A Granary Becomes a Navy Hospital

By Thomas L Snyder, MD, 1-1-06

California gained statehood in 1850. Two months later Navy Secretary William Graham wrote to President Fillmore that “a new empire has, as by magic, sprung into existence. San Francisco promises, at no distant time, to become another New York.” He went on to say that “a Navy yard is very much needed in California, and no time will be lost in accomplishing the work.”

A three-officer commission was soon dispatched to choose a suitable site, and they decided on one protected inside San Francisco Bay at Mare Island. Commander David G. Farragut (of “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” fame, a Civil War hero and the first admiral of the U.S. Navy) arrived at the remote place in 1854.

Within two days of his arrival at the California site, Farragut ordered the sloop-of-war over from Sausalito. This ship, soon to be replaced by the much larger USS Independence, served as the first naval medical facility on the West Coast. Ambulatory care was given in the ship’s sick bay, and the “hospitalized” were cared for from wooden bed frames suspended from the sick bay overhead or from their own hammocks. The average inpatient load was 10 sailors or civilian Navy yard workers.

The limitations of care aboard ship are made clear in a note from the yard surgeon in 1863; he wrote, “The frigate Independence, particularly in the winter season, is a very unsuitable place to treat the sick. It is cold, wet, and open to every wind that blows.”

Navy officials, while sympathetic to the plight of men serving in the tiny Pacific squadron, did little to correct the situation—likely because their attentions were focused on prosecuting the Civil War and not on a little Navy yard in far away California. Taking the situation into their own hands, surgeon Bishop and the commandant of the Navy yard submitted plans for a temporary facility—to be fashioned from an unused granary. The plans provided for a 25′ x 25′ ward on the first floor and a 24′ x 40’9" ward space above, and called for a large cistern for year-round water supply, an attached bath approached from outside, and a nearby outdoor privy.

Still, Washington resisted, recommending that sick sailors be sent to the Marine (Public Health) Hospital in San Francisco, 25 miles away. This suggestion was met by stiff resistance both by local Naval authorities who feared desertion by sailors not under their direct observation and by the sailors themselves, who didn’t cotton to being hospitalized with merchant mariners.

Permission from Washington finally came through in July 1863. Work completed, the “Temporary Hospital” at Mare Island Navy Yard opened on Feb. 23, 1864.

The hospital carried an average inpatient load of 30, cared for by a surgeon and a surgeon’s steward, until the first permanent hospital—palatial by comparison—opened in 1871. TH

Dr. Snyder is a retired captain of the U.S. Naval Reserves’ Medical Corps. He writes regularly about naval medicine.

Image: The first Navy “Temporary” Hospital on the West Coast opened in February 1864.

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A Brief History of Prosthetics

By Kim M. Norton, 2007

From the ancient pyramids to World War I, the prosthetic field has morphed into a sophisticated example of man’s determination to do better.

The evolution of prosthetics is a long and storied history, from its primitive beginnings to its sophisticated present, to the exciting visions of the future. As in the development of any other field, some ideas and inventions have worked and been expanded upon, such as the fixed-position foot, while others have fallen by the wayside or become obsolete, such as the use of iron in a prosthesis.

The long and winding road to the computerized leg began about 1500 B.C. and has been evolving ever since. There have been many refinements to the first peg legs and hand hooks that have led to the highly individualized fitting and casting of today’s devices. But to appreciate how far the prosthetics field has come, we must first look to the ancient Egyptians.

For every plight, man seeks solutions

The Egyptians were the early pioneers of prosthetic technology. Their rudimentary, prosthetic limbs were made of fiber and it is believed that they were worn more for a sense of “wholeness” than function. However, scientists recently discovered what is said to be the world’s first prosthetic toe from an Egyptian mummy and it appears to have been functional.

424 B.C. to 1 B.C.

An artificial leg dating to about 300 B.C. was unearthed at Capua, Italy, in 1858. It was made of bronze and iron, with a wooden core, apparently for a below-knee amputee. In 424 B.C., Herodotus wrote of a Persian seer who was condemned to death but escaped by amputating his own foot and making a wooden filler to walk 30 miles to the next town.

History Prosthetics 02The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.) wrote of a Roman general in the Second Punic War (218-210 B.C.) who had a right arm amputated. He had an iron hand fashioned to hold his shield and was able to return to battle.

The Dark Ages (476 to 1000)

The Dark Ages saw little advancement in prosthetics other than the hand hook and peg leg. Most prostheses of the time were made to hide deformities or injuries sustained in battle. A knight would be fitted with a prosthesis that was designed only to hold a shield or for a leg to appear in the stirrups, with little attention to functionality. Outside of battle, only the wealthy were lucky enough to be fitted with a peg leg or hand hook for daily function.

It was common for tradesmen, including armorers, to design and create artificial limbs. People of all trades often contributed to making the devices; watchmakers were particularly instrumental in adding intricate internal functions with springs and gears.

