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Piecing Together a Story

29 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by Nancy Clark in Uncategorized, Writing Biographies

≈ 1 Comment

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biography, Dr. Blaine, old time doctor, quilting, quilts, writing biography

I have always enjoyed working with fabric. My mother taught me to sew by the time I was 10 or 11, starting with hand-stitched doll clothes and then graduating to my own clothes on her sewing machine. As a young mother, I made clothing for my two children as well as for myself and my husband. Making or adjusting curtains became a necessity as we moved many times in our marriage. I never became what you would consider an accomplished seamstress but had fun challenging myself with creating a wall hanging or completing a quilt that my grandmother had pieced many years before.

Quilt blockRecently I completed another quilt that someone else had started. It was a simple task of assembling already sewn blocks into a top and then lining it and providing a backing. But it gave me such unexpected pleasure that now I can’t stop. It wasn’t so much the stitching together (the quilting part) of all the layers of fabric, but more the design and assembly of the pieces that intrigued me. Working with colors and patterns to create something uniquely my own feeds my need to bring order from chaos, beauty from randomness.

And then it struck me. Isn’t this the same fulfillment that I find in writing the biography of my great-grandfather? To gather all the disparate facts and episodes of his life and create something new that will be his unique story?

But the analogy doesn’t end there. (Aren’t analogies fun?) In the process of creating a quilt top, I sort through the fabric that I already have to see what blends with what, what makes for interesting contrast, what can  be used for borders or trim, what general theme I want to follow. In the same way, as I write the biography, I sort through the tons of material I have collected to see what might be appropriate for this or that chapter, what little detail might bring a story to life, what is interesting but may be only a sideline, and what general theme will tie it all together.

As I continue to lay out the various fabric pieces for a new quilt, I sometimes come to the difficult conclusion that a certain piece (Why does it have to be my favorite?) just doesn’t work with the others or with the theme I have chosen. So out it goes, perhaps to appear in a later creation. Similarly, as much as I would like to include in my book all the fascinating facts about the development of medicine in the United States from 1880 to 1930, too much of it will bog down the flow of the story. So out it goes — or much of it anyway — perhaps to appear in a blog post or an essay somewhere down the line.

Since my Scotch heritage demands that I pinch pennies, I try very hard to use up the fabric and other supplies already on hand for whatever project I’m working on. Invariably, somewhere in the middle of my planning, I suddenly realize that I need another yard of white cotton or a spool of red thread, and off I go to the nearest fabric store. As I continue writing chapters of my book, I come across blank spaces in my knowledge: What year was the city of Attica electrified? What does “chirurgery” mean? Why did the B & O Railroad help fund a community hospital in Willard? And off I go mining the Internet for those hidden gems.

Of course, as with any analogy, even a fruitful one, the comparison eventually breaks down. In my case, the planning and execution of a  quilt (at least the kind I make) is much less involved than the writing of my great-grandfather’s biography. And once a quilt is completed, I can give it to a loved one or a favorite charity, but its distribution is very limited. My book, when eventually published, will be shared with a much wider audience.

So as I work on both my quilts and my book, I’ll continue to find joy in their similarities and satisfaction in their differences, using my God-given talents for both to create beauty from chaos.

 

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What kind of word is “chirurgery”?

22 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by Nancy Clark in Interesting Facts about Medical Practice 1880-1930, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

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chirurgery, Dr. Blaine, old time doctor, old time doctors, spelling, surgery

Looking at WordsIn my research for the biography of my great-grandfather, I’ve come across this word, chirurgery or its related forms chirurgical and chirurgeon, a number of times. It didn’t take long to figure out that it must be a variant form of surgery, surgical, or surgeon. But where did it come from and when did it disappear from common use? I don’t think I have the complete story yet, but here’s what I know so far about this intriguing word.

It’s a known fact that English vocabulary is rife with words borrowed from other languages.And it’s also well known that many of our medical terms find their origin in Greek and/or Latin. The Latin term for surgery was chirurgia, while the Greek form was cheirourgia. But the spelling in Old French was serurghien, which was later modified to surgien. So it appears that the word in Middle English, surgerie, followed the French spelling rather than the Latin or Greek.

Then the Renaissance came along. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), sometime around the 16th century, the spelling of the word in English reverted to the Greek-influenced form chirurgery, with the accompanying pronunciation of the first syllable as a k sound rather than an s, and with the accent on the second syllable. That would make it sound something like “ki-rur’-dgery.” Think of it like the first syllable in chiropractic. In both cases the “chi” means “hand” in Greek.

What I still can’t find is any evidence of when the spelling and pronunciation shifted back to our current form. The latest use of chirurgery that I could find cited in the OED was dated 1846. But I have seen it still used in documents printed in the late 1800s. So I am guessing that by the beginning of the 20th century at least, we had managed to shake off the influence of those Renaissance pundits and went back to the original spelling and pronunciation of surgery. In every dictionary I consulted, the variant chirurgery is now labeled as “archaic.”

If you have any more information about the history of this word, please share it!

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Who Pays the Doctor?

