Customer Reviews

I Only Dress the Wounds: Notes of a Country Doctor

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Read Ted Merrill's book if you are a seeker after peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, or self-control, if you seek the quality of compassion, if you want your soul steeped in these qualities. Read Ted's book to find out how he did it.

He has illuminated many segments of his life, which can benefit us readers. Yes, we can learn from reading this simple memoir, but we can also just curl up in our favorite reading spot and enjoy a good read. Purchase this book so you'll have it close at hand. It's one of those books that bears reading again and again.

This book brought a tear to my eye at times. At times I laughed. Reading this book, at times, I came to appreciate how it is that rare and extraordinary folks walk among us, administer to us, lay their hands on us and greatly desire that we be comforted, healed and lifted up. Sure, they're mortals like us, but they're seekers...and finders.

By my criteria, this is one of the 20 best books I've ever read. And I read a lot of books, mostly non-fiction.

My demands for a best-book are simple: basically it needs to exhibit a reasonable degree of intelligence. I don't necessarily require that it be entertaining or that it doesn't offend my sensibilities; it simply has to be honest and intelligent in the sense that it teaches me something useful about human nature and/or a particular environment. Now that I'm in my seventh decade, it seems such books are fairly rare. Dr. Merrill's book "I Only Dress the Wounds" is the exception in a world increasingly driven by avarice and political correctness.

Dr. Merrill, or Ted as he likes to be called by patients and colleagues alike, comes across in this highly personal book, as a fellow who genuinely likes all kinds of people and who wanted to become a doctor primarily to help people and to a lesser extent all living things. To those ends, he received his medical degree in 1948 from the prestigious Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, in upper Manhattan. Columbia P&S has the distinction of awarding the very first medical degree in the North American Colonies in 1767.

From the start, Ted was interested in General Practice (or Family Medicine), even though some of his med school professors counseled against it saying "A Columbia man's too good for General Practice! You should go into research, or a specialty, or maybe teaching." Given that a really good GP must be a diagnostician, a surgeon, and often a psychiatrist, Ted's inclination was to turn the professors words around to say "Oh no, you have it all backwards. Only a Columbia man is good enough for general practice."

Of course, he didn't actually say that. He dutifully pursued his studies to graduate and then spent the next 52 years validating his opinion. And that's essentially what the book is all about. More specifically, it's about the attitude and approach a GP must have to treat a wide variety of medical problems in a wide variety of environments from Germany and Vietnam (military), to Vermont and Northern California (urban) and finally to Eastern Oregon (rural).

Without being overly technical, while at the same time not oversimplifying the procedures, Dr. Merrill takes us through a number of child births, miscarriages, a large variety of Emergency Room trauma (12 years, I think, in the ER), and the innovative (just invented) kinds of procedures necessary to rural doctoring.

Through it all we are treated to Dr. Merrill's personal approach which often involves moral questions not fully resolved today. His opinions and reasoning are always clear (to me) though I suspect some readers will be offended, particularly when it comes to religious opinion. But the good doctor remains consistent and true to his beliefs throughout, and for that no one should be faulted.

Taken as a whole, the journey described is a bittersweet one. It seems this world is no longer suitable for doctors who are dedicated to the craft of the ancients; that of treating all possible medical conditions in environments less than ideal. In our modern litigious world, that requires malpractice insurance approaching $100K/year, and where insurance company doctors are prominent in determining patient care, there is little room for such a doctor anymore. Perhaps the best a modern GP can hope for is to become a "primary care provider" approved by an insurance company for the purpose of recommending other company approved specialists. Alternately one can decide to practice in another country ... requiring uninsured Americans to travel a very long distance indeed to get adequate care at a reasonable price (a recent suggestion by AARP).

If I have a complaint about the book, it would be the Epilogue. Though I found the sentiments expressed interesting and even useful (in a morbid sort of way), I felt it was the wrong way to end the book.

Having said that, I would highly recommend Dr. Merrill's book for anyone interested in personal medicine, both from the standpoint of understanding human physiology, and also in appreciating how the practice of medicine been transformed in the last 50 years. A careful reading should provide valuable personal insights into how best to deal with the medical profession in acquiring adequate care.

Disclaimer: Though I live in the same Eastern Oregon County as Dr. Merrill, I've never met the good doctor. I've never talked to Dr. Merrill nor am I aware of anyone who was his patient. Now that I've read his book, I may try to remedy that.