The Doctor’s Bill vs. The Cure: A Colfax Family’s War on Typhoid
When typhoid fever struck a household in Colfax, Washington, one family claims their conventional medical treatment failed—until they turned to the 'hygeic' system of Dr. Glover.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
COLFAX, WASH., Jan. 31.
You will pardon me for drawing your attention to my precious shares, for I wish you to get the system of treating disease with the old fogy about the same time as the fox, and we treated him at our house by the hygeic treatment, and he was getting along fine in about 8 days, but his appetite was not good until he gave us the dodge one day to go to the orchard and filled himself with tree fruit and exerted himself running through the fields and took a jet-back. Then he would listen to nothing but his mother had a doctor. So I took him to one and he said the young man had the typhoid fever in a dangerous form and must go to bed and not get up any more for eight or ten days. So we put him to bed and recommenced dosing him with some bitter drugs. He would have been up in a few days if I had not kept him down to please the doctor. But he was out and doing well in three weeks, and would have been much sooner if he could have had his wish gratified. The doctor in six times to see him, and the bill at the drug store was $7.50, and the doctor's bill was $27 total $34.50. The balance of the family began to come down with the same complaint, and three out of five of us had it worse than the one already mentioned. I heard of your system and called on your agent, Dr. Glover, and he treated the remaining five patients and gave us his personal...
This 1902 letter to the editor highlights a recurring tension in American healthcare: the high cost of conventional medicine versus alternative 'cures.' While the 'hygeic' treatment mentioned here is likely pseudoscientific by modern standards, the story reflects the genuine desperation families felt when facing deadly epidemics like typhoid, which was a common killer in Washington's logging and farming communities before sanitation improvements.
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