a lot of these doctors were self-taught or worked under someone else who was self-taught. they were getting ready to retire. they would just learn as they went. this would be the room that you would come into for possibly a tooth-pulling, if they were going to take tonsils out, if they were going to remove an appendix. if they were going to deliver a baby. if you were going to do an eye exam, you came to the one exam room that they had, warmer weather, better days, people would sit outside and wait. if it was cold and nasty, middle of winter, everybody could easily be crammed into the exam room with maybe just a sheet pulled across the patient. privacy wasn't that huge of an important thing for them to have to have when you went to the doctor. so other things that make it scary to come to the doctor during this pioneer time is if you look at our exam table we

have, the exam table is -- it's all metal. this is a metal exam table. would they sterilized no? would there be the clean paper like when you go to the doctor today on the exam table? no. under our mannequin, there's actually a groove bent into the center tray of the exam table. and that groove runs into a pan which is basically called the blood pan and the blood groove. if the doctor was, say, removing an appendix, the blood would run around the side of the patient, into that groove and into the pan. and the smaller pan would allow the blood to drip into the larger pan on the floor. once the surgery was done, did they sterilize it? no. bucket of water and a rag. they would wash it off. that would be about as clean as they would get it. the same for their tools. a good doctor would have something similar to this, a wash basin. they would have water for washing their hands and a bar of soap. the soap they used was not anti-bacterial soap.

it was basically homemade lye soap. it was better than nothing. they would wash up and start to do their work. but think about it. there's no x-rays. there's nothing to render you unconscious for surgery. nothing to give you for pain, what we would say were really good painkillers. morphine had not been invented yet. ether had not been invented yet. you take our mannequin here and we'll say he was out breaking horses and he got thrown off a horse and he landed wrong. the unfortunate thing was when he landed he broke his leg. his foot is pointed in the wrong direction, we know it's broken because it's pointed in the wrong direction. we load him up in the wagon. they bring him into the doctor's office, five, seven miles on a bumpy road. they get him to the doctor. the doctor goes, yes, it's broken. and the doctor says, okay, the first thing we have to do is

we're going to have to try to get his boots off. they would have to remove the boots. in order to do that, the first thing they would have to do is rotate the leg back into the right position. that would just entail the doctor rotating the leg back with him screaming and hollering the entire time. something else the doctors would do that they don't do today is he would ask his buddy that brought him, i'm going to need your help. their job would be to pin him to the table while the doctor did his work. say i was the person who brought him in. my job would be to do this and pin him to the table while the doctor rotated that foot back up into the upright position. the doctor gets ready to take his boot off. and he digs around in his bag. he may just pull his pocket knife out and go to cut the leather on the boot. he may moan and groan and ask the doc not to cut his boots off. why not? simple reason.

it may be the only pair of shoes he had. so he would -- the doctor would then have to make the decision, do i cut his boot off or go by his wishes? he goes by his wishes. a doctor with a broken leg inside the boot manages to wrestle the boot loose. when he does, he hears a nice slurpee sound when the heel comes loose he hears it go -- when he does he gets the boot off. the pants leg is bloody. there's a bulge sticking out. the boot is full of blood. the reason for that is the bone has been exposed to the skin. so the doctor does his best -- remember, no painkillers, no x-ray. and the doctor has to try to set this bone. and the only way he knows how, so the first effort is going to be, he's going to take the heel and the foot and he's going to apply pressure and pull and see if he can pull the bone back under the skin. well, that works somewhat. but it doesn't work as well as it should. so then what is he going to do? he's going to grab the ankle and

take his fingers and put push it back through the hole that it's made through the skin and then push his finger in there so he can feel the bones and he's going to rotate the bone and foot around until he thinks he feels those bones come back together. and at that point, he's going to bandage it up, no plaster cast at this point. so what's he going to do? he's going to splint it. and splinting involves two boards. he would take two boards, one on each side of the leg. the wound would be bound. he would take the two boards, lay them side by side on there and then take some dressings and tightly wrap the board on and that would become the cast. they get him home, within ten days, maybe a little longer, the house starts getting this kind of foul odor to it. they notice there may be flies buzzing around the wound and

they fear -- their biggest fear is maybe it's got infected. of course, an infection was not something you wanted to get on any major scale because with gangrene setting in, they didn't have any antibiotics to apply to it or to even give them orally to try to fight the infection. you had to hope your body was strong enough to fight it off. if the infection set in, the cure-all for infection was an amputation. the doctor said, i was afraid it was going to happen, that it would get infected. why did it get infected? maybe because the doctor had his fingers in the wound. doing war he needed to do. but he had to do what he had to do in order to try to save the leg. now the infection's there and the doctor would have to come up above the infected area and remove the leg. and it would generally -- first amputation would be at the knee. they would come up maybe midpart of the thigh. they would use something very crude and very -- what we would say very crude.

