During our recent ramble in the field of medical science we have thought now and then of Dr. G.J. Baker, the family doctor of our youth, and his wonderful pocket knife.
“Doc Griff” Baker, who delivered all three of the Felts boys and wrestled them through most of the diseases of childhood plus a siege of typhoid, was Mother’s first cousin. Day or night, rain or shine, he came on foot, carrying a little black bag in his hand and wearing a leather medicine case slung by a strap from his shoulder. Once he arrived everybody felt better.
“Doc Griff,” who practiced medicine with his brother, “Doc Verg,” was a second generation member of a galaxy of Doctors Baker. Three Sanders sisters, Mother’s aunts, married three Baker brothers, all three of them doctors and all three of them substantial landowners in the Cottage Home community in the southwest corner of Williamson County. The second generation Doctors Baker practice in Marion and Herrin. Doctor A.N. Baker of Marion is of the third generation in direct succession.
After “Doc Griff” had taken temperature and pulse and made the patient comfortable he sat down to a table to perform his pharmaceutical duties. From glass bottles in his medicine case he counted out tablets and tapped out powders on a clean sheet of paper. Then he took out his wonderful pocket knife, with the rounded metal end of the handle he crushed the tablets into fine powder and the, opening the knife, he mixed the powder thoroughly with the tip of the blade. He always had an admiring audience, even including the patient.
Then when the powder had been compounded, he used the sharp blade of his wonderful pocket knife to cut another sheet of paper into delicate rectangles about twice the size of a special delivery postage stamp, then he distributed the powders to the papers, measuring them carefully on the tip of the knife blade. Then he wiped the blade of his knife on the palm of his hand, closed the blade and put the knife in his pocket. The rectangles of paper were neatly folded, turned up at the ends and stowed in a dish on a bedside table. Each “powder” in the proper amount of water was a dose of medicine.
For powders of unusually disagreeable taste, such as quinine, the doctor used capsules which he filled in the sickroom with the aid of his wonderful pocket knife. The capsules were not streamlined as they are today and were something of a novelty. The doctor also mixed his own bottled medicines but that chore was performed in the mysterious inner sanctum of his office. We feel certain that he used his wonderful pocketknife in preparing those mixtures which invariably came out pink. Both Doctor G.J. Baker and Doctor V.A. Baker worked long hours, at all hours and died in middle age.
(This article was written by David V. Felts and printed in the Southern Illinoisan, Friday, June 16, 1950, in his column, Second Thoughts; Republished in “Footprints”, WCHS, Volume 5, #3, 2002)