History Prosthetics 03The Renaissance (1400s to 1800s)

The Renaissance ushered in new perspectives of art, philosophy, science and medicine. By returning to the medical discoveries of the Greeks and Romans concerning prosthetics, the Renaissance proved to be a rebirth in the history of prosthetics. Prostheses during this period were generally made of iron, steel, copper and wood.

Early 1500s

In 1508, German mercenary Gotz von Berlichingen had a pair of technologically advanced iron hands made after he lost his right arm in the Battle of Landshut. The hands could be manipulated by setting them with the natural hand and moved by relaxing a series of releases and springs while being suspended with leather straps.

Around 1512, an Italian surgeon traveling in Asia recorded observations of a bilateral upperextremity amputee who was able to remove his hat, open his purse, and sign his name. Another story surfaced about a silver arm that was made for Admiral Barbarossa, who fought the Spaniards in Bougie, Algeria, for a Turkish sultan.

History Prosthetics 04Mid- to late 1500s

French Army barber/surgeon Ambroise Paré is considered by many to be the father of modern amputation surgery and prosthetic design. He introduced modern amputation procedures (1529) to the medical community and made prostheses (1536) for upper- and lower-extremity amputees. He also invented an above-knee device that was a kneeling peg leg and foot prosthesis that had a fixed position, adjustable harness, knee lock control and other engineering features that are used in today’s devices. His work showed the first true understanding of how a prosthesis should function. A colleague of Paré’s, Lorrain, a French locksmith, offered one of the most important contributions to the field when he used leather, paper and glue in place of heavy iron in making a prosthesis.

The 17th through 19th centuries

In 1696, Pieter Verduyn developed the first nonlocking below-knee (BK) prosthesis, which would later become the blueprint for current joint and corset devices.

In 1800, a Londoner, James Potts, designed a prosthesis made of a wooden shank and socket, a steel knee joint and an articulated foot that was controlled by catgut tendons from the knee to the ankle. It would become known as the “Anglesey Leg” after the Marquess of Anglesey, who lost his leg in the Battle of Waterloo and wore the leg. William Selpho would later bring the leg to the U.S. in 1839 where it became known as the “Selpho Leg.”

In 1843, Sir James Syme discovered a new method of ankle amputation that did not involve amputating at the thigh. This was welcome among the amputee community because it meant that there was a possibility of walking again with a foot prosthesis versus a leg prosthesis.

History Prosthetics 05In 1846, Benjamin Palmer saw no reason for leg amputees to have unsightly gaps between various components and improved upon the Selpho leg by adding an anterior spring, smooth appearance, and concealed tendons to simulate natural-looking movement.

Douglas Bly invented and patented the Doctor Bly’s anatomical leg in 1858, which he referred to as “the most complete and successful invention ever attained in artificial limbs.”

In 1863, Dubois Parmlee invented an advanced prosthesis with a suction socket, polycentric knee and multi-articulated foot. Later, Gustav Hermann suggested in 1868 the use of aluminum instead of steel to make artificial limbs lighter and more functional. However, the lighter device would have to wait until 1912, when Marcel Desoutter, a famous English aviator, lost his leg in an airplane accident, and made the first aluminum prosthesis with the help of his brother Charles, an engineer.

Moving toward modern times

As the U. S. Civil War dragged on, the number of amputations rose astronomically, forcing Americans to enter the field of prosthetics. James Hanger, one of the first amputees of the Civil War, developed what he later patented as the “Hanger Limb” from whittled barrel staves. People such as Hanger, Selpho, Palmer and A.A. Marks helped transform and advance the prosthetics field with their refinements in mechanisms and materials of the devices of the time.

Unlike the Civil War, World War I did not foster much advancement in the field. Despite the lack of technological advances, the Surgeon General of the Army at the time realized the importance of the discussion of technology and development of prostheses; this eventually led to the formation of the American Orthotic & Prosthetic Association (AOPA). Following World War II, veterans were dissatisfied with the lack of technology in their devices and demanded improvement. The U.S. government brokered a deal with military companies to improve prosthetic function rather than that of weapons. This agreement paved the way to the development and production of modern prostheses. Today’s devices are much lighter, made of plastic, aluminum and composite materials to provide amputees with the most functional devices.

In addition to lighter, patient-molded devices, the advent of microprocessors, computer chips and robotics in today’s devices are designed to return amputees to the lifestyle they were accustomed to, rather than to simply provide basic functionality or a more pleasing appearance. Prostheses are more realistic with silicone covers and are able to mimic the function of a natural limb more now than at any time before.

In exploring the history of prosthetics, we can appreciate all that went into making a device and the generations of perseverance required to ensure that man can not only have four limbs but that he can have function.

From: amputee-coalition.org

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Cholera (Excerpt)

By Kirk T. Mosley, M. D.

The early history of Asiatic cholera in the United States Army is based upon the experience of the military forces with the disease when cholera pandemics originating in the endemic centers of the Far East invaded the North American Continent and gave rise to widespread epidemics within the United States on at least four different occasions in the 19th century.1 The disease entered the United States through seaports, particularly New York and New Orleans, being brought in by infected immigrants from cholera stricken areas of western Europe.

