Frontier medicine in the early settlement of Butler County was as rough-hewn as the log cabins of the early pioneers.

The first settlers of the county spent hard, laborious lives carving homes and livelihoods out of the wilderness. When any became injured and sick, there was no money for doctors or indeed any doctors in the county at all.

Patients were treated by any number of rough-and-ready methods. And there was a lot of blood.

According to the “History of Butler County Pa.” published by R.C. Brown & Co. in 1895, “Prior to 1805 when the physicians of Rapp’s colony of Harmony came among the people, the leech or blood-letter of the settlement was the physician for, be it known, the pioneers had blood to spare.”

Jean Purvis agreed with this assessment in her “History of Medicine in Butler County” published in 2000.

“Pioneer medicine in that wilderness was basic, usually a matter of herbs and hope and folk medicine with a little bloodletting on the side. Childhood diseases were many and often fatal. Croup, dysentery, diphtheria, scarlet fever, as well as the usual childhood ailments, all took their toll of children,” she wrote.

Purvis noted gunshots and other wounds were treated with slippery elm bark, flax seed and other poultices. Rheumatism was treated with the oil of geese, bears, wolves, raccoons, groundhogs and polecats rubbed onto the aching joints. The blood of a black cat was considered an effective treatment of erysipelas or skin infection.

In the early days of the county, housewives and midwives were often the only source of treatment.

Purvis noted “After all else failed, many turned to charms and incantations, perhaps as effective as some of the other recipes.”

The Brown “History” notes Baron Detmar Basse, who founded Zelienople, brought his extensive knowledge of herbs and drugs to Western Pennsylvania, and was given the title of doctor, although this was more an honorary designation than a job description.

Chrisloff Mueller, who came to the area with George Rapp, the founder of the Harmony Society in 1803, was credited with being the first doctor in Pennsylvania north of the Ohio River.

The Harmony/Zelienople area boasted a number of doctors shortly after the turn of the 19th century.

Brown’s “History” noted J. McHenry was a doctor who arrived in Zelienople in 1815 at about the same time as a physician identified as only Dr. Agnew moved to Harmony.

John Cowden established a practice in Portersville in 1818, at the age of 21. The Brown “History” called Cowden the epitome of the pioneer doctor.

The “History” noted, “He witnessed the deaths of the first settlers in the northeast townships and lived among the children and grandchildren before dying himself in Allegheny City where he moved after a service of 50 years in Portersville.” He died Feb. 15, 1880, at the age of 83.

Many of the early county doctors had little more training than their patients. Doctors learned their skills, such as they were, by entering into apprenticeships with established physicians, rather than from any medical school.

Would-be doctors entered into an apprenticeship with an established physician by paying a $100 fee. In return, the apprentice would work with the doctor for two to five years doing everything from grooming the doctor’s horse to eventually helping treat patients.

Even with the arrival of doctors with some training, however rudimentary, it was hardly any easier on the patients.

Purvis wrote, “Surgery was both painful and dangerous. There were no anesthetics except alcohol and some herbs, and there was the ever-present danger of gangrene or infection. As a consequence, surgery was a last resort, confined to urgent problems: gunshot wounds, abscesses, treatment of hernias and fractures, and only the most difficult and desperate obstetrical cases.”

The “20th Century History of Butler and Butler County” by James A. McKee of Butler, published in 1909, contains an account of Dr. A.M. Neyman, then 83, reminiscing during a Butler Medical Society banquet in 1900 about his contemporaries of 60 to 70 years past.

“The Old Doctor,” said Neyman “was almost universally a general practitioner: physician, surgeon, dentist, obstetrician. Specialists were rarer in those days.

“He spent much of his time on horseback and was usually an expert horseman, there were no roads for wheeled vehicles,” said Neyman. “As an educated man he was afforded high respect. He never or rarely accumulated wealth.”

Neyman, who in 1900 was the oldest living doctor in the county, was born in Butler in 1826. Neyman took a circuitous route to becoming a doctor, according to McKee’s book. Neyman taught school and clerked in the office of the justice of the peace. He went to Ohio in 1845 to study medicine. He was back in Butler in 1847 and back to teaching school. In 1850 he resumed studying medicine under a Butler physician, Dr. W.J. Randolph.

He must have learned Randolph’s lessons well. Neyman, along with Dr. Charles Emmerling, was credited with performing a Caesarian section in which both the mother and child survived, the first west of the Allegheny Mountains, in 1860.

By the 1820s, the county seat of Butler became home to a series of physicians.

