How Will We Pay These Outrageous Doctor Fees? September, 1919

From The Daily Times, Wilson, N.C., Sept. 6, 1919

Money-Mad Medical Men. . . The Only Hope the Poor Man Has Is to Keep His Bowels Open and Trust in the Lord

Mr. Editor:

There has much been said and written about the “high cost of living” and according to the new fees adopted by the Wilson County Medical Society at their last meeting and how in effect—the only way for a poor man to reduce “the high cost of dying” will be to take a dose of quick acting poison and end his troubles at once, for if he should have a protracted case, or several cases of sickness in his family, it would be as impossible for a very poor man to pay his physician as it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. It can’t be did, and if it could be the surviving member of the family would die of slow starvation.

The old fees were high enough in all consciousness and to pay them many a poor man has been forced to deny his family actual necessaries of life, forcing him to skimp here and there to make buckle and tongue meet.

It is presumed the fees published in last Thursday’s Times are correct as they were not corrected in yesterday’s issue, which the writer produces today, viz:

Day visits within the corporate limits, $3

Night visits between 10 p.m. and 12, $5

Night visits between 12 and 6 p.m. $5 to $10

Office visits for prescription, $2

Examinations, $2 to $20

For filling out sick benefit certificates, $1

For filling out insurance proofs of death, $2

Obstetrics, $35 to $50

Country practice $3 for the first mile and $1 for each successive mile, going trip only.

Reader, study these fees carefully and see if one paragraph doesn’t smack of race suicide among the poorer classes—a putting up of the bars in the poor man’s home against the coming of any more new babies, and for those that are already there, if they should require the service of a physician, figure out, if you can, how a poor man living 10 miles in the country can pay $12 to get one of the fraternity at the sufferer’s bedside and then pay for the medicine. No poor man can pay such charges and he had better make up his mind to confine his medical needs to c.c. pills, castor oil, quinine and sassafras tea and keep a midwife in the neighborhood—keep his bowels open and trust in the Lord, for as a matter of fact association doctors he is unable to pay. If these prices are to continue where will the undertaker’s pound of flesh come from?

Woe unto doctors and scribes.

--R.B. Evans