16 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by Nancy Clark in Interesting Facts about Medical Practice 1880-1930, Uncategorized

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average income in 1908, Dr. Blaine, medical bills, medical insurance, old time doctor, old time doctors

Money Sign

The Money Dilemma

Medicare costs rising! Obamacare not working! The headlines keep us in a constant state of worry about medical expenses. But at least there is some help out there for most of us.What was it like before all these insurance programs existed — not only for the patients but for the doctors as well?

In a musty, hard-bound ledger more than a century old, I found a glimpse of life before medical insurance and credit cards. My great-grandfather, Harry G. Blaine, was a small-town physician in northwest Ohio from the 1880s to 1930. Using information from his ledger, I was able to compute these figures: Over five months in 1908, he collected a total of $657 in cash from his office practice. The rest of the charges — a total of $1,426 — were billed to the patients, with the understanding that the amounts would be paid in the future. But it’s doubtful that all of them were because over that same five months, only $967 was collected from old debts.

With no credit cards and no easy access to cash, his patients no doubt did the best they could. One person signed promissory notes to pay an $800 bill in installments over  a period of eight years. Others paid their debts with assets, like the beautiful Waterbury Pinwheel Regulator wall clock that is still in our family, or a small farm in Michigan that wasn’t sold until after Dr. Blaine’s death. Other patients simply fell short of their obligations.

Except in large cities where there were wealthy clients, the average medical doctor in the early 20th century worked long, hard hours for only minimal gain.

A bookmark I ran across in a dusty library box says it all:

                    The Doctor

God and the Doctor / We alike adore,

Just on the brink of danger, / Not before.

The danger past, / Both are requited:

God is forgotten / And the Doctor slighted.

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Life Isn’t Linear

09 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by Nancy Clark in Writing Biographies

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

biography, characters, Dr. Blaine, old time doctor, old time doctors, writing biography

When I first started pulling together resources for my great-grandfather’s biography, I figured that it would be easy to organize: start at his birth and end at his death — right? Wrong again! Writing it that way, I soon discovered, was boring. No one wants to wade through pages of “He was born on…. When he was nine, he…. In 1877 he married…. He died in….” And after recalling biographies that I have read and enjoyed, I realized that good biographies are much more than just lists of events.

So, taking the advice of a writer friend, I began to look for stories to hang the facts on. And there are plenty of those. Implication in a grave robbery, two devastating fires, the early death of a son, a divorce, a trip to England right before the start of World War I — these are only a sample of what makes Dr. Harry Blaine’s life so compelling. Now that I am about halfway through a very rough draft, using stories as a way to organize all the bulging files of information I have collected seems to be working. They are certainly more interesting to write and hopefully will be more interesting to read.

One problem which still lingers, however, is what to do with portions of his life in which specific stories are lacking but which reveal more about his character. He was active in community affairs, for example, serving as mayor of Attica, Ohio, for one term. He also invested in a number of business ventures, but had an uncanny sense of picking largely unsuccessful ones. No compelling stories there, but important facts that round out who this man was. What do I do with those? Will it be possible to slide some factual chapters in between the stories and still keep the reader from nodding off? Maybe I’ll just have to wait and see how it all fits together and decide from there.

But that brings me back to my original question: How do I organize this mess? No one’s life is a straight line. Even in telling a story from my own life, I find myself circling around, backing up, filling in detail, flying off in tangents. Stories may be paramount, but what order do I put them in and how much backstory can I cram in without confusing — or boring the reader? People who write novels must share some of these same concerns, but they at least have the freedom to invent their way around obstacles. Writers of biography are stuck with the facts, just the facts, ma’am.

I’m already slipping out of that straight-jacket. And it feels liberating!

Comments – and advice – are welcome!

Dr. Blaine

Dr. Blaine

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How to Write Biography Right

03 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by Nancy Clark in Writing Biographies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

biography, historical fiction, old time doctor

Dr. Blaine 1889 Tiffin, OH

Dr. Blaine 1889 Tiffin, OH

While most of my writing friends are busy extracting story after story from their vast storehouses of imagination or musing about the significance of their lives in their memoirs, here I am still struggling with how to write a compelling biography about my great-grandfather Harry Gordon Blaine, a country doctor in northwest Ohio from around 1880 to his death in 1930. The idea came to me more than 25 years ago. With an abundance of source material at hand, how difficult would it be to reconstruct this man’s life? It would be just like writing a research paper, wouldn’t it? And, unlike many students, I always enjoyed the challenge of gathering lots of information on a topic and organizing it  into a coherent whole.

But after many long years of reading and researching, I finally decided it was time to start organizing and writing. And that  has been like trying to hold on to a slippery eel while balancing on one foot! Where should I start? Should it be organized in strict chronological order?  How much background and historical material should I include? How can I keep it lively enough so the reader will keep wanting more? What is my overarching theme? No research paper has ever been this hard!

My solution so far has been to find individual stories from Dr. Blaine’s life — there are many! — and write those, not worrying right now how they will all fit together in the end. I have also experimented with creating dialogue to help move the story along and have leaped to conclusions that may or may not be valid.

So if I continue in this vein, will I end up with a biography or with what some might call historical fiction? Whatever it may be labeled, my goal is to create a compelling story that will be an appropriate tribute to a remarkable, yet truly human man.

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