The Midwest Pioneer, His Ills, Cures, & Doctors

^^iil!§SMlgSilil;lii;iliHiilin^^ LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN IN MEMORY OF STEWART S. HOWE JOURNALISM CLASS OF 1928 STEWART S. HOWE FOUNDATION THE MIDWEST PIONEER HIS ILLS, CUKES & DOCTORS THE DOCTOR ON HORSEBACK THE MIDWEST PIONEER HIS ILLS, CURES & DOCTORS By MADGE E. PICKARD and R. CARLYLE BULEY HENRY SCHUMAN New York 1946 Copyright 1945 by R. Carlyle Buley Pb Z>^rr L hier K To the 'Pioneer Doctor who boldly jaced the wilderness; and to the Pioneer who bravely jaced the Doctor, ^0 FOREWORD 1 n this book, first published in a Hmited edition in 1945, the authors have endeavored to render a brief, non-tech- nical but substantial account of pioneer medicine in the Middle West. They have found the subject quite interesting and believe that it has importance as a chapter in the social history of the region and period. Their goal has been set some- what short of that of the western doctor who, a century ago, launched a short-lived medical periodical with the intent "to treat of the general principles, laws, and phenomena of mind and matter: the world within us, and the world with- out us; commencing at the perfection of nature, or man; and travel down through all stages of animal existence. From man to brute life, from animal to plant, from plant to crystal, from crystal to clod, from intellect to feeling, from feeling to form, from form to shapeless matter; from the most inveterate disease to the mildest complaint; from the strongest remedy to soothing means, from simple to compound, from pills to powders. We shall endeavor to follow the footsteps of nature through the nice, and ever descending scale of that which surrounds us." The older spellings have been used for Pittsburgh and Cleveland in contemporary references, and newspaper cita- tions are to the titles which the papers carried at the time. Though documentation has been reduced to the barest essentials and the bibliography streamlined, it is hoped that enough remains to serve as a guide to the more curious or ambitious student of midwest medical history. Special thanks are due Mr. Paul Angle of the Chicago Historical Society, who permitted Dr. Carter's monumen- tal work to leave his guardianship on divers occasions, and to Mr. R. E. Banta of Crawfordsville who did likewise with that of Dr. Smith. The authors trust that these two doctors and some of their contemporaries would in no wise be piqued at any pubKcity given their rather pecuHar and naive thoughts. After all, they brought it upon themselves. Bloomington, Indiana July, 1946. M. E. P. R. C. B. " CONTENTS I. "HE'S AILIN' II. HOME REMEDIES AND DOMESTIC MEDICINE III. DOCTORS: BLEED, BLISTER, AND PURGE IV. "THE PEOPLE'S DOCTORS" V. MEDICAL ODDS: ANIMA TO ZOOTES VI. "WHO IS A DOCTOR?" VIL NIRVANA IN BOTTLES — DRUGS AND "PATENTS" NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE "HES AILIN' jj CHAPTER I ^^The dawn will break 7ipon us, and bright day shall go forth and shine; when we may hope to live with the dear objects of our love, until ripe and full of years, we shall be gathered to our fathers" —Dr. Samuel Robinson, Lecture IX, Cincinnati, 1829. X he pioneer wife was alone with her children. The Indians around the cabin, though bent on grabbing hot bread rather than scalps, were getting out of hand. When one started to crawl through the cabin window, she cracked him on the skull with the wooden potato masher, pulled him on in, and barred the shutter. A while later a some- what more sober Indian was pushed out the cabin door to find his companions. The wound and contusion on his head had been bathed in cold cider vinegar and neatly bound in a poultice of squirrel brains and crushed ginseng leaves. So well did the job meet with the Indians' approval that thereafter, when they more politely asked for the hot bread which was, next to liquor, their greatest weakness, there was much thumping of skulls and grunting laughter. A man was riding across the prairies one warm winter day, when the temperature began to fall precipitately. Within a few hours it was well below zero. The rider was lightly clothed, and it was miles to the nearest house. Though he valued his horse, he valued his life more. When he felt himself beginning to freeze, he sacrificed the animal, gutted the carcass, crawled inside, and lived to tell the tale. A pioneer husband was called back to his cabin from the clearing where he worked to confront the emergency of a premature delivery. The six-year old daughter was dispatched through the woods to a neighbor's, but the trail was rough, and help was slow in coming. Relying upon common sense and his experience with cows and sheep, the farmer officiated