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From: Tom Lincoln <>
Subject: Re: PARSONS & KNIGHT in Directory of Deceased American Physicians?
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 1995 20:41:00 -0600

You (Roger A King) write:

> Alanson PARSONS was a partner in a local drug store with his son while
>in Algona so I assume he was trained in herbs or pharmacology but I know
>not where. In the Algona history there were descendants who were
>pharmacists through the third generation.

He may well have been a Homeopathic physician. There were schools in both
NY and Phila... and also upstate. It was very popular.. and given that
the conventional wisdom is that the first time that a random encounter
between a random patient and a random physician had more than a 50% chance
of success was after 1913... homeopathy probably only did the harm of
inadvertent neglect where many things were cured by "tincture of time."

The perception was growing that:
"Pathology is life under altered circumstances." (Virchow 1860s)

The idea in the 1830s was to return the patient to their "natural state."
This required that one ask the patient a lot of questions to find out what
that state was (I am talking Harvard and Cincinnati Medicine here!). One
person's natural state might well be different from anothers, just as no
two rivers are alike. Homeopathy was very consistent with that. After
the Civil War medicine began to strive to return people to a "normal
state", a matter of statistics -- gained from the vast numbers of patients
treated in the war itself. One began to ask about a normal pulse and a
urine of normal specific gravity (the only laboratory test) and a normal
temperature... Graphs were made... The war promoted encounter forms,
which were filled out.. Medication's impact against a norm began to be
judged more carefully.

Modern medicine swings back and forth between these two.. for a while
re-emphasizing patient history as a matter of personalized diagnosis, and
now the "numbers" and the scans...

Lenox KNIGHT MD of Manhattan, Putnam Co. was possibly influenced to go into
medicine by the yellow fever epidemics that periodically afflicted
Baltimore in the early 1800s, if indeed he grew up there...

p q
\|/
/|\ TOM LINCOLN
\|/ "Life is short, art is long, opportunity fugitive,
/|\ experimenting dangerous, reasoning difficult."

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• Re: PARSONS & KNIGHT in Directory of Deceased American Physicians? by Tom Lincoln <>