In the first three epidemics, which swept this country in the fourth, sixth, and seventh decades of the 19th century, troops of the Army often suffered as severely as did the civilian population from outbreaks of the disease. In some instances, troops were responsible for the spread of the disease as infected units were moved from a station to a new post where the disease had not yet appeared. In many instances, the disease was introduced among the troops from civilian communities. One of the first experiences of American soldiers with cholera fully demonstrated its devastating character and showed how disastrous an outbreak can be to a military operation. During the Black Hawk Indian War in 1832, seven companies of infantry troops destined for this campaign embarked on the steamer Henry Clay at Buffalo, N. Y., on 1 July. Cholera broke out among the troops on 4 July. By 9 July, only 68 men of the 7 companies that departed from Buffalo were left. Many died of the disease on board ship; many others deserted in panic and died of cholera in the surrounding countryside.

Fortunately, cholera has not been a serious problem to military operations of the Army in any of the major conflicts involving the United States. The disease had not reached the North American Continent at the time of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.The Mexican War had just ended when the second American invasion by cholera began in 1849.Cholera was absent from the United States during the Civil War but entered shortly thereafter, in 1866, for the third major outbreak in this country. Cholera apparently played no role in the Spanish-American War, but in 1902 and 1903 the disease, broke out among American troops on duty in the Philippine Islands.

1 Wendt, Edmund C.: A Treatise on Asiatic Cholera. New York: W. Wood & Co., 1885.

From: history.amedd.army.mil

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Drinking Cold Water & Other 19th Century Causes of Death

By Shannon Selin

Given the rudimentary nature of medical care in the early 19th century, Napoleon is probably right when he complains to Dr. Formento in Napoleon in America that “you kill more men than you save.” Disease was thought to be caused by imbalances within the body. There was little understanding of how infections began and spread, or of the importance of hygiene. Treatments included bloodletting and mercury. Many people died young, and some causes of death were unusual.

Causes of death in American cities in 1820

In 1820, there were a total of 9,617 deaths reported in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston. (1) These were the four largest cities in the United States, with a combined population of 293,544. (2) Approximately half of those who died (4,762) were under 20 years old. Of these, fully half (2,436) were children under the age of one.
The largest single causes of death were:
Consumption (tuberculosis) – 1,619 deaths (17%)
Stillbirth – 561 (6%)
Cholera – 480 (5%)
Dysentery – 439 (5%)
Typhus fever – 368 (4%).

The remaining deaths were ascribed to a great variety of causes, hinting at rather discretionary methods of investigation and categorization: e.g., affection of the stomach & head (2 deaths), indigestion (1 death), hydrophobia (1 death), hysteria (1 death). Forty-six deaths were pinned on “teething.” Ninety-seven were simply classified as “sudden.” The 106 deaths attributed to “unknown” causes presumably had less inventive reporters. What really stands out, though, are the 16 deaths blamed on “drinking cold water.”

How drinking cold water could kill you

Dr. Benjamin Rush was the first to write about the phenomenon of people in Philadelphia “being diseased by drinking cold water.”

This mortality falls chiefly upon the labouring part of the community, who seek to allay their thirst by drinking water from the pumps in the streets, and who are too impatient, or too ignorant, to use the necessary precautions for preventing its morbid or deadly effects upon them. These accidents seldom happen except when the mercury rises above 85° in Fahrenheit’s thermometer.

Three circumstances generally concur to produce disease or death from drinking cold water. 1. The patient is extremely warm. 2. The water is extremely cold. And 3. A large quantity of it is suddenly taken into the body. The danger from drinking the cold water is always in proportion to the degrees of combination which occur in the three circumstances that have been mentioned. The following symptoms generally follow….

In a few minutes after the patient has swallowed the water, he is affected by a dimness of sight; he staggers in attempting to walk, and, unless supported, falls to the ground; he breathes with difficulty; a rattling is heard in his throat; his nostrils and cheeks expand and contract in every act of respiration; his face appears suffused with blood, and of a livid colour; his extremities become cold, and his pulse imperceptible; and unless relief be speedily obtained, the disease terminates in death, in four or five minutes. …

More frequently, patients are seized with acute spasms in the breast and stomach. These spasms are so painful as to produce syncope, and even asphyxia. They are sometimes of the tonic, but more frequently of the clonic kind. In the intervals of the spasms, the patient appears to be perfectly well. The intervals between each spasm become longer or shorter, according as the disease tends to life or death.

It may not be improper to take notice that punch, beer and even toddy, when drunken under the same circumstances as cold water, have all been known to produce the same morbid and fatal effects. (3)

Rush’s “one certain remedy” for the disease was liquid laudanum (tincture of opium). He also advised taking the following precautions before drinking a large quantity of cold liquid when one was overheated.

1. Grasp the vessel out of which you are about to drink for a minute or longer, with both your hands. This will abstract a portion of heat from the body, and impart it at the same time to the cold liquor, provided the vessel be made of metal, glass, or earth….