but it would be an amputation kit. the amputactuati ky remove the limb. and most doctors would be pretty practiced in amputation, civil war because they had just had hundreds of thousands of patients to work on. so amputation was the route to go. so they would take their amputation tools. and the first one that they would have to use would be the scalpel. these are not nice and delicate tools, as you can see. it's long, very narrow, got a very sharp edge on it. the reason for the length is because this blade here would u through the thigh. through the top and out the bottom. then they would take the bone saw and the bone saw, very small teeth on it. and it would be used as it says to saw through the bone. and they would saw the boep as close up to the top as they could. they would cut the bone higher than the flesh would be when

they fdeey would fold it over the shortened bone and stitch that and that's what would make the stump. you would think that a lot of patients would dieery wi but it very effective surgery, done proper properly. we talk about doctor's office because we have a doctor's office here. a lot of times like i mentioned doctors were tenant farmers. so they farmed and they did -- also saddlebag doctors, doctors that not only stayed home bound at their doctor's office, but they would go out and roam the countryside and go to small communities. we have a great example of what the saddlebag doctors would carry. not only a saddlebag with a.m. amputation kit and surgical kits but a great example of a saddlebag doctor's kit that has all of the medicines he would have had and needed the time. you can see they're individually

hold, helded by leather straps. there's vials and bottles and the bottles lean out to gain access. top would have been areas where he kept spoons and smaller portions of medicines and whatnot. and this would all have been closed up and carried by the the doctor on horseback and this would be his medical bag. a lot of the medicines during this time had cocoa based. they were opium based. so sometimes they didn't really have true medical properties. it just made you feel real good that they were there. so but locally, things that they would use for medicines they would use things like dandelions, great for when you were constipated. think used willow bark, boil the willow bark down, scrape the residue out of the pot and that's the base ex-ingredient for an aspin. a great early painkiller.

one of my favorites that they used a tree called tickle tongue, what they would use prior to doing dental work. you can suck on it it will make your mouth go numb. not as good as novocaine but better than nothing. we'll move to the back. which was basically the doctor's dental office and also the pharmacy. there would be jars and vials of groundup powders and whatnot and he would make his own pills and medicines that way. and of course like i said they used things that would grow naturally. some of them actually did have some medicinal purposes and actually worked. some of them did not. a lot of recipes de thsh didn-- call them prescriptions -- were poise onnous. recipes that require that you put three drops of hemlock in it, very poise onnous. there's several that call for

crushed up buckeye seeds. buckeyes are poisonous. the rule of thumb was, a little could cure you, and a lot could kill you the doctor would have had his pharmacy. his scales for weighing the powders and whatnot and measuring out everything into the way he would have needed it. we mentioned this would have become the dentist's office as well. dental work is probably in my opinion, outside surgery, one of the scariest things people would have done during this time period. if you look here we have our dental chair and our dental drill. and our dental drill is referred to as a tretle drill. a tretle drill is just that it runs off a tretle like a sotomay sewing machine, but you would use foot power to get the belts turning and you can hear, it's nice and squeaky, imagine that dental drill sound and it would have that and that would go up and of course that would be what would

cause the drill bit to turn, and the dentist would use that to drill your teeth. our dental chair that you see here is a true dental chair and medical chair that would have been used, this was used in the s around 1886 by a local doctor south of town here. true blue medical chair. the reason we know it's a true blue medical chair, number one, by the design and by its function. so we know if you foot pedal here, the chair can lean back. you can get a lot of angle to the patient who's laying in the chair. but the big thing is, is the absence of any arms built on this chair, because in order for the doctor to be able to pull a tooth he had to keep you as immobile as he could. the patient would sit in the chair, back against the back and the doctor himself would step

over the patient and pin him to the chair so he could work on the patient's mouth and basically keep his body from moving around so much pulling of teeth, just kind of like today but not the novocaine or anything that they would give you. pliers were used and -- to remove impacted tooth. one of my favorite a tool called a tooth key. and the tooth key consist i've handle, a shaft and a hook, and it's a hinged hook. we'll pretend the fingertip is a tooth and you would hang that at the base of the gum right on the edge of the tooth and retate it around and using manpower and leverage you would rotate the tooth out of the gum line. we hear about george washington having wooden teeth. they weren't always wooden. as the years would go by, eventually they would start

