Dr. William Erastus Platt

The dining room table

Sometime in the 1890s, in a clapboard house in Safford, Arizona, a man presented with acute appendicitis. The nearest hospital was a hundred miles of dust and creosote away. Dr. William Erastus Platt cleared the dishes from his family's dining room table, sterilized a butcher knife and a set of kitchen utensils, and performed an emergency appendectomy. The patient survived. In the Gila Valley of the 1890s, the alternative to improvisation was death.

This scene, published decades later in the peer-reviewed journal Arizona Medicine, was no tall tale. It was a Thursday. Platt's daughter Clara remembered it the way other children remembered holiday dinners: matter-of-factly, because the dining room table served as operating surface, recovery ward, and mortuary slab in steady rotation.

Every room in the Platt house served double duty. Patients occupied the bedrooms. When a patient died, the body stayed in the house until burial, because Dr. Platt owned the one and only mortuary in Safford. His children grew up understanding that home was also hospital, pharmacy, and funeral parlor.

A mail driver's ambition

William Erastus Platt was born on October 30, 1858, in Fillmore, Utah. His parents were part of the LDS pioneer migrations pushing south through the territory, and the family would later settle in the colonies of northern Arizona. Young William started working as a mail driver, hauling correspondence across the vast distances between isolated settlements. The job required endurance, self-reliance, and an intimate knowledge of terrain. All three would serve him later.

In 1883, he married Isabell Hill Romney in the St. George Temple. Isabell was a granddaughter of Miles Park Romney, one of the most prominent Latter-day Saint colonizers of the Southwest. The Romney connection would later link the Platt family to Michigan Governor George W. Romney and, through him, to Senator Mitt Romney.

Platt earned his medical degree from the University of Louisville in 1893, at the age of thirty-four. Louisville's medical school, founded in 1837, was one of the oldest west of the Alleghenies. A frontier mail driver from Utah Territory studying alongside the sons of Kentucky planters would have been conspicuous. He returned west carrying credentials that fewer than fifty men in all of Arizona could match.

The tea towel telegraph

He practiced first in St. Johns, Apache County, where he ran a drug store for six years and learned five Indian tribal languages. Around 1900, he moved to the Gila Valley, settling in Safford, where he received Arizona medical license number 41. He also held a financial interest in the Apache Drug Company, the same pharmacy that his future son-in-law George Nicholas Goodman would eventually make famous in Mesa.

In an era before household telephones reached rural Arizona, Dr. Platt's patients developed their own communications system. When someone in the family fell sick, they hung a white tea towel on the wooden gate outside their property. Platt would spot these flags from his horse and buggy as he made his circuit, pulling up to isolated ranches to treat everything from catastrophic farm machinery accidents to sweeping infectious diseases.

The tea towel system sounds quaint now. In practice, it represented a distributed triage network covering hundreds of square miles of punishing desert. A single physician, riding alone across territory where a thrown horseshoe could mean a day's delay, scanning the horizon for a scrap of white fabric. The system demanded that Platt maintain a reliable circuit and that his patients trust his regularity. If the towel went up on Monday, you could expect the doctor by Wednesday. That certainty, in a place where certainty was scarce, was itself a form of medicine.

Two hundred tonsils in two days

Isabelle Hill Romney Platt died on June 8, 1919, at age fifty-six, after a sudden illness lasting only a few days. She was born March 3, 1863, in Salt Lake City. Eleven children were born to them; five died young, six survived.

After Isabelle's death, Platt threw himself deeper into his work. One extraordinary episode survives in the record. He organized a mass tonsillectomy for the school children of the valley. With the assistance of his three eldest daughters and a Dr. T.H. Slaughter of Miami, Arizona, surgery began at six o'clock in the morning and continued until late at night, two days running. By the end of the second day, more than two hundred school children were minus their tonsils.

The logistics are staggering. Each child required individual anesthesia, the procedure itself, recovery monitoring, and discharge. Two hundred procedures in roughly thirty hours of operating time means one tonsillectomy every nine minutes, sustained across two full days. The three Platt daughters, trained by years of assisting their father, served as surgical nurses, anesthetists, and recovery ward attendants simultaneously.

The pharmacist daughters and a medical dynasty

Dr. Platt's influence extended well beyond his own practice. He owned pharmacies in Pima, Thatcher, and Safford. Two of his daughters became registered pharmacists, learning the trade in his drug stores before pursuing formal credentials. Three of his grandsons became physicians. The medical dynasty that the Goodman family carries today traces its origins to this man, his dining room table, and the tea towels on the gates of the Gila Valley.

His daughter Clara Platt grew up watching her father meticulously measure and compound raw ingredients into medicines using brass scales and glass mortars. She attended Tempe Normal School (now Arizona State University), then completed pharmacy school in Los Angeles in 1918. She married George Nicholas Goodman, who had apprenticed as a teenager in Platt's own Gila Valley pharmacies. Together they co-founded Apache Drug on Main Street in Mesa, and George served five terms as mayor.

Clara transmitted the "Healer of the West" archetype from her father's generation to the next. Two of her sons entered medicine: Harold Richard became an optometrist, and Clifford James became the physician who founded Chandler Community Hospital. Clifford's son, Dr. Clifford Goodman Jr., went on to found MomDoc, now Arizona's largest independent OB/GYN practice. The through-line from Platt's butcher-knife appendectomy to twenty-one MomDoc offices across the Salt River Valley runs straight through Clara's childhood apprenticeship in those back rooms.

The last circuit

Dr. Platt practiced medicine in the Gila Valley for over forty years. In 1939, and again in 1941, testimonial dinners were held in his honor, covered by the Arizona Daily Star. He died on November 13, 1941, at the age of eighty-two. The whole town turned out for the funeral.

In January 1969, twenty-eight years after his death, the journal Arizona Medicine published a full profile of him. The article, written by Audrey D. Stevens, ran under the headline that the valley had already given him decades earlier: Healer of the West. It concluded with a catalog of his professional life that doubles as a portrait of frontier Arizona itself: a man who learned five languages to treat his patients, who rode a horse and buggy because there were no roads, who operated with kitchen implements because there was no hospital, and who taught his daughters to compound drugs because there was no one else.