2. If you are not furnished with a cup, and are obliged to drink by bringing your mouth in contact with the stream which issues from a pump, or a spring, always wash your hands and face, previously to your drinking, with a little of the cold water. By receiving the shock of the water first upon those parts of the body, a portion of its heat is conveyed away, and the vital parts are thereby defended from the action of the cold.

By the use of these preventives, inculcated by advertisements pasted upon pumps by the Humane Society, death from drinking cold water has become a rare occurrence for many years past in Philadelphia. (4)

Dr. R. Tolifree later expanded Rush’s prescription.

Some maintain there is but one certain remedy, laudanum. This view is too contracted; for if laudanum be not at hand, we should give alcohol, essence of peppermint, &c. in doses much larger than usual. (5)

The drunkards’ disease?

Some people apparently took to using alcohol as a preventive measure, which “A. Physician” affiliated with the Temperance Union frowned upon.

I have observed, within a few days past, a number of deaths have been reported from ‘drinking cold water,’ accompanied in some of the newspapers by earnest cautions against drinking cold water when heated, as though this alone were the cause of death. These reports and cautions, there is reason to fear, have had a tendency to influence many to use ardent spirits in the water they drink in the present warm weather, more than one instance of which have fallen under my observation. And with the view of preventing such imprudence, it is fit that the facts of the case should be understood.

The instances of sudden death from drinking cold water almost universally occur among intemperate foreigners, or others who indulge habitually in the use of spirituous liquors. Such persons, after creating a thirst by the use of ardent spirits, which rum will not allay, go to a pump or spring of water and drink to satiate this morbid thirst, which is more owing to their intemperance than to labour and heat combined.

The effect of cold water, thus suddenly applied to the stomach, is supposed to be a paralysis, extending from that organ to the heart. That such examples of paralysis from drinking water, however cold, or however much the individual may be heated, ever did occur, except when the stomach had previously been impaired by intemperance or otherwise, remains to be proved. Hence such accidents proverbially occur among drunkards, to an extent which should serve as a warning to the intemperate and a salutary lesson to the sober.

Such persons, however, may avoid the mischief they dread in a much better way than by mixing aspiritous liquors with the water they drink. Let them wash the hands and face with cold water before drinking, or hold their mouths full a few moments before swallowing it, and they may then safely satiate their thirst, even with iced water, without harm. (6)

Perhaps one of the saddest cases of death from drinking cold water was this one, in 1834.
Very many deaths have happened from drinking cold water, but at New York, one of the sextons, becoming heated when digging a grave for a person that had so died, drank plentifully of cold water, and so died himself. (7)

So what was going on?

An article published in the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology in 1999 notes a case of sudden cardiac death in a 12-year-old boy after rapid ingestion of a frozen slurry drink. After observing that ingestion of cold liquids has been associated with syncope (fainting), the authors conclude that “ingestion of cold liquids should be considered a potential trigger for fatal cardiac arrhythmias in patients with underlying heart disease.” (8)

Maybe this was behind some of the deaths caused by drinking cold water in the 19th century.

1. Eclectic Repertory and Analytical Review, Medical and Philosophical, Vol. XI (Philadelphia, 1821), pp. 133-140.

2. “Population of the 61 Urban Places: 1820,” United States Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab05.txt, accessed October 14, 2016.

3. Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 1, Second Edition (Philadelphia, 1805), pp. 183-185.

4. Ibid., pp. 186-187.

5. R. Tolifree, “Observations on Death from Drinking Cold Water when the Body is Heated,” Baltimore Medical and Surgical Journal and Review, edited by E. Geddings, Vol. 1 (Baltimore, 1833), p. 295.

6. A. Physician, “Deaths from Cold Water,” Journal of the American Temperance Union, Vol. 2, No. 8 (Philadelphia, August 1838), p. 116.

7. Niles’ Weekly Register, Vol. 46 (Baltimore, August 2, 1834), p. 379.

8. P. Burke, M.N. Afzal, D.S. Barnett, R. Virmani, “Sudden death after a cold drink: case report,” American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, Vol. 20, No. 1 (March 1999), pp. 37-39.

Image: Death’s Dispensary, cartoon by George Pinwell in FUN Magazine, August 18, 1866

From: shannonselin.com

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Dirt Eating in the Antebellum and Early Modern South: “I’ll be blamed ef I hanker after making my bowels a brick-yard”

By Deanne Stephens Nuwer

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Geophagy, or dirt eating, has long been associated with the South, particularly with enslaved populations as well as poor whites. Neither of these groups had social or political influence, and many of the privileged classes pointed out that there were glaring social and economic differences between those who ate dirt and those who did not. By the early nineteenth century, the term “dirt eater” had become a pejorative one for whites as well as blacks. Dirt eating within the slave populations has been studied over the last two centuries. William Dosite Postell, who includes dirt eating as part of slave fitness in The Health of Slaves on Southern Plantations (1951), explained that his findings were based on what Dr. William M. Carpenter, a nineteenth-century professor at Louisiana Medical College, labeled Cachexia Africana in the New Orleans Medical Journal (1844; qtd. in “Reviews”). Both Postell and Carpenter concluded that plantation owners believed dirt eating was detrimental to the health of their slaves and attributed it to “digestive disturbances” (Postell 82). While Postell did not suggest that dirt eating was an uncontrollable habit, he cited it as one more example of the many health issues plaguing enslaved people. The topic has continued to inspire research and intrigue scholars.

