Ledgers are highly important in giving us a glimpse and understanding of day to day healthcare and how doctors practiced medicine in the 19th century. Major events like medical breakthroughs are often studied and wrote about, but ledgers like Dr. Chamberlain’s offers us a valuable lesson on how everyday people were treated.

Physicians were essentially business owners and ledgers provided a way to keep track of their finances in order to turn a profit. This meant recording every single charge, as well as any personal payments made.

Daybooks were also popular for physicians during the 19th century. Daybooks were notepads that could be easily carried around and the physicians could record daily interactions with patients, as well as any purchases made by the individual. Ledgers would be larger books that had patients in alphabetical order that physicians could fill in with information from their day book when they had time to do so. Based on the information in Dr. Chamberlain’s books, they very well could be daybooks rather than ledgers.

References

Jones, Jonathan. (2018). What Can (and Can’t) We Learn From 19th Century Physicians’ Account Books? Fugitive Leaves. http://histmed.collegeofphysicians.org/19th-century-physicians-account-books/