The coal-company doctors of Appalachia fought the health hazards of the coal fields, arguably the most dangerous and diseased working environment of the modern world. Often the doctors were held accountable for evils that persisted despite their best efforts. Claude A. Frazier - a coal-camp doctor's son and a doctor himself - draws on the memories of health workers, miners, and their families to convey the horrific problems in the coal camps, the resourcefulness of the doctors and nurses, and the struggle to raise health standards in and around the mines. Doctor Frazier tells how, from the Civil War to World War II, Appalachian mountain folk were exploited in a feudal system ruled by the coal companies. The miners, always in debt to the company, paid for a doctor's services with a checkoff from wages.^
The company doctor, like the company store, school, and church, was a consequence of the poor transportation and poverty in the wild mountains and narrow valleys where King Coal reigned. Miners and Medicine recalls not only the coal-camp doctors who were incompetent but the many others who performed valiant service in conditions that seem impossible by today's standards - in tiny, polluted communities with no nearby hospital or pharmacy, precious few nurses, and nonexistent sanitary facilities. Often the miners' wives and children, whose stories are told here, went hungry in drafty, pest-ridden company housing, from which they were expelled if they had no family member working in the mine. Boys went to work as teen-agers until child-labor laws finally were enforced in the 1950s. Black lung shortened the lives of virtually all miners.^
Miners and Medicine relates participants' memories of how the company doctors competed with the grannies, yarb doctors, and patent-medicine men, ultimately bringing stable health care and community hospitals to northern Appalachia. Today the company towns have been abandoned or brought up to date, thanks in good part to the company doctors, as well as the United Mine Workers of America. This book will please those who want to savor the attitudes, mores, and spirit of earlier days in Appalachia. It also has appeal for those interested in labor studies, public health and occupational safety. and medical-benefit programs.