In this essay, I want to go beyond Postell’s research on dirt eating since he did not analyze it within the cultural context of the South. Exploring the history and persistence of dirt eating over two centuries reveals much about Southern views of race, class, and nutrition. Playing a pivotal role in defining the health and eating habits of African Americans and poor whites alike in the antebellum and contemporary South, dirt eating shows how these two groups were tied to and intimately associated with the earth through their [End Page 141] dependency on the soil—not only for their livelihood but for their identity, status, and even future. Just as the farmer Wang Lung in Pearl S. Buck’s popular novel The Good Earth (1931) gave his children dirt to eat when faced with famine (84), poor whites and African Americans in the antebellum and early twentieth-century South relied upon the earth for their sustenance.

Historians have extensively explored antebellum Southern society, carefully defining its social stratifications. Clement Eaton, for instance, in A History of the Old South (1949), studied the established stereotypical categories and characteristics of Southern society that have lingered. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the Old South insofar as dirt eating was concerned is that it was inescapably agrarian, entrenched in traditionalism and provincialism. Thus those in power fought to retain slavery to uphold the Southern economy based on cash crops such as tobacco and cotton. Existing on the edges of that society was an unfortunate class—“poor whites”—who in addition to being stigmatized as clay eaters, were called “piney woods folk,” and “crackers.” These “poor whites” were nuisances and “objectionable neighbors,” according to Eaton (463). Ulrich Phillips further referred to clay eating as a “vicious practice” of the “plain people” in his Life and Labor in the Old South (347). Ironically, these dirt eaters as a class lived mostly in the less fertile areas of the Southeast, particularly in the Carolinas and Georgia.

As early as 1851, the epithet “dirt eater” was linked to whites who were not acceptable on any level of Southern society. The Daily Alabama Journal that year proclaimed that white people “opposed to secession are . . . Union loving men, dirt eaters” (“Champion”). Another report warned readers about a man named Hayden, who was a “regular old tramping” thief who had stolen money from local businesses. It cautioned the public to be careful when dealing with this “lazy” man who “looks as if he ate dirt” (“Look Out”). From a different perspective and region of the country, an article from the Springfield [Massachusetts] Union conjectured that as a result of the Civil War, the South would be a place where upper class whites could live rather than just the “dirt eating whites” and continued by...

From: The Southern Quarterly, Volume 53, Numbers 3/4, Spring/Summer 2016, pp. 141-155

From: muse.jhu.edu

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American Homeopathy

From: homeoinfo.com

The same sorts of medical systems that haunted Hahnemann with bad dreams were at work with some differences in the New World. The nineteenth century found chiropractic, osteopathy and naturopathy gaining popularity. Opium, liquors, hot baths, garlic, mercury, and wine were used by the gallon as stimulants for phlegmatic ailments. Fads which oversimplified the practice of medicine led to a reduction in recognized diseases and a corresponding reduction of medicines. Benjamin Rush, the most respected American physician was a strong advocate of mercury and bloodletting. Calomel, mercurous chloride, was a stimulant for treating just about anything. Mercury poisoning was common at this time and many mothers would not let their children be treated. Medical historians see the introduction of homeopathy as stopping the harm of this corrupt medicine which was the only good it could do.

Homeopathy was introduced into the USA by Hans Burch Gram in 1825 and many German immigrants took to the system. Constantine Hering, a graduate of Leipzig University, founded the first American school of homeopathy in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1835 with instruction in German. After six years, it was replaced by him with the Homeopathic Medical College in Philadelphia. In 1844, licensing standards were put together by the newly founded American Institute of Homeopathy. The AIH also was the clearinghouse for the provings of North American native plants and other new remedies. Later the American Medical Association (AMA) would form in reaction to growing popularity of homeopathy as a business guild in order to protect the interests of its physicians with the help of the pharmacies who supplied calomel and the like.

The formal counterattack against homeopathy grew slowly as the system became more apparent through translations and increasing practitioners who used sweet tasting globules instead of foul preparations. In 1842 the New York State Medical Society ruled that homeopathy was a form of quackery. The members believed that the success of homeopathy was only because of their poor marketing and public relations and decided that medical education needed a revamp as long as they could get rid of the homeopathic community. The pretentiously named sugar pills under the guise of pharmacy shouldn’t allow homeopaths immunity as practitioners of other medical system. This is the groundwork that the AMA was formed on in 1847. In 1856 the AMA banned any discussion of homeopathic medical theory in their journals and threatened expulsion of any doctor who even consulted with a homeopath. You were expelled even if you were married to a practicing homeopath. Even though the official stance is that they were trying to eliminate quackery, the records show that their main target was homeopathy, the only other major force in American medicine.