making dentures and false teeth. if we look, we have ivory teeth that would be used, or porcelain, porcelain used a lot, too. but the unique things about these dentures are that they are toxic, because the base that they made and used they used lead to hold these teeth in place. so you pop these in your mouth and your gums are absorbent and they're pulling toxins out left and right. you wear them for a few weeks and you start feeling sickly, the doctor doesn't know about lead poisoning at the time. he tells you, stay off your feet for a few days hopefully you'll get to feeling better. your not going to wear your dentures in bed, so you set them on the table. you feel better, you're back on your feet. so you put your teeth back in. then you get sick again. so you know, you could get lead poisoning from wearing your dentures at the time. we talked about the doctors

themselves. regionally when you look at this time period 1830s to 1930s, if we go 1849 the records show there were only 87 doctors in the western half of louisiana. i mean, that's pretty scarce when you talk about a populous, a whole state. doctors like we said talked about them moving around. these doctors were much needed but you know always tell the kids on our turs when we do tours the next time you go to your doctor be sure to hug his or her neck or shake his or her hand and thank you because of the amount of time they issued into schooling and everything that they've done to help bring us into this modern world. all weekend long, american history tv is featuring shreveport, louisiana. learn more about shreveport and find out where c-span's local content vehicles are going next online at c-span.org/local

content. your watching american history tv. all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. >> there's a new website for american history tv where you can find our schedules and preview our upcoming programs. watch featured video from our regular weekly series as well as access history tweets, history in the news and social media from facebook, youtube, twitter, four square. follow american history tv all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3 and online c-span.org/history. february 2012 marked the 40th anniversary of president nixon's 1972 trip to china. coming up next, former ambassador, nicholas platt, who traveled to china with nixon, discusses how americans viewed china in the 1960s and '70s, and reflects on the politics of nixon's visit to china. this program is about 40 minutes.

>> well, that was a wonderful hour, mike. it really is a nice piece of history. let me start with you, max. and then next to you, mike. you suggested that there was kind of a real manipulation of this whole sort of epic journey. but what was the narrative you didn't get? i mean, if nixon hadn't been trying to make a giant campaign commercial out of this, what was it you would have gotten? >> oh, well, i spent about a week before we went at the cia and got myself briefed on who's who in china and what's going on in china. i had a longstanding relationship with kissinger after his secret trip. he was quite ready to boast about many of the things that happened. i had my head full and my notes

full of the diplomacy of the issue, the taiwan issue and so on. plenty to write about during this meeting. it was not hard to speculate about what was really going on behind the scenes and what they were talking about. on top of that, as this film well suggests, we spent a great deal of time sneaking away, not just to the university, but walking around town, the department store. i was covering china. and people at home were eating it up because this was the other side of the moon suddenly being exposed to american curiosities, something that -- and then finally there was the whole spectacle of this manipulated scene, which i could get above and write about, making fun even of cronkite and barbara walters and company, so that i had a lot of witty and sarcastic material as well to go with the very

heavy diplomacy. it was a great spectacle and a great joy. of course, i was writing with a fury that nixon had held us to one seat. we wanted help. our deadline was such that i had to file by breakfast in beijing. which meant i had to sit up all night writing and all day covering. there was no chance to sleep. it was a nightmare. and here we are. we survived. >> do you think, in retrospect, we have overplayed the significance and the meaning, game-changing significance of this trip? >> in nixonian terms, yes. the back story of all this is a piece of history that nixon and company and largely the republican party were responsible for creating the

china problem, for selling themselves so heavily to the support of taiwan and alienating not only communist chinese and having no dealings with them, while we were, in fact, having lots of dealings with the russians. but insisting that the democrats, if they made any approaches to china, would suffer for it politically because they had lost china to the communists. so what nixon was exploiting was the readiness of the american public, really, for a new relationship that our politicians had maneuvered themselves into preventing. and he himself personified that resistance to a new diplomacy with china. so the fact that he turned made this an epic event, as much in american politics as it was in international diplomacy.

so it was important in that sense. but we also were there because of the chinese were lusting for this relationship. the ping-pong was the overt first signal, the fact that my boss, james dresden, was in there even moments before kissinger was, much to nixon's annoyance, was proof that th chinese were reaching out to us because the triangular diplomacy of the enemy is my enemy is my friend that was occurring was as important to them as it was to us. therefore, i believe it would have happened sooner or later anyway. when i said flippantly, what would have happened if nixon had not gone, i said, i think ronald reagan would have gone. he would have enjoyed it immensely. he would not have said as he said in berlin, "tear down that wall."

