By Mike Rainone for the News
...The delightful and vivid new feature is called ‘The Doctor’s Office’ and is located in the museum’s exciting display room, which very authentically reveals and tells the exciting and colourful stories from over a century of history, challenges, and successes for countless generations of hardy pioneer families and individuals of all ages. I have to admit that I was quite overwhelmed and just a little bit squeamish to see and even touch some of those ominous stainless steel instruments that our skilled early physicians actually used to endeavour to bravely treat, solve, and cure the countless ailments of their early patients.
Just the names of some of these first humble medical utensils may scare you just a little, but they included: forceps and snares to remove tonsils and adenoids, a bone nibbler, an endoscope tube, bowel forceps, dental forceps, abdominal retractor and suction, metal catheter, rectal scope, a tuning fork, oral irrigator, skin graft knife, bone cutter and cordette, a 1908 microscope, a mercury sphygmomanometer, and all sorts of very sharp and shiny scissors, tweezers, and scalpels. In those rugged early days there were very few hospitals, and many of the sudden surgeries, treatments, and deliveries had to be performed in the physician’s office, kitchen table, or elsewhere in dark and tight conditions under the dim light of the fireplace, stove, or lantern, with only the assistance of a nurse, midwife, husband, wife, or neighbour.
Also included in this great family display is a replica of how one of the first doctor’s offices in Ponoka may have looked and greeted patients starting way back in the early 1900s. Featured are an original wooden wheelchair, infant’s cradle and weight scales, the good physician’s bag on a tiny desk, prescriptions written by Dr. Melvin Graham in 1919, original babies bottles, a medicine cabinet full of everything from epsom salts to castor oil, an original (what must have been really cold) ceramic bedpan, and so much more in this grand salute to early local medicine...
From the Ponoka News