Eclectic medicine was widespread in nineteenth century medicine, one of the greatest homeopaths, J. T. Kent had originally been an eclectic. The effect of homeopathy on the general medical community created a bridge for many eclectic practitioners to become allopaths. They could choose to back their choices of a homeopathic remedy with allopathic philosophy. The patient didn’t care about the esoterica; the results were creating sympathetic adherents in many influential areas. Calomel, quinine and jalap as well as bleeding finally passed out of fashion.

By the Civil War in America, homeopathy was the American medicine and standard medicine Using bloodletting and large mercury doses were gradually eliminated. Much of Hahnemannian thought was adopted by the developing modern medical system except for the homeopathic principles including diet, hygiene, immunization, preparation of medicines, the origin of germs, and the techniques of surgery. Hahnemann would applaud the system of controlled laboratory experiments with a clear-minded procedure but scorn the principles on which they were based.

The cholera epidemic of 1849 was a resounding success for homeopathy claiming a 97% cure rate by the Cincinnati physicians in over a thousand cases. The medical establishment openly admitted it had no cure and went through major excuse production to cover their beliefs. Housewives picked up Hering’s The Homeopathic Domestic Physician along with a homeopathic kit with numbered remedies and understood how to protect her family without a knowledge of physiology or chemistry. The New York Times, powerful politicians, and business interests all supported homeopathy during the peak of popularity in the 1870s and 80s. The yellow fever epidemic in the South during the 1870s was treated successfully and the homeopaths left their mark in recommending sanitary corrections in the water systems. Hundreds of homeopathic hospitals, clinics, insane asylums, nursing homes, orphanages and schools were in operation.

But as quickly as the popularity increased, once modern medicine learned to adopt many of the homeopathic practices, it kept in touch with the American public by providing a standardized medicine while homeopathy was perceived more and more as an old-fashioned system. The mobility of the American public worked best with the specialization of the modern physician and the fundamentalists of homeopathy did little to keep up as they were bickering ideology couched in rigid anti-modernist terms amongst themselves.

The AMA at first did not like the introduction of pharmaceutical proprietary medicines, the formulations that doctors knew almost as much as their patients did, from companies such as Parke-Davis. But under pressure from the common enemy of homeopathy, the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical firms aligned through a continued business relationship. Parke-Davis created and supported a number of medical journals including American Lancet and Medicine. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) was supported by the advertising of proprietary medicines. AMA’s resistance to the drug machinery quietly subsided.

The International Hahnemannian Association split from the American Institute of Homeopathy (AIH) in 1880.

One of the people who severely weakened homeopathy was George H. Simmons, general secretary of the AMA (1899-1911) and editor of the JAMA until 1924. As a previous ardent homeopathy from Nebraska, he welcomed the estranged homeopaths caused from the internal disputes into the AMA depleting the homeopath ranks and lessening the demand for homeopathic remedies. The AIH began a counter-movement in 1910 but lacked anything more important than a name ignoring training and subsequently letting the practice die. Materia medica chairs in medical colleges were kept but seen as historical interests. Names were gradually changed eliminating the words homeopathy and Hahnemann. The change of the last school’s name occurred in 1996.

The policies of the American Medical Association and Abraham Flexner’s Report on Medical Education in the United States and Canada (1910) took away homeopathy’s professional sanction and was isolated it as a non-scientific medicine. Under the direction of the AMA, policies concerning the criteria of medical schools were formed terribly biased against homeopathy. These were included in the temporary survey know as the Flexner Report that became official policy for denying lower schools the power to give medical licenses. Those schools became known as sectarian schools, lost enrollment, and lost financial support from the government which eventually put them out of business. Modern medicine was created and homeopathy and allopathy were seen as outdated systems to discard while incorporating what was useful. Until the late 1960s few new homeopaths entered the practice.

In the 1918 Flu Epidemic allopathic death rates were 30%, while the homeopathic rates were 1%.

Sulfanilamide kills enough people that they become the impetus for the stricter regulation of drugs by the government, as embodied in the FDA Legislation of 1938.

Homeopathy in the USA was in steep decline from the 1920s to the 1960s but has had a strong recovery since the 1970s. A new clinic, the Hahnemann Clinic, in Berkeley, California, was the first one in operation in decades with patients numbering two thousand and growing. The Greek George Vithoulkas revitalized a group of California homeopaths with the help of Bill Gray, his Mill Valley physician and editor of his The Science of Homeopathy, the first major work in over 50 years. He formed the International Foundation for the Promotion of Homeopathy with the intention of raising standards of homeopathic practice and publicizing homeopathy in North America and the world. He first restricted his education to licensed physicians as they were the only legal ones allowed to practice in order to start things out on the right foot.

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Cincinnati's Sister Anthony O'Connell: "Angel" of the Civil War Battlefield

By Howard Wilkinson, 2-26-15

Throughout the Civil War, on the bloody battlefields and in the hospitals overflowing with the wounded, many a mortally wounded young soldier left this life looking into the kindly face of a nun from Cincinnati.

“Lord have mercy on his soul,’’ were the last words he heard, and a promise from the woman dressed in black that she would tell his mother that he died bravely.