[ laughter ] and by not tearing down that wall, i think history itself would have evolved in pretty much the same way as it has. >> so, mike, you've sat with all of this footage now for a long, long time. do you think this was just sort of a natural course of events, as max suggested, it was bound to happen? or was this some really innovative and significant insight that nixon and kissinger had had to foresee this -- >> i think there's truth in both of those things, i think max is right, eventually, sooner or later the logic of having a relationship with china and the lunacy of not having a relationship with china would have hit critical mass anyway. but i've been living and breathing this stuff for a long time. i think nixon and kissinger

deserve credit for sort of sussing out that there was a moment and acting on it. nixon's calculation was that only a guy like nixon could do this. and interestingly, i interviewed morally safer of "60 minutes" and he talks about having lunch with nixon in hong kong in 1967 and asking nixon -- wanting to ask nixon about vietnam and nixon saying, vietnam is not important, it's a sideshow. china is important. >> and he wrote an zblarl and he wrote an article about it. but what nixon said to safer was, the only person who can do an opening to china politically in the states would be a republican president because he was the one who had credibility with the people who were against it. if a democrat had been doing it, nixon would have been the first one to sort of get on the bandwagon and bait them for betraying taiwan and so on. he was able politically to do it and to sell it to a lot, not all, but a lot of the skeptics on the right by saying, well,

this is our great step to counter the soviet union and bring the chinese in on our side. and therefore, if we have to do certain things. so you have to give them credit. i'm a product of the 1960s, the anti-war movement. i was not exactly a fan of nixon growing up. but he's an extremely complicated figure who had great insights and pulled this off and was simultaneously the most petty, vindictive, conspiracier to -- and kissinger the same way. and when you look at their fear of losing control, it's almost like a split personality. they did this amazing thing with the other side of it that was not so nearly attractive. >> so, nick, you at this point were a young foreign service officer and i assume steeped in the ideology of the cold war and presumably

not particularly pro-communist. what was in your head when you were on this plane about to go to the land of the the antichrist, to bury the hatchet and to have your leader, president nixon, embrace these people who we had spent decades in opposition to? >> i was just pinching myself. this is a dream, you know? i had studied chinese in the early '60s. i'd spent year as a china analyst in hong kong, working with people like stan carno and the kalbs and so on and so forth. and the idea that we were actually going to go to china and that nixon and mao -- by the way, this took a lot of political will in both governments. and only people as powerful as nixon and mao were able to pull this off. >> but tell us about -- how did you all sort of repurpose your

brains from this sort of cold war perspective to suddenly, this is okay? >> my brain was already prepurposed. i wanted a relationship with china. i thought it was long overdue. we had operated under the analytical assumption that china and the soviet union were a united bloc, which was crazy. it was wrong. so much evidence that that was not so. and what nixon was doing was taking advantage for the first time in policy terms of the sino-soviet difficulties, sino-soviet split. and it completely changed the way the dynamics of international politics went. >> and how did the trip itself, max and nick, change your minds? when you landed there, you were of one frame of mind.

what frame of mind were you in when you left? >> well, when i left, i was still pinching myself. but i had come -- even in this strange bubble that we were in, no contact with the chinese other than our own particular minders, we had spent our time talking about sort of the nuts and bolts of a relationship to come, trade, travel, investment, legal issues, sports, culture, et cetera, et cetera. all of which ultimately became the relationship, after the triangular diplomacy came to an end. but my distinct memory, people asked me when i came back, what did you learn that you didn't know before? and i said, well, it's really silly for me to say this.

but i came away with the impression -- strong impression that communism is a very thin veneer and that this -- we were dealing with chinese. i'd been dealing with chinese from hong kong, from taiwan, so on and so forth. but that these people that we were dealing with were chinese. and they said, wow, is that what you learned? >> mike, how about you? >> i had two dominant impressions. one was, especially driving through the countryside, what a poor country this was. we knew that it was massively populated but we had -- i had no idea of the primitive nature of the agriculture that we witnessed as a bus was speeding through the country -- >> and you were seeing the best of it? >> that's right.

but even more vivid in my mind, because of the poverty, was going through beijing on my own, where possible, and mind you, i had spent three years in the soviet union. and i'd seen a great communist country and how it functioned and the terrible shortages and the sloppiness of life in moscow as i had experienced it. and here, going around beijing, the store that was selling multicolored ping-pong balls, magnificently arranged in a retail fashion that you could never have seen in moscow. somebody else -- another store had crayons and drawing paper and a few primitive art supplies. but the pride of display, not done for us, but this was in the normal run of things.