Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles If you were an early settler in the Wild West, and you got sick, you had three health care options. One, find a doctor, and hope their strange potions numbed your pain. Two, figure out how to cure your own ailment. Or three, die. Of course, if you were able to find a doctor, you'd probably die anyway, because they sort of just winged it as they went along. Today, we're going to discover what it was like going to a doctor in the Wild West. But before we cut into this here story, we reckon you subscribe to the Weird History Channel and holler at us about a Old West thingamajingins you'd like to hear about. Now, take a swig of whiskey, and bite down on this here rag. We're going to go see a doctor in the Old West. Now, you have to remember the state of medicine in the Old West. It wasn't so much of a science yet as it was a way to make money. Sure, you had a lot of doctors in it for altruistic reasons, but for the most part, medicine was a cutthroat business. When a new physician established an office in a smaller town that already had a doctor, things could get ugly fast, as they'd usually become territorial. Two doctors in one town meant they'd have to split profits. One of the more infamous incidents of dueling doctors took place when a Dr. Edward Willis moved to Placerville, California, which was then called Hangtown. Upon his arrival, Dr. Willis pitched a tent that would serve as his home and medical office. He then hung a sign above his door announcing his services as doctor and surgeon. None of this was cool with Doc Hullings, the first doctor to open a medical practice in the burgeoning mining camp. Hullings immediately walked over to the new doctor's tent and ordered him out of town. Dr. Willis calmly told Hullings he wasn't going anywhere then turned his back on him, and then ordered him out of his tent. Incensed, Hullings stormed out and came up with a plan, which wasn't so much of a plan as it was just him showing up several days later with a backup of several well-armed Hangtown gold miners. Hullings demanded Willis produce a diploma, which he promptly did. Hullings tore it in half and tossed it to the ground. Mr. Paul Clam, a friend of Dr. Willis, was there and witnessed the exchange, and then punch Doc Hullings. Hullings escalated the fight, challenging Clam and Willis to a duel with pistols. This duel was held in an abandoned mining pit. After the Sheriff yelled "Fire," both men shot, and both men went down. Clam was badly wounded from three body shots. Doc Hullings was slightly more wounded. He was dead According to miners' law, any man who abandoned his claim also gave up all rights to his land. Since Doc Hullings was dead, He had technically abandoned his claim, and Dr. Willis instantly became the town's sole physician. His first job was to save Mr. Clam's life, and his first official act was to sign Doc Hullings's death certificate. Doctor was an extremely vague title people gave themselves in the Wild West. While some had formal training, one didn't need a fancy degree or any real formal hands-on experience. All you needed was a bag full of unsterilized surgical tools and the ability to convince people you knew what you were doing. And because there was a shortage of medical professionals on the frontier, becoming a doctor was as simple as calling yourself a doctor. For example, in 1827, a janitor performed the first cesarean section in the West. John Richmond worked as a janitor at a medical school, and while he was there, he'd listen in on lectures and take mental notes. Eventually, he quit his janitorial gig, then called himself a doctor and performed a c-section without ever observing one or cutting into a human body, for that matter. Richmond wrote, "Finding that whatever was done must be done soon and feeling a deep and solemn sense of my responsibility, with only a case of common pocket instruments, about 1 o'clock at night, I commenced the cesarean section. The patient never complained of pain during the whole course of the cure." That said, Dr. Richmond might have exaggerated a bit, as the accounts of the c-section has been debated. While the woman survived the shady procedure, the child did not. And in her 2018 book Cesarean Section, An American History of Risk, Technology and Consequence, Jacqueline H. Wolf wrote. "The mother begged him to stop. She couldn't endure the pain." As barbaric as Richmond's attempted c-section was, it's the first published account of an attempted to cesarean performed in the United States. For every John Richmond, there were formally trained doctors who had an idea of what they were doing. But even these medical professionals relied on dangerous and highly-experimental treatments. Dr. Daniel Drake, a founder of Ohio's first medical college, strongly advised bleeding for patients whose pulse is nearly imperceptible. If the doctor's lancet couldn't induce blood flow from a vein, Dr. Drake recommended cutting the jugular vein in the neck. Yes, the majority of patients who underwent blood letting through their jugular had a prognosis you'd probably predict. They perished. Blister treatments were another one of the more confusing treatments these doctors regularly performed. This questionable practice called for a doctor to cover a portion of the skin with crushed chili peppers to produce hyperemia. The chili paste would produce a very powerful counter-irritation so that the pain of the blisters would override the painful condition being treated, sort of like hitting your head with a hammer if you had a stomach ache. Purgation was another go-to treatment these Old West doctors liked to suggest to their patients. If a doctor suggested you purge, you would be ordered to swallow calomel, a mercury-based drug that made you evacuate your bowels with the velocity of a broken frozen yogurt machine. The hope here was that the purging would get rid of the black bile in one's stomach, but it rarely healed anyone. As medieval as medicines seemed in the Old West, it's no surprise that common folk were alarmed by some of the practices these new doctors sprung on them. When doctors sliced open human bodies or performed unorthodox surgeries to save patients' lives, it really freaked people out. One frontier doctor reported that he opened the throat of a child choking with diphtheria and kept the windpipe open with fish hooks. Now, imagine it's 1875, and you see this. You'd probably flip out, too. It's no surprise that some people believed doctors were performing satanic rituals. In another case the famed surgeon Dr. Ephraim McDowell performed a messy operation on a 45-year-old Kentucky woman named Jane Crawford. McDowell was summoned to the Crawford farmhouse to assist in what was thought to be a long overdue childbirth. McDowell soon found that Crawford wasn't pregnant. She was suffering from a massive ovarian tumor. Dr. McDowell then suggested the removal of the tumor, a surgery that had never been attempted before. Eventually, Dr. McDowell was able to extract Crawford's , tumor all 22 pounds of it. That said, he had a difficult time with some of the townsmen, who thought he was doing the work of the devil. Superstition and taboos contributed to the talk that McDowell was doing something otherworldly in his office. His patient survived a 25-minute procedure without anesthetics, but accusations of satanic practices