Fear of a Female Planet

This particular doctor owned a plantation himself and his family owned over 360 slaves on four plantations in Southwestern Mississippi. The system was pretty much a single payer system - a slave owner paid a doctor a certain amount per year, then the doctor had a fee chart (housecall: 2.50, Childbirth: 30.00, etc.) that deducted from what had initially been paid. By the start of the Civil War there were more doctors per capita in the South than the North, primarily because the slave system required a lot of medical attention. These doctors also treated freed people and whites, but slavery was a convenient "customer base."