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Leave a comment Posted on September 26, 2022 19th Century, 20th Century, America, Death, Disease, Drugs, Edwardian, Medical History

Treating the (Last) Pandemic: Heroin, Aspirin, and The Spanish Flu

On September 16^th, 1918, Lieutenant Colonel Philip S Deane, head of Health and Sanitation at the Emergency Fleet Corporation, claimed the outbreak of the Spanish Flu on the East Coast was due to the crews of a handful of German submarines who had made it to New York. How ever it had gotten there, it was the Germans’ fault, and in any case, it was no big deal. In the same statement, he said the Spanish Flu was, “Nothing more or less than old-fashioned grippe.” Grippe was a term for the common flu.

Sound familiar? Despite apparent precautions being taken, the Spanish Flu claimed its first victim in the US in Philadelphia, spreading among the sailors and marines until the naval hospital was completely overwhelmed and hundreds of people needing immediate help were transferred to the nearest municipal hospital or treated outside in the navy yard.

Within 24 hours, 41 deaths were recorded in Boston. More were reported throughout New England, and as it began to spread to the civilian population, a nationwide warning against public hysteria was issued. The virus worked quickly, and it could develop into pneumonia.

All around the world, the death toll was staggering, with an estimated 50 million people losing their lives before it was over. But then, as now, people didn’t necessarily know what they were dealing with or how to treat it.

In a 1918 article on “the so-called influenza epidemic,” Chicago doctor Albert J. Croft suggested that the Spanish Flu wasn’t a virus at all, but the result of gasses from the First World War ascending to the atmosphere and forming a kind of toxic dome around Earth. It made more sense to him than a virus spreading quickly enough to infect people on opposite sides of the planet; it had to be environmental, or at the very least, Divine Retribution for the war—which plenty of people believed (and vehemently blamed the Germans for starting).

Assuming the flu was a toxin, Dr. Croft recommended laxatives to flush it out, along with saline enemas. He also recommended phenacetin, a pain reliever that destroyed kidneys (and also killed Howard Hughes), and strychnine.*

But Dr. Croft was not the only person recommending enemas and strychnine. An October memorandum from the base hospital at Camp Zachary in Kentucky outlined the standard treatment for patients admitted with the Spanish Flu.

It started out simple enough, as everyone had the equivalent of Vick’s Vaporub applied to the nose, and they were given a cup of warm milk and a basic enema. More severe cases were treated with small doses of strychnine or an enema of hot black coffee, brandy, and water.

And worse—yes, worse—for this type of enema, you’d have to hold it there for 20 minutes.

Coffee with brandy is delicious. There’s a certain logic to treating the Spanish flu with a Spanish coffee, but I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to drink it.

If you can believe it, that wasn’t actually the worst of it. Patients with a cough or chest pain—basically all of them—were given heroin. heroin-bottle-collection_1518_canvas

As an opiate, heroin was effective as a cough suppressant, but that’s not the only thing it was used for.

As William Small explained in the Eclectic Medical Journal of August 1919, sleep was critical for surviving the Spanish flu. As fever and chills could make it difficult to sleep, anything that would help you to sleep was a good thing. Laudanum would have been the obvious answer, but no:

“It has been our custom never to allow a sleepless night. Tepid sponging may first be tried, but, if insufficient, the patient should be given heroin hypodermically, repeated once or twice, if necessary, at intervals of an hour and a half until sleep is obtained. A satisfactory night’s rest is almost always followed by considerable improvement in general condition.”

You’d certainly think so.

Heroin

This sounds shocking to us now, but at this point, heroin had been used in medicine for about twenty years.

Medical grade heroin—also known as diamorphine—was first synthesized by British chemist C.R. Alder Wright in 1874. Nothing really came of his experiment until 1897, when another chemist tried again.

Felix Hoffmann worked for Bayer pharmaceuticals in Germany. If Bayer sounds familiar, it certainly should—it’s still one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. They still sell one of Hoffman’s most famous inventions—aspirin, which he synthesized on August 10^th, 1897.

