Pioneer Doctors of Coos County Oregon. This item is unavailable.Pioneer Doctors of Coos County Oregon

At his retirement party in 1984, after serving the Coos Bay, Oregon, community as a physician and surgeon for 50 years, Dr. Ennis Keizer captured the Keizer family's simple but decades-long and deep dedication to medical science and service to the area as follows: "... There is a great deal of satisfaction in being a doctor. It's kind of nice to go home and have [had] someone say, if it hadn't been for you ...." Many of us have had those exact feelings about our medical professionals at one time or another, and hopefully most of us have told them so.

After reading about the numerous Keizer family doctors and nurses, who had collectively dedicated almost 100 years to the medical profession in the region, the author William A. Lansing, sought out other stories about early doctors in Coos County, Oregon. Though information was quite limited, Lansing was able to find enough snippets in local newspapers and medical journals to assemble a variety of stories about these early medical pioneers. Some are brief and others longer; many dates (especially for photos) were simply unavailable, and several doctors' time of service to the people of Coos County could only be surmised through advertisements they made in the local papers. But even the briefest of entries adds to the richness of the community's history. 

Names such as Drs. Horsfall, Bartle, McKeown, Straw and Haydon may resonate with people still living today, while others such as Drs. Wolf, Wetmore, Angell, Culin and Hodson may not. In total, the Pioneer Doctors of Coos County, Oregon covers 40 physicians (mostly those with medical degrees-but a few with only minimal formal medical training), who practiced in the area-the bulk of them starting from around the turn of the twentieth century through the 1940s, and some a bit beyond that era. 

The book also expands into the history of the hospitals in Coos County, as well as pioneer dentists and the area's early drug stores. And for fun, there's a chapter on "quackery"-featuring those whose ads for cure-all remedies splashed throughout the classified pages of local newspapers for decades.

William A. "Bill" Lansing is the former President and CEO of Menasha Forest Products Corporation headquartered in North Bend, Oregon. He and his wife, Ann, have made their home in North Bend since 1969, and there they raised two sons, Brent and Kurt. Bill grew up in a rural part of northern California and was in the first four-year graduating class of Colfax High School. From there, he went on to receive college degrees from Sierra College, Humboldt State College and Yale University. Since retirement, he has devoted his time to researching and writing local history books on numerous topics about southwestern Oregon. The Author recalls: "Remembering my early introduction to the family doctor in Nevada City, California, in the late 1940s and early 1950s brings forth the memory of getting a penicillin shot in the posterior-and for not crying I got a lollipop. I still recall the smell of the alcohol dip the nurse used to sterilize the mercury thermometer and the eternity required to hold it under my tongue for one minute without opening my mouth to breathe. How things have changed."