There was often only one doctor left in a community, be it a large town like Fort Worth or several small towns that were close enough together for him to travel back and forth. This was logically the result of the doctors being “drafted” or joining up with the medical core for the duration of the war.
Medicines were either wholly unavailable or outrageously priced. Therefore, most people, with or without the encouragement of their doctor, used their own home remedies. These mainly revolved around tinctures of opium, if they had it. It was gold to the medical community then. If you had a cough, you might be fed a compound of honey diluted with sulphuric acid and tincture of opium. For a chest cold or feverish pains the concoction would be more like quinine, camphor gum, a dash of silver sulphate and opium tincture.
