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At his retirement party in 1984, after serving the Coos Bay, Oregon, community as a physician and surgeon for 50 years, Dr. Ennis Keizer captured the Keizer family’s simple but decades-long and deep dedication to medical science and service to the area as follows: … There is a great deal of satisfaction in being a doctor. It’s kind of nice to go home and have [had] someone say, if it hadn’t been for you …. Many of us have had those exact feelings about our medical professionals at one time or another, and hopefully most of us have told them so.
After reading about the numerous Keizer family doctors and nurses, who had collectively dedicated almost 100 years to the medical profession in the region, the author William A. Lansing, sought out other stories about early doctors in Coos County, Oregon. Though information was quite limited, Lansing was able to find enough snippets in local newspapers and medical journals to assemble a variety of stories about these early medical pioneers. Some are brief and others longer; many dates (especially for photos) were simply unavailable, and several doctors’ time of service to the people of Coos County could only be surmised through advertisements they made in the local papers. But even the briefest of entries adds to the richness of the community’s history.
Names such as Drs. Horsfall, Bartle, McKeown, Straw and Haydon may resonate with people still living today, while others such as Drs. Wolf, Wetmore, Angell, Culin and Hodson may not. In total, the Pioneer Doctors of Coos County, Oregon covers 40 physicians (mostly those with medical degrees-but a few with only minimal formal medical training), who practiced in the area-the bulk of them starting from around the turn of the twentieth century through the 1940s, and some a bit beyond that era.
The book also expands into the history of the hospitals in Coos County, as well as pioneer dentists and the area’s early drug stores. And for fun, there’s a chapter on quackery -featuring those whose ads for cure-all remedies splashed throughout the classified pages of local newspapers for decades.
