Gone are the days of your family doctor coming to the house with his little medical bag to tend to his patients. Also gone are the days when payment for that house call could be made with a chicken or jars of homemade jams. Most small towns had at least one such doctor and Holly Springs was lucky to have had Dr. Benjamin Wise Burt.
Born in the Buckhorn area in 1862 to parents Rev. John Henderson and Nancy Rollins-Burt, Dr. Burt received his Doctor of Medicine from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Baltimore, Maryland in 1886 and soon hung his shingle out in the Holleman’s Crossroads area. He married first Ida Rollins, who passed in 1894, and then Lenna Judd in 1896.
His daughter, Lois Burt-Burkheimer, related in interviews with Elizabeth Reid Murray and was quoted in the book WAKE Capital County of North Carolina that “my father had special certificates hung in our hall–one for diseases of the heart, another for female diseases.” Murray writes in her book, “With patients in Chatham, Harnett and Wake counties, he was often away overnight and occasionally two nights when delivering babies. His horse, ‘Old Dan,’ knew the country roads, so Dr. Burt would catch up on his sleep on the return trip after an overnight childbirth case, knowing Dan would get him safely home.” His daughter added that her father would wake up, back the buggy into the buggy house, unhitch Dan and lead him to his stall. Sometimes he kept his shotgun, his hunting jacket and his Irish setter, Bruno, in the buggy in case he might find time to hunt or fish while out on house calls.
Murray describes in her book that Dr. Burt had a two-room, white clapboard office building next to the family’s home. The front room had only an open counter and no other furnishing, the back room was filled with shelves of medicine. Burt’s daughter remembers that patients often came to the front porch of their home for treatment. She said she saw a tooth pulled in the front yard once and treatment with a syringe for hard accumulated ear wax.
Dr. Burt never worried about collecting fees, his daughter proudly reminisced in WAKE Capital County of North Carolina, and his wife chided him for not sending bills, even though he had custom stationery. She added, “When a patient was unable to pay for medicines, he would say, ‘Just a moment, I believe I have some samples in my office that will help you.’” He did not use herbal medicine but often consulted the “Great Physician” as his daughter recalls him pacing the hall at night in prayer for one patient or another.
By 1919, Dr. Burt moved into downtown Holly Springs according to Druscie Simpson who lives in his old residence on Raleigh Street. The beautiful home, which Simpson states was originally a one-story cottage with the second story added on in the 1940s, boasts heart of pine floors, four fireplaces and its original transom window over the front door. The majestic magnolia trees in the front yard add to the quaintness of this true Southern Belle.
With the move into town, Dr. Burt now hung his shingle for his general practice on the second floor of the “Drug Store” owned by William Lonnie “Father” Price, where Price’s son-in-law, Cecil Shaw, served as the druggist. The apothecary-display case from the now-razed building, which sat approximately where My Way Tavern is currently located, was purchased by the Holly Springs Historical Preservation Society from the estate of James Wright and can be appreciated in the lobby of Town Hall.
There is no doubt that Dr. Burt sat at the bedside of many of Holly Springs’s early families during times of blessings and sorrows. The “bedside manner” of these old country doctors has disappeared with the passing of years. It took a compassionate soul to manage horrors of returning Dough Boys from World War I, to understand the randomness of the Spanish Flu, to explain to parents the ravages of polio or measles, to understand how typhus spreads and to feel the defeat of the short-fallings of current medical methods.
I wonder what Dr. Burt would think of the countless medical offices, the new hospitals, the drug stores on every corner, the “doc-in-a-boxes” and the availability of health care for every ailment there is. I think he might hitch up “Old Dan” and ride around town and smile. .