She was Sister Anthony O’Connell, known throughout the Union Army as “the Angel of the Battlefield.”

With Sister Anthony as their leader, 42 nuns of the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati left their peaceful home at Cedar Grove in Price Hill, where Elder and Seton high schools now stand, to travel the country, from Tennessee to Maryland, to treat the wounded and comfort the dying.

Today, next to the Sisters of Charity Motherhouse in Delhi Township, they rest in peace in the religious order’s cemetery, high atop a hill overlooking the Ohio River. You can pick out their grave sites because they are marked not only by the headstone cross but a second marker – one that says “U.S. Army Nurse.”

“They were better trained than any other nurses in the Civil War,’’ said Sister Judith Metz, the archivist of the Sisters of Charity. “This was a time when many believed that women were not fit to be nurses, not capable of doing the job.”

But Sister Anthony was the director of nursing at St. John’s Hospital in Cincinnati, which was run by the order and later became Good Samaritan Hospital. All of the sisters were trained in medicine by the doctors there.

The Civil War mission of Sister Anthony  began in May 1861, about a month after the war started.  At Camp Dennison in northeast Hamilton County, about 12,000 recruits were training for service in the Union Army. A measles epidemic had broken out in the camp; and men were dying in large numbers.

Archbishop John Purcell and George Hatch, then the mayor of Cincinnati, went to Sister Anthony and asked if a group of sisters could go to Camp Dennison to tend to the sick.

Sister Anthony said they would; and about half of the sisters of the order volunteered to go, taking the railroad line along the Little Miami River to the camp.

From Camp Dennison, the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati traveled with the Army throughout the war, from Tennessee to Maryland, treating and comforting wounded soldiers on battlefields and in hospitals behind the lines.

And their work was not limited to wounded Union soldiers. They treated many Confederates as well, especially those who had been taken prisoner.

“Most of these young soldiers were Protestants, from small towns and farms, and many of them had never seen a nun before,’’ Sister Judith Metz said. “They weren’t comfortable with it at first. They called them ‘Holy Marias’ and a whole lot of other names. But it didn’t take long for the kindness and compassion of the sisters to win them over.”

That was evident in the diary of one Union soldier who was treated by Sister Anthony on a hospital ship anchored on the Tennessee River during the bloody battle of Shiloh in April 1862.

“Amid this sea of blood, she performed the most revolting duties for those poor soldiers,’’ he wrote. “She seemed like a ministering angel and many a young soldier owes his life to her care and charity.”

Sister Anthony, Sister Judith Metz said, “was a natural born leader.”

She was born Mary O'Connell in Limerick, Ireland in 1814, migrating to Massachusetts with her family as a young girl.

At the age of 21, she became a nun, joining the Sisters of Charity founded by St. Elizabeth Seton in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

Two years later, the order sent her to Cincinnati to open an orphanage and she ended up as the head of nursing at St. John’s Hospital, which was located at Third and Plum streets downtown.

In the spring of 1862, Sister Anthony and a group of Sisters of Charity boarded a hospital ship in Cincinnati and made the long journey to Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. There, just beyond the river bank, the battle of Shiloh was raging. News reports of the carnage at Shiloh was the event that convinced most Americans, both North and South, that this war was going to be a long and bloody war.

Sister Anthony wrote in her diary of the horrors of the battle.

“At Shiloh, we ministered to the men on what were popularly known as floating hospitals,’’ Sister Anthony wrote. “We were often obliged to move further up the river, being unable to bear the stench from the bodies of the dead on the battlefield.”

She wrote, too, of “one poor fellow, whose nose had been completely shot off, and was nearly missed by the stretcher bearers. When found, the young soldier was placed in a hog pen, the only place of shelter and repose remaining.

“Before he could be brought to the boat, he had lost blood enough one would think to cause death; his clothes were saturated and the blood even reached his boots,’’ she wrote.

He became one of hundreds of wounded soldiers brought back to Cincinnati and treated at the Burnet House, a luxury hotel converted temporarily into a hospital, and other area hospitals.

Sister Anthony returned with them, working at the Burnet House. One day, she said, an “old gentleman” came to the hospital, saying he had heard his son might be there.

She walked him through the wards, without finding his son, when it occurred to her that the boy with the missing nose might be his son. The father could not recognize the boy because of the disfigurement of his face, but he looked at the soldier's hands and found a scar between his fingers that he recognized.

“Soon, father and son were locked in a fond embrace,’’ Sister Anthony wrote. “He took his darling back with him to his home.”

Sister Anthony and the other Sisters of Charity moved from place to place during the war – working in hospitals in Cumberland, Md.; Nashville, and Richmond, Ky. After the Richmond battle in August 1862, a Union defeat, 40 horse-drawn ambulances were sent to the Kentucky battlefield from Cincinnati, along with six Sisters of Charity. They treated wounded soldiers in the field; and brought hundreds back to Cincinnati to receive care.

Sister Anthony and the Sisters of Charity had good relations with the Union leadership, who needed all the help they could get with a strained Army medical corps that depended largely on volunteer nurses, often the wives of soldiers. In all, over 600 nuns from a multitude of religious orders served as nurses during the war.

