OLD MEDICINE

I was telling some friends at breakfast this morning that I had quit smoking. It reminded me of our family doctor when I was growing up in the late 40's and early 50's. Dr. Joe Freiden was his name. Good man. His office was in his house on Carthage Avenue which was just two blocks from ours. I would be taken to him when I was sick and he would listen to my heart with his stethoscope while a lit cigarette dangled from his lips. Almost inconceivable today. He put stitches in my lip in his office one night when I busted up my face playing cops and robbers. This was the same time I broke my front tooth - the tooth that didn't get fixed for twenty years. He's the one who fluoroscoped my hand when I thought I broke it. A fluoroscope is a live x-ray machine on which you can look at your bones on a fluorescent screen. I think these machines were outlawed long ago. They used to use them for fittings in shoe stores in those years. He's the one who came to see me at our house when I had scarlet fever. He diagnosed me as having glandular fever (mononucleosis) so I had to miss Suzanne's senior prom. On a weekend when I had come home from boot camp at Fort Knox he met me at the hospital emergency room. I wasn't supposed to be in Cincinnati. It was too far from base. He diagnosed me as having bursitis in my ankle and did a wrap with an ace bandage and gave me some medicine. He said young doctors didn't know how to wrap with an ace bandage. They all used these new plaster casts. He thought it was deplorable. Mostly he always told me I was healthy as a horse. I went to him until he retired in about 1970. Somewhere in between he quit smoking.