at the birth of his first son. A doctor found his patient unable to deliver herself of child. Whatever was to be done had to be done quickly. In an unfloored and unchinked cabin, by the light of candles shielded by blankets to prevent their being blown out, with a case of ordinary pocket instruments he per- formed a successful Caesarian section, probably the first in the West. A strange young man stepped into the grocery filled with Irish canal laborers assembled around the whiskey barrel. After a few minutes he announced that within three weeks one-fourth of those present would die of smallpox. Since there was no smallpox in the region, his statement was received with derision. But the smallpox came, and with it many deaths. Impressed with the accuracy of his own prediction — he did not know on exactly what grounds he had made it — the young man took up medicine and became a successful doctor. Isolated and exceptional incidents these, but incidents which had a habit of happening on the frontier in a period which, in the minds of many unsuspecting moderns, was characterized by "the simple life." From one viewpoint pioneer life was much more simple than life in the compli- cated industrial order of the twentieth century, with its many interdependent relationships and delicate balances, but on the other hand, to one who might be transferred from a modern farm of central Illinois or southern Michi- gan to the same scene of a century and a quarter ago, the processes of getting the mere essentials of Hfe — food, shel- ter, clothes, and medicines — to say nothing of conven- iences, travel, and amusements, would no doubt make Hfe seem infinitely complex. Water did not come from taps, food did not come from cans, nor did the doctor and ambulance respond to the telephone. As the pioneer advanced into the virgin forests and far- reaching prairie lands of the Middle West he was faced with many problems. In the early days there was the Indian, ever a nuisance, sometimes a terror. For almost two centuries the Indian had been a part of the environment; the struggle with him was a conditioning factor as important as the climate, the topography, and the vast distances in determining the character of the American pioneer. There was the task of chopping, grubbing, and hewing a home out of the wilderness, of getting enough food to carry life through the early years, of creating a domestic economy which would make that home in a large measure self-sufficing. In time came the necessity of acquiring title to land; of laying hands on enough money to pay for it. Obtaining cash required means of getting produce to mar- kets—roads, boats, canals, railroads—the business of trans- portation. There was the need for governments, local and state; of men and money to run them; of schools, lest the next generation grow up savage and ignorant. In addition, seriously weighing on the minds of many, was the incubus of the devil and all his works, matters not so much of this life as of the next. More basic than any of these problems, however, was that of health. Unless the settler survived, all other problems were relegated into insignificance; he simply never got around to them. Although nothing was more vital in the conquest of the wilderness than health, over none of the factors involved did the people seemingly have less control. Just as first settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth suffered heavily from the diseases of a new environment, so did the 10 whites who reached the Mississippi Valley. French explor- ers, fur traders, and the habitans around Detroit and Vin- cennes became familiar with the diseases of the region. The Jesuit missionaries recorded summer illnesses among the Indians around the missions: they connected them with the eating of new corn, squashes, and watermelons. Sometimes it was "a malignant fever, of the purple kind." At Fort Miami in 1749 the twenty-two French inhabitants, includ- ing the commandant, had the fever. British and Americans had similar experiences. George Morgan, Philadelphia merchant, western trader, and ambitious empire builder, wrote from the Illinois country in 1766: "Ague & Fever has been remarkably prevalent — Insomuch that of the Garrison & Inhabitants of Fort Chartres & Kaskaskia few have escaped being more or less afflicted therewith & altho 'tis not in itself Mortal yet the frequency of it must be the Occasion of other Disorders that are so — Insomuch that not a single Person Male or Female born at the Illinois of Parents of fifty Years of Age & very few of Forty — Neither has there been any French Native of the Country known to have lived to an old ." Age.

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