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E.C. Masters practiced medicine in "Swamp East Missouri"
When Dr. E.C. Masters came to Advance in 1938, the area was about as primitive as it was possible for a small Missouri town to be. Doctors during this period of time had no penicillin, tetracyclines or mycins, so malaria, pneumonia, and other diseases were common causes of death.
Southeast Missouri is notoriously referred to as "Swamp East Missouri," and with good reason. Before the massive draining project that the Little River Drainage District conducted from 1914 to 1928, most of this part of the country was uninhabitable.
The project was the "largest drainage project in the world" at the time, creating almost 1,000 miles of ditches and 304 miles of levees. More dirt was moved than was moved in building the Panama Canal.
Dr. Masters reports in his 1980 autobiography that malaria became chronic, so most people over the age of 50 developed rheumatic hearts.
Before Masters built his clinic in 1950, he practiced from the back room of the old Kinder's Drug Store for several years, traveling by wagon and mule-powered mud sled into the remote regions of swampland in North Stoddard County.
In his autobiography, Masters describes one unbelievable incident when he was called out to see a patient in "Kinder swamps":
"I closed my office and ate a bite and got down there, and here Mr. Bidewell was at the railroad junction and he said, 'Well, here's a mule. You get on this mule and just let him go and he'll take you there; he'll go back home.' Of course, I didn't know the way down through those swamps. I'd never been down in this particular area, and I didn't know where Mr. Walker lived or anything else, but he told me, 'Just let the mule have his way, and he'll take you there.'
"Well, I got my bag and got on the mule. It happened to be in the early spring, still cold, the water was covered with a thin skim of ice. It was dark and I had to stay in a position to keep the limbs from hitting me in the face going down through the swamps. We'd get in water all the way from knee deep on the mule all the way to belly deep, and I'd have to lay my legs up on the top of the mule to keep from getting my feet wet. You know, we fooled around in that swamp all night long, and I just about froze to death. In fact, if it had not been for the heat from the mule's body, I don't know what I'd have done, because I hugged that mule all night long in order to stay warm."
When he finally found the house, he had to pack a man's nose to make it quit bleeding - just one of many unusual cases in which the old doc had to be innovative in figuring out how to solve a multitude of medical problems with hardly any supplies.
Advance Mayor James J. Harnes, Sr., in recalling the stories he'd heard, repeated one told to him by Dr. L.A. Masters, E.C. Masters' cousin. Dr. L.A. practiced with Dr. E.C. for a period of time, and they shared some of the same experiences. Dr. L.A. remembered going out in the middle of the night to deliver a baby, only to discover that the woman was not ready, so the exhausted doctor lay down on the bed beside the woman and took a nap until she was ready to have the baby. Dr. E.C. shares an identical story in his autobiography.
Rusty Newton recalls a scene she once witnessed in her father's clinic.
"I was in there one day after school, when a bunch of people brought a young blonde girl in with a head injury so bad that I could see pieces of her brain showing," Newton remembers. "My dad sewed her up, and she survived. He was always getting people with really traumatic injuries brought in from the Wappapello area. He would fix them up and send them on to Cape. His clinic worked like a M.A.S.H. unit in time of war."
Dr. E.C. Masters described several miraculous operations in which he sewed severed fingers back on, and in one case, he sewed a man's neck back together, when the steering wheel of his car went straight through. The man insisted on going home to Marquand without going to the hospital, and, remarkably, he lived. He came to see Dr. Masters years later to prove he was still alive.
Dr. Ed Masters, who practiced in the clinic with his father from 1972 to 1974, describes their practice as like an emergency room.
"We did everything," explained Dr. Ed Masters. "I remember one day after lunch, I was seeing a patient, when someone said, 'Dr. Masters, come quick!' I went to the back of the clinic, where they had brought in a man who had tried to commit suicide. He had a through-and-through gunshot wound in his head. We fixed him up the best we could, but he died on the way to the hospital. We saw everything from an acute heart attack and severe trauma, to a ruptured tubule pregnancy."
Dr. Ed Masters confirmed that the clinic delivered some 4,500-5,000 babies during the years it was in operation.
One of the things Dr. E.C. Masters was proud of was the number of doctors he had brought in and located in the area. He tells in his autobiography that he located 27 doctors in and around Advance, from Lutesville to Bernie. These doctors consulted with each other quite often.
However, Dr. E.C. Masters' influence on the community spread much farther than the medical profession. When he came to Advance, there was no sewer and water, no fire department, no paved streets, hardly any street lights, no city hall, and no marshall. To make matters worse, 84 city wells were contaminated, and there were knife fights every Saturday night.
"Advance was not a safe place for anyone to bring his family, especially on Saturdays," Dr. E.C. Masters wrote. "I never had any family practice on Saturdays. It just wasn't a safe place for women and children to be. In fact, there's been, I believe, seven different people killed on the streets in Advance, from fighting and at Cash Corbin's place by the Greenbrier Junction, and Hamlin's place in Sturdivant. I would stay up late patching people up from fights. They'd slash each other with knives something terrible. I've had numerous times when I'd put a hundred sutures in people who'd been stabbed with a knife. "
In fact, Dr. E.C. admitted that these lawless conditions were the main reason he became mayor. Pulling together other members of the community, such as Ed Mirley, Dr. Masters succeeded in getting a public water system, a fire truck, a city hall, a factory, and street lights. One subdivision in the city is called the "Masters Subdivision."
Thus, the legacy left behind by this remarkable man extends far into the Advance community, even to this day. He would be gratified to know that his grandson, Reid Masters, graduated at the top of his class at the University of Illinois School of Medicine and became a Navy physician, married to a classmate who is also a doctor. Two more doctors named Masters embarked into the future.