“The sisters were highly regarded because they did not have to be taught,’’ Sister Judith Metz said. “They had skills that few of the other nurses had.”

At Nashville, when Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman visited the hospital where the Sisters of Charity were working, he joked with the soldiers about the black-clad women who were treating them.

Sister Mary Ann McCann, in her 1917 book, “The History of Mother Seton’s Daughters,’’ quoted Sherman as saying, “Come on, boys. You are only foxing (faking) it to get all the good things that these kind sisters prepare for you.”

At the end of the war in 1865, Sister Anthony and the other sisters returned to the order, which moved its Motherhouse to Delhi Township in the 1880s.

Sister Anthony went on serving after the war, tending to the poor and sick at Good Samaritan Hospital and the St. Joseph Infant and Maternity Home. She died on Dec. 8, 1897 – her 83rd birthday.

Archbishop William Elder asked that her funeral be held at St. Peter in Chains Cathedral downtown; and every seat was taken, with hundreds unable to get inside, standing on the cathedral steps. Many of the mourners wore the emblem of the Grand Army of the Republic – the organization of Union veterans of the Civil War.

Today, at the Motherhouse, her belongings are cherished by the sisters – the battered medical kit she carried throughout the war, along with her eyeglasses, her rosary, a small pair of scissors and a pocket knife.

“The fact that these things survived and are preserved tells you something,’’ Sister Judith Metz said. “It is a testimony to how highly she was thought of. And always will be.”

Image: "Angel of the Battlefield" painting which hangs in the Sisters of Charity's Motherhouse

From: wvxu.org

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Ill and Injured Children on Antebellum Slave Plantations: A Dangerous Childhood

By Marie Jenkins Schwartz

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Childhood was the least healthy stage of a slave’s life (Steckel 449). Prone to accident and disease, many children never lived to adulthood. Planter Martin W. Philips became so inured to high rates of childhood morbidity on his Mississippi plantation that he did not even bother to tally the number who died in the farm journal he used to keep track of daily events. When the adult slave Jane died in 1859, he noted that her death had brought to five the number “grown negroes” who had passed away since the plantation’s establishment in 1840. There was “no telling the number of younger ones,” he added (Philips 463). Of the five children born in bondage to Edna and Bob Jones in North Carolina, only one son—Hyacinth—lived long enough to be given a name, and even he died in infancy (Rawick ser. 2, vol. 15, pt.2: 25).

High rates of mortality, morbidity, and injury among enslaved children worried antebellum slaveholders because it threatened the Southern way of life. The United States had ended its participation in the international slave trade as of 1808, and slaveholders knew that slavery could remain profitable for future generations only if enough enslaved children survived to replace older slaves who died each year. Moreover, high rates of sickness and death suggested failure on the part of owners to care adequately for the youngsters, which encouraged a growing number of people, particularly in the North, to call for its end. Sentimental notions about childhood were gaining ground throughout the nation, which placed pressure on slaveholders to show concern for the enslaved youngsters living in their midst. The human quality that causes a person to empathize with someone who is suffering further motivated planters to worry about the children’s health. Slaveholders cultivated an image of themselves as paternalistic stewards of slaves. High rates of death, [End Page 56] disease, and injury called into question the ability of an owner to live up to this ideal. In more practical and immediate terms, neglect of children roiled relations with adult slaves rendering them less willing to cooperate in the workplace. Yet slaveholders proved reluctant to take steps that might have given enslaved children a better chance of survival.

Simply put, slaveholder desire to care for children was tempered by a desire for profit. To deflect criticism for the children’s poor health, they employed negative stereotyping of parents and other child caregivers and pointed to their own supposed benevolence. Rather than be horrified by what was happening to individual girls and boys, owners congratulated themselves on demographic trends that showed the enslaved population to be increasing. They considered home care—not professional care—the best approach to children’s health: indeed they had few medical allies in caring for enslaved children. They lauded whatever attention white mistresses gave to the children as superior to the care and nurture provided by enslaved parents, particularly mothers. They delegated nursing and childcare duties to black nurses, whom they said performed poorly. And they refused to acknowledge their own role in creating conditions that put children at risk for illness and injury and even death.

Slave owners took more interest in the overall birth and survival rate of slaves than in the fate of individual boys and girls. As long as the birthrate remained high enough and the death rate low enough to replenish a plantation’s slave population, planters considered the health status of enslaved children and adults acceptable. George Noble Jones refused to heed a warning that harsh punishments by one of his overseers were damaging his slaves’ health because he was satisfied with “their natural increase which in the last year has been over ten percent, in a gang of 120” (Phillips and Glunt 124). As long as planters could tally more births than deaths in their farm journals, they were satisfied.
Physicians in the era took little professional interest in childhood ailments, which meant they were not strong allies in the fight against childhood mortality and morbidity. Doctors were eager to treat slaves at the behest of owners: the...

From: The Southern Quarterly, Volume 53, Numbers 3/4, Spring/Summer 2016, pp. 56-69

From: muse.jhu.edu

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