Medicine: Pioneer Perils

For U.S. pioneers, Indians and the weather were mild risks compared with the dangers of sickness—and doctoring. In The Midwest Pioneer, His Ills, Cures & Doctors (R. E. Banta, $5), published last fortnight, Indiana Historians Madge E. Pickard and R. Carlyle Buley tell about the medical terrors of the early Century.

Ague and Hypo. Advertisements circulated to lure western settlers referred to the climate as "salubrious," but a rhyme got around that had more truth in it:

Don't go to Michigan, that land of ills,

The word means ague, fever and chills.

Malaria flourished the length of the Mississippi and the Ohio. The itch, typhoid, dysentery—all avoidable by cleanliness and sanitation—were common. So were smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, colds, pneumonia, tuberculosis. Asiatic cholera decimated many towns in the 1830s and '40s. Other popular ailments included insanity, alcoholism, "scolding," and a mysterious disease known as "ennui" or "hypo," marked by "feelings of dullness, fear, indefinite pains and lack of desire to attend to any business."*

Bleeding and Blistering. Even the "riglar" doctors, using the best science then known, were dangerous by modern standards. Bleeding "to syncope" (fainting) was often prescribed, and if a patient was very weak and his veins hard to come at, "recourse should be had to the jugglars." Blistering and cauterizing were matters of course. In case of wounds, pus was considered a good thing and was sometimes encouraged by planting a piece of horsehair or thread under the skin.

Favorite drugs were "mercurials, calomel, opium, niter, Glauber's salts, Dover's powders, jalap, Peruvian bark—and by the 1840s, quinine" in heroic doses. One doctor reported a patient who took so much calomel that his teeth fell out, then the upper and lower jawbones came out "in the form of horse shoes." One treatment for the ague involved putting the patient in a draft between two cabins, stripping off his clothes, pouring cold water over him until he had a "pretty powerful smart chance of a shake."

Stomach Abracadabra. The doctor who hung his shingle in the village or rode circuit through the forest was, often as not, a quack. Charms were popular: for convulsions, pour baptismal water over the peony bush; for bedwetting, fried-mouse pie; for a cold, crawl through a double-rooted briar toward the east; for a fever, write "Abracadabra" on a piece of paper and wear it over the stomach. Manufactured charms included "Perkins Patent Tractors" (metal rods to draw out disease) and "Dr. Christie's Galvanic Belt . . . for all nervous diseases."

But amid all the quackery and superstition, two western doctors made great and lasting contributions to the science of medicine. In his office in Danville, Ky., Dr. Ephraim McDowell performed the first operation for ovarian tumor on a brave, unanesthetized woman who lived 31 years thereafter. In Mackinac, Mich., peering through a hole in the stomach wall of a half-breed Indian named Alexis St. Martin, Dr. William Beaumont made his momentous discoveries about the action of the gastric juices.