Brown’s “History” credits George Miller as the first doctor outside of Harmony in the county. Born in Washington County, Miller received his medical education at Cannonsburg and came to Butler after his marriage in 1814. Miller was a member of the first Butler borough council before moving to Ohio in 1823.

Henry C. De Wolfe, was another early physician in Butler. A native of Hartford, Conn., and a graduate of Yale, he came to Butler in 1817. De Wolfe served as treasurer of the borough in 1825. He is also credited with erecting the first brick building in Butler. He died in 1854.

His son, T.R. De Wolfe, also practiced medicine in the county from 1851 to 1859, when he suddenly and unexpectedly died.

Dr. George Lyon arrived in the county in 1823 and died in 1853. Lyon was remembered as a pioneer of the temperance movement in the county.

Another doctor in Butler had a darker history. According to the Brown “History,” Henri De Coliere, described as a Frenchman, arrived in Butler in 1840 and was not held in high esteem. Indeed, he was called the doctor of the last resort.

The Brown “History” notes he attended a case of delirium tremens in Butler. “He diagnosed the case and declared the patient would die. In broken English he said the patient would die ‘in three minute,’ and to make his prediction good he administered a poison which killed the man in the time specified.”

The “History” noted “He was a desperate character who had penchant for using the knife, and his victims were numerous both in the Butler and Harmony neighborhoods.” De Coliere was placed on trial for manslaughter but later escaped from jail and any further historical records.

Another doctor who combined medicine with running a school, according to Purvis, was Dr. James Graham, a native of Ireland, who opened a school on Butler’s McKean Street in addition to practicing medicine.

His teaching methods were harsh, according to a former student, who remembered Graham using “a cat-of-nine-tails as a whip for a bad boy.”

Purvis wrote Graham was reported to be “a thorough physician and a school and in his sober hours he was popular, but his use of drink led to his death.”

Better examples of the healing arts was Loring Lusk, a practicing doctor in Butler County from 1823 to 1878 and his sons, Joseph and Amos Lusk, who also became doctors.

Joseph Lusk studied medicine under his father, attended the Western Reserve Medical College in Cleveland, where he graduated in 1850 and began his practice in Harmony. He was later elected to the State Legislature. In addition to being a physician and politician, he also a geologist and an archaeologist amassing a valuable collection of minerals and antiquities. He died in Butler in 1889.

Amos Lusk also studied under his father and began practicing medicine in 1849 in Harmony. He moved to Zelienople in 1851 and was appointed in charge of the U.S. Marine Hospital in Pittsburgh in 1853. He moved to Missouri in 1857 but returned to Zelienople in 1861 and practiced medicine until his death in 1891.

Amos Lusk became the first president of the Butler County Medical Society when 12 doctors formed the organization on Nov. 3, 1866. The previously mentioned A.M. Neyman was its first vice president.

According to Brown’s “History,” “The aim of the society was to enable doctors to cooperate more effectively with the state and national associations in advancing the knowledge of medicine and the status of the physician.”

In 1881, the state required doctors to register in the county in which they practiced. There were 69 in Butler County that year.

Purvis writes that among them were Mary Harper of Renfrew who it is believed to have practiced medicine in her brother-in-law’s Butler office in 1883.

Two other female doctors were Eliza Gorman who in 1890 who practiced in the office of her husband, Dr. Robert Grossman, along with her sister Louisa Shyrock. Purvis writes both sisters became members of the Butler County Medical Society, “obviously a much more progressive group than the American Medical Association which did not admit women until 1915.”

A Butler Eagle article dated Feb. 22, 1909, reported Mrs. I.J. McBride of Butler presented the Butler County Medical Society with an “interesting and valuable” collection for the society’s library consisting of 200 large photographs of serious and unusual gunshot wounds and the accompanying surgical operations made at the Lincoln General Hospital in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War.

The photographs were compiled by the late Col. James McKee of Butler, who was the surgeon in charge of the hospital from 1863 to 1866. McKee was connected with the medical department of the regular Army for 35 years.

The “History of Butler County Illustrated” by C. Hale Sipe, published in 1927, recounted that the typhoid fever epidemic in the county during the winter of 1903-04 which afflicted 1,587 and left 127 dead, claimed the lives of two county doctors.

Sipe wrote: “Two physicians of Butler sacrificed their lives in combating the dread epidemic. Dr. John E. Byers, the county medical inspector, while visiting a fever patient in January 1904, was stricken with a cerebral hemorrhage and died in a few hours. Dr. William H. Brown contracted a disease from exposure during that terrible winter which caused his death in 1905.”