho poople were rumors ran it were people who tended to drink to alcoholic excess and there about of orgies and other things that ordinary people did not like to talk there. You find in the minutes of the city council where they paid a doctor find four dollars or something to go in there and to treat the sick. You will the city council arguing over a ien dollar medical bill in which they treated or everybodywho they had in there and he submitted ten dol lars for aspirins quite sure whatever they used at the time. The council, being thrifty, wasnrt that they werentt being taken and so they had their full debates and argued about this until finally the thing was approvedor else it was negotiated down somewhat. Most of the doctors y1ehad here were mi I itary men. Most of the doctors in the West were military men. You didntt find too manycivilians. The military treated not only fhe soldiers, ihey treated the lndians, they treated civilians, they treated whatever wanderercame in wifh a broken head or smallpox or diphtheria or whatever the particular ailment or disease was at the time. V'/ehave a picture of an early day El Paso scene here and there v,/asone little got sign on there and the reading was so very difficult to understand. So I a magnifying glass out, this was aboui 1806, and put it on fhere. Here was a sign that said trWecure rheumatismby electricity.rr lt had a coil there which I guess they stuck the patients hand in, or his arm, or his leg or something and they attached it to a battery and gave him the treatment for a soecified sum. lt didnrt have how much it cost there, I guess that was negotiated once they begin talking about it. The dociors that we had here in town--there was a Doctor Manninghere in lBBl--he is the earliest one that I knowof although I knowthat there had to be several particularly with the mi I itary here. He was quite an accomplished individuaI for his time: he played the piano, he played the violin. He was also very antagonistic indi- vidual; he was kind of short. And whereasmany short people are very friendly becausethey are shorf, others are not friendly becausethey are short. lt sort of leaves them on a complex there of some kind or another. He was con- stantly getting into trouble and he collided with the city marshal as is in the book. The result of a gunfight while the marshal was killed and the doctor had his arm shot here at the elbow. He didntt bother to show up af his triral. He was charged with murder and he didntt bother to show up becausethe doctor at Fort Bl iss testified that the bul let had injured his arm and nerve and caused him a great deal of pain. So the jury simply found him not gui lty and everybody went home. The doctor then movedto Arizona where he practiced for a great manymore years and was quite respected. We had someother doctors here that I wonder abouf. I donrt recal I the namesof all the gunshot woundswhich took place around here. You would think that the doctor would certainly be acquainted with this. We had one particular killing here where a noted gunmanby the nameof John WesleyHardin' was killed. It has recorded and re-recorded how Hardin died by being shot in the back of the head; actually he has becomesome sort of a folk hero. The reason people will not acceDf that he could have died from the front is that they donrt like their folk heroes dying any other way than by violent means. For instance, who ever heard of a folk hero who died of rheumatismor just died of old age. It simply doesntt happen. He either dies violently in defense of his country, or somethingor the other happensto him and he just disappears, maybe,and then another story starts about him. We had a gunfight here in which Harding was shot in the corner of the left eye. The witnesses disagreed on whether he was shot in the front or whether he was shot in the back. There was a great deal of controversv about it and three doctors testified that he was definitely repaired or, occasional ly, down fhrough the chimney which never worked anyway. The smokenever went up, but it simply circulated around fhe room and disappeared in the summertime wheneverthey quit a parficularly bad habif of putting their sinks, which was their namefor fhe lafrine. They would set in upstream from the water or somethingand also invarably had their stables upstream from the water, and occasionally you would find a surgeon general on a post who would complain about this. But ordinarily such things as germs werentt thought of. You read an occasional report of how somebodyis puzzling--they cannot under- stand--why they just get one case after another of typhoid. They invent al I sorts of excuses from divine intervention to so on to explain this typhoid and if doesnrt occur to anybodythaf if they would just nrovetheir stables downstreamor their horses downstreamor if they would just assign a man ro bathing in the hospital. Here af Fort Bliss fhey passedan order out that each soldier would bathe at least once a week. Unless there was wafer there wasnrt muchof a methodof bathing--when I say water Itm speaking of a stream. Many places had the so-called tubs but nobody had a way of heating water and they didnrt want to heat any water. Consequentlythey were hardly as spic- and-span as we see them on the television tube. This is a lisf of someof the ailments here at Fort Bliss and separated into white troops and colored troops. The white troops in which for the year 1869 they had a 106 men. For that year, seventy eighf of them got sick, three of them had malariar 2l had diarrhea and dysentery, ten had venereal diseases, two of them had rheumatism, five of them had what they call cardiac affec-lions which I think was tonsilitis and diphtheria and things which they clid not know and so, like now, whena doctor doesnrf knowwhatls wrong with you he says you have a virus and, perhaps, I shouldntt say this.