An Amish House Call

• Knowledge, attitudes, practice
• House calls
• Onions
• Bronchitis
• Physician practice patterns

Making house calls was exhausting. It was late afternoon, time for the Sunday meal, and he was dead tired. Fortunately, these were familiar back roads in the county where he had practiced for many years, and there was only one more name on the list. He glanced briefly at the note. It gave the address of a woman who needed a vitamin B₁₂ shot. He found the house, well known to him from previous visits, pulled the car into the driveway, parked it, got out, and went to the side door. The family was sitting at the table, about to eat dinner. He knocked on the screen door, said that he had to do something briefly, and told the patient she could get back to her meal in just a moment. They walked into the deserted parlor, where he had her hike up her skirt. He filled the syringe, wiped the site with alcohol, injected her hip, and placed a small bandage. She paid him and escorted him to the door. She waved good-bye from the porch as he got into his car to drive home. A mile and a half down the road, he realized with horror that he had misread the note and gone to the wrong address.

She thought he was wonderful—after all, he was a doctor who not only treated her when she was sick, but anticipated things in advance—for instance, when she might need an extra B₁₂ injection.

That story was told to me in the doctors' lounge of the hospital. It was 1984; I was fresh out of residency and listening to the senior physicians tell their tales of medicine when they first started to practice. The storyteller was the doctor involved, an older, well-loved physician who had spent his career treating …