Watch the video
To see a video of Tom Fey and John Ochsner performing the Dr. Dodge story, visit tinyurl.com/drdodge.
The Green County Historical Society meets at 6:30 p.m. on the third Wednesdays of the month at the Monroe Public Library, 925 16th Ave. Upcoming presentations include a history of Doris and Edwin Blair's dolls by Christie Strait (Feb. 20) and "The Evolution of the Coffee Cup" by Linda Schiesser (March 20).
TOWN OF SYLVESTER - Once upon a time in Green County lived a clairvoyant healer so skilled he once cured a man who'd had a lizard living inside his belly since the Civil War.
Dr. John Dodge practiced his trance-inspired medicine in the mid-1800s on a farm southwest of Albany, in the Town of Sylvester. He died in 1889 and is buried a few miles away under a fungus-encrusted marble headstone at the Gap Cemetery on Wisconsin 59.
Tom Fey, a Monroe history enthusiast, has studied Dr. Dodge on and off for more than 20 years. In 1990, he got hold of a reel-to-reel tape recording of a man who worked for Dr. Dodge as a boy.
John Brandt was 84 in 1958 when his nephew, Roger Elmer, recorded him talking in his kitchen in Brodhead.
Fey eventually transcribed the first half of this conversation - a task that took him about 15 hours - and now reenacts it with his friend and fellow historian John Ochsner. The pair most recently reenacted the story of Dr. Dodge for about 40 people at the Green County Historical Society's monthly meeting Wednesday.
Ochsner, who lives near Albany, plays the inquisitive nephew, while Fey plays Uncle John. Uncle John's wife, Aunt Dora, also has a small part when she chimes in to correct her husband on historical details. It's an engaging enactment and provides a glimpse of daily life 140 years ago in Green County. Given a little tightening and direction, "The Dr. Dodge Tapes" would make a good production for a community theater group to take on.
Fey still has half of Uncle John's conversation with Elmer to transcribe. He's already transferred the conversation onto cassette tape and CD and donated the original reels to the Wisconsin Historical Society for preservation.
Uncle John came from a large family of at least nine kids. His parents were too poor to support him, so they made a deal with their neighbor Dr. Dodge. The boy would do chores around the farm in exchange for food and lodging. He lived there from age 10 to 14.
Among Uncle John's tasks was writing down the diagnosis and prescription that came to Dr. Dodge when he fell into a trance to treat a patient. One prescription, dated May 8, 1882, advised mixing equal amounts soda, ginger, bismuth, magnesia and consuming the tincture in "two tablespoons of pure water in the middle of the fore and afternoon."
Dr. Dodge told the same patient, diagnosed as having a "rather inactive" liver, to "put one tablespoon of pulverized charcoal in two-thirds of a pint of new milk to drink."
Not all his prescriptions were so complex. He once told the father of two sick boys they were "just plum full of green apples."
The self-proclaimed doctor often made his diagnosis and prescription without actually seeing the patient. Ailing people from as far away as Chicago would send him a lock of hair to evaluate for a prescription. Uncle John recalls Dr. Dodge receiving boxes of letters weekly from across the region.
One day Dr. Dodge read in a Chicago paper about a man who believed a lizard living in his belly was causing "awful pains that seemed to move around in him and if he'd eat heavy, it sort of quieted down." Dr. Dodge offered to heal him and get rid of the amphibian.
"Well, the man told them it was a live lizard," Uncle John later recounted to his nephew. "When he was in the Civil War, it was awful dry and he laid down and he'd drink water out of a crick or a ditch." The man speculated he drank in the lizard then. By the time Dr. Dodge heard of the situation, the animal "weighed five or six pounds and it was a pretty big lizard."
Dr. Dodge prescribed him a medicine and through his clairvoyant powers was even able to tell the man where to find it on the shelf at his neighborhood drugstore in Chicago. The medicine worked in days. The lizard passed "in pieces through his bowels," Uncle John recalled. "The third day he was all a new man."
Dr. John Dodge practiced his trance-inspired medicine in the mid-1800s on a farm southwest of Albany, in the Town of Sylvester. He died in 1889 and is buried a few miles away under a fungus-encrusted marble headstone at the Gap Cemetery on Wisconsin 59.
Tom Fey, a Monroe history enthusiast, has studied Dr. Dodge on and off for more than 20 years. In 1990, he got hold of a reel-to-reel tape recording of a man who worked for Dr. Dodge as a boy.
John Brandt was 84 in 1958 when his nephew, Roger Elmer, recorded him talking in his kitchen in Brodhead.
Fey eventually transcribed the first half of this conversation - a task that took him about 15 hours - and now reenacts it with his friend and fellow historian John Ochsner. The pair most recently reenacted the story of Dr. Dodge for about 40 people at the Green County Historical Society's monthly meeting Wednesday.
Ochsner, who lives near Albany, plays the inquisitive nephew, while Fey plays Uncle John. Uncle John's wife, Aunt Dora, also has a small part when she chimes in to correct her husband on historical details. It's an engaging enactment and provides a glimpse of daily life 140 years ago in Green County. Given a little tightening and direction, "The Dr. Dodge Tapes" would make a good production for a community theater group to take on.
Fey still has half of Uncle John's conversation with Elmer to transcribe. He's already transferred the conversation onto cassette tape and CD and donated the original reels to the Wisconsin Historical Society for preservation.
Uncle John came from a large family of at least nine kids. His parents were too poor to support him, so they made a deal with their neighbor Dr. Dodge. The boy would do chores around the farm in exchange for food and lodging. He lived there from age 10 to 14.
Among Uncle John's tasks was writing down the diagnosis and prescription that came to Dr. Dodge when he fell into a trance to treat a patient. One prescription, dated May 8, 1882, advised mixing equal amounts soda, ginger, bismuth, magnesia and consuming the tincture in "two tablespoons of pure water in the middle of the fore and afternoon."
Dr. Dodge told the same patient, diagnosed as having a "rather inactive" liver, to "put one tablespoon of pulverized charcoal in two-thirds of a pint of new milk to drink."
Not all his prescriptions were so complex. He once told the father of two sick boys they were "just plum full of green apples."
The self-proclaimed doctor often made his diagnosis and prescription without actually seeing the patient. Ailing people from as far away as Chicago would send him a lock of hair to evaluate for a prescription. Uncle John recalls Dr. Dodge receiving boxes of letters weekly from across the region.
One day Dr. Dodge read in a Chicago paper about a man who believed a lizard living in his belly was causing "awful pains that seemed to move around in him and if he'd eat heavy, it sort of quieted down." Dr. Dodge offered to heal him and get rid of the amphibian.
"Well, the man told them it was a live lizard," Uncle John later recounted to his nephew. "When he was in the Civil War, it was awful dry and he laid down and he'd drink water out of a crick or a ditch." The man speculated he drank in the lizard then. By the time Dr. Dodge heard of the situation, the animal "weighed five or six pounds and it was a pretty big lizard."
Dr. Dodge prescribed him a medicine and through his clairvoyant powers was even able to tell the man where to find it on the shelf at his neighborhood drugstore in Chicago. The medicine worked in days. The lizard passed "in pieces through his bowels," Uncle John recalled. "The third day he was all a new man."