by David Flint
A good sized crowd took a break from listening to news about the Swine Flu and went out Monday evening to hear Stuart Lehman talk about 18th century medicine as practiced in the American colonies. Lehman, dressed as a colonial physician, brought with him to the Stephentown Heritage Center an amazing
collection of herbs, medicines and surgical tools. They included a trephine drill for cutting a hole in your skull to let off pressure and a bowl of leeches for getting rid of some of that bad blood. These are things that Stephentown’s first doctor of record, Dr. Ezekial Baker might have used, or earlier, Dr. Abraham Staats, sent by Killian Van Rensselaer in 1642 to take care of Rensselaerwyck.
Lehman said the first recourse if you got sick was of course “Dr. Mom.” And if mom was well off she might have Dr. Culpepper’s Complete Herbal or English Family Physician to consult. Some of the herbs used in those days were actually quite good and helpful, such as willow bark, related to today’s aspirin, for headaches and other pains, oil of clove for pain or colds, Peruvian bark for fevers or purple foxglove, related to today’s digitalis, for dropsy or congestive heart failure. Use of tobacco for “cleaning the lungs,” however, was maybe not such a good idea, nor was the widespread use of mercury, arsenic, antimony and lead for all sorts of maladies. There were some good treatments, for example ground oyster shells for dyspepsia, but ground up cow horn for a salve could likely give you a case of tetanus and cutting a hole in an onion, inserting a hot coal and holding it to your ear to cure an earache was probably not too effective. “Heroic treatments” included raising blisters all over the body with heated cups and then incising the blisters to drain out the offensive humors. King George in England, suffering from porphyria, had this done to him extensively and, according to Lehman, the doctors treating him couldn’t understand why the more they did it the more agitated poor George became. Copious bloodletting was part of such “heroic treatments,” sometimes in amounts up to a quart or more over the course of a few days. It was this sort of treatment that may have quickened the demise of another George, our first President, in 1799.
With licensing regulations lax or non-existent, most anyone could call himself a doctor, but the better ones probably didn’t have a medical degree anyway. Most eighteenth century doctors probably did the best they could but knew nothing about germs and infection. There was in fact the theory that “laudable pus” was to be expected after surgery and was a sign that things were progressing well. Lehman said doctors were unwittingly spreading infection all the time. Medical practitioners figured the causes of illness were vile vapors or miasmas coming out of the swamps. There were all sorts of tonics to combat these and to restore balance among the four bodily humors – blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. One recommended remedy was that for every degree of fog in the air, you should take one draft of Madeira wine. Lehman said you had to take all these remedies with the proverbial grain of salt but anything might work if you believed in it with enough faith – the placebo effect.
Although doctors, as they became more professionalized, claimed they had come to save the populace from ignorant midwifery, Lehman said the midwives of the era actually knew something and had a much better rate of safe baby deliveries than did the 18th century doctors. Midwives were generally highly respected and were consulted for general illnesses not just for delivering babies.
Use of anesthesia in surgery such as ether and chloroform didn’t really get started until the 1840s. The victim might be provided some laudanum after surgery to lessen the pain. Without anesthesia it was mainly a matter of working as quickly as possible. The faster the surgeon could amputate a limb, the better the chances the victim might survive.
If people have Swine Flu and other problems too much on their minds these days, Lehman had some advice from one of many self help books prevalent in the 18th century. In “advice to the studious,” the author suggested that too much “intense thinking can be destructive to health.” Accordingly he advised that, “A degree of thoughtlessness is necessary to good health.”