Eleven days later, the man who gave the world aspirin invented heroin. Drug_store_sign_for_products_Heroin_and_Aspirin_before_US_Heroin_ban_1924

At the time, morphine addiction was a serious problem in Europe and the United States following the Franco-Prussian War and the American Civil War, so Bayer tried to develop a less addictive alternative. The drug Hoffman created didn’t come out quite as expected—it was twice as potent as morphine, and it would become one of the most addictive substances in the world.

It was called heroin after the German word heroisch, meaning “heroic” or “strong.”

When it first hit the market, it was hailed as a wonder drug. They said it was a non-addictive substitute for morphine without as many side effects. Between 1898 and 1910, Bayer advertised it as a cure for headaches and general malaise, and it was sold in cough syrup for children. It was even given to babies to help them sleep.

In its capacity as a replacement for morphine, heroin became a recreational drug in the United States as early as 1912.

It wasn’t exactly difficult to get. Heroin was a common ingredient in over-the-counter remedies. One of these was Hayes Healing Honey. For just 35 cents, you could get a bottle containing morphine, heroin, and chloroform in 7% alcohol. While honey does help a sore throat, whether Hayes actually contained any is anybody’s guess. Packages are rare now, and honey isn’t listed as an ingredient.

Local drug stores carried heroin products, and you could even get it through the mail—it was so popular that it was sold in the then-iconic Sears & Roebuck catalogue. For $2.50, you could get several doses, a syringe, and a stylish travel case. Much of the advertising was aimed at women, who handled more of the childcare and were more likely to become addicted themselves. Apart from veterans, women were the most likely to use it for various illnesses as well as menstrual cramps, insomnia, and pain related to childbirth.

By the time the Spanish Flu started in 1918, heroin had become prescription-only in the United States, but prescriptions weren’t exactly hard to come by, and the country’s addiction had long since set in. It was still used in hospitals and cures for the common cold. Heroin was part of the standard treatment for the Spanish Flu as it was an effective cough suppressant and helped people to sleep.

As we know now, heroin is incredibly dangerous. As easy as it is to overdose now, it would have been far more likely in the chaos of overrun hospitals during the Spanish Flu. The cause of death would have been hard to identify. Like those who lost their lives to the Spanish Flu, many would have appeared to have died in their sleep.

Oddly enough, Hoffman’s other invention—aspirin—may have caused several deaths attributed to the Spanish Flu as well.

In 1917, just one year before the Spanish Flu, Bayer lost its patent on aspirin in America. American companies flooded the market with it to try to compete, but the boxes didn’t include any dosage information. For a long time, no one knew exactly how much you were supposed to take.

Still, when the Spanish Flu came to the United States, aspirin was recommended as a treatment and bought in huge quantities by the Navy as well as the general populace. The Journal of the American Medical Association advised people to take up to twenty-five tablets a day, more than twice the maximum safe dosage as we now know it.

Just like heroin, aspirin overdose looks a lot like the flu. People would take it to treat the flu and, apparently not recovering, they would continue to take more until they died of what was assumed to be the flu. We have no way of knowing how many deaths from the Spanish Flu were actually caused by aspirin or heroin overdose.

Heroin was banned in the United States in 1924.

Jessica Cale

*Do NOT try this at home

Sources

Nicholas Bakalar. In 1918 Pandemic, Another Possible Killer: Aspirin. The New York Times.

Dallas Morning News. The Theory Advanced by Dr. Albert J. Croft of Chicago. December 8^th, 1918.

Memorandum For the Treatment of Influenza Pneumonia, Base Hospital, Camp Zachary, Taylor, Kentucky. MS C 38 Glentworth Reeve Butler Papers, 1917 – 1918. October 3^rd, 1918.

New Orleans States. German Pirates Bring Influenza. September 19^th, 1918.

James Rambin. In 1918, Austinites Faught a Pandemic by Getting Drunk and Doing Heroin. Towers.

William D. D. Small. The Treatment of Influenza. The Eclectic Medical Journal. August, 1919.

Yale School of Medicine. From Cough Medicine to Deadly Addiction, a Century of Heroin and Drug-Abuse Policy.

Leave a comment Posted on January 16, 2022 18th Century, America, Crime, Georgian Britain, Guest Posts, London, Persons of Interest, The Enlightenment

“We are determined to foment a rebellion”: Women and Espionage in the American Revolution

Patience Wright It’s no secret that women in the eighteenth century had little to no political freedoms. The patriarchy that had worked so well for the male elite of Britain and the rest of western Europe had, by that time, been transplanted in the American colonies. Despite the lack of women’s rights in Britain’s New World colonies, even during the famous period of salutary neglect, American women had hope that revolution and independence from the empire would bring about new rights.

As Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John in 1776:

I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

Clearly, some women in America held out hope for a better future once freed from the patriarchy of Britain. While Abigail Adamas is remembered as one of the important women of the American Revolution, many others risked their lives for the cause.

As many women worked as nurses and cooks for the American army, some took a more direct route: espionage.

Don’t Send a Man to Do a Woman’s Job

Of all the spies that Washington and the American military effort employed throughout the war, the women who volunteered their services proved the most effective. Most men, especially those who served in the military, viewed women as innocent and non-threatening. Due to this sexist oversight, British commanders inadvertently gave female spies premo access to military intelligence, often discussing important matters in front of the women they deemed so harmless.

The story of Patience Lovell Wright (pictured top right, National Portrait Gallery) is perhaps the best example of British officers and higher-ups disregarding the presence of a woman when discussing matters of war.

Born in Bordentown, New Jersey in 1725, little is known of Wright before her husband’s death in 1769. A widowed mother of five children, Patience began making wax sculptures to make ends meet. Originally created for clothing models, her lifelike representation of heads and hands soon gained her notoriety.

In early 1772, Wright picked up stakes and moved to England. Centering her new shop out of London, Wright quickly gained patronage from some of the most influential members of British society. She even had members of Parliament and the king’s court come to her to have their likenesses done. By the time the American Revolution had begun, this expat had the perfect setup to turn spy.

By making small talk and overhearing gossip, Wright gained insight into the political and military affairs of the British. Once she had a piece of juicy intel, she would hide it in a sculpture and send it to American agents in Europe and the Americas. She kept in touch with such notable patriots as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Through these connections, Wright helped the American cause back home stay informed on the latest news from the British capital.

Another woman who took advantage of the era’s patriarchal bent was Lydia Darragh (right). Hailing from Dublin, Ireland, the Darraghs moved to Philadelphia in the 1750s. Whether they took an extreme liking to the colonies or saw a means of striking back at the British for their age-old abuses of the Irish, the Darragh family supplied the Continental forces with soldiers and spies.

After British officers were quartered in the Darraghs’ home, they must have overlooked the family due to their pacifist Quaker beliefs, because they often discussed plans for military campaigns within earshot of Lydia. What they didn’t know, though, was that she was listening. Taking what she heard from the officers as she went about her day, Lydia and her husband would translate the information into a shorthand often used by the family. She then sewed these letters into the buttons on the coat of her teenage son, who would then simply walk across British lines to deliver his button-messages to his older brother serving with the American forces.

On December 2nd, 1777, Lydia put herself in even greater danger. Somehow made aware of a particularly secretive and important meeting between the officers stationed in her home, Wright hid herself in a closet that adjoined the room in which these loose-lipped redcoats met. Startled by what she heard, she left the house as soon as she could under the pretense of needing more flour. She then made a beeline for a small mill on the outskirts of town, where she met Colonel Elias Boudinot and delivered the message: the British were planning a clandestine attack on George Washington’s forces camped in Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania.

When the British forces marched on Whitemarsh and found no Washington, they realized their secret attack wasn’t so secret after all. Though Lydia was questioned, she was never seriously considered a threat, so her familial spy ring remained at large.

Part of a spy ring now made famous by AMC’s Turn: Washington’s Spies, Anna Strong is another perfect example of the overlooked woman turned spy.

Operating out of Setauket, Long Island, Strong was one of the handful of New Yorkers who made up the Culper Spy Ring. Just like Wright and Darragh, Strong had the guts and the guile to pass on information about the British in plain sight.

One of four members of the Culper Spy Ring, Strong’s job was to coordinate the passage of information. The other members included Abraham Woodhull, who procured the intel; Caleb Brewster, who transported information off the island; and Benjamin Talmidge, the ring’s spymaster within Washington’s forces.

In order to avoid detection, the Culper Ring used six different inlets along the Long Island coast as dead drops. When new intel was gathered, Woodhull took it to one of these drop zones. In order for Brewster to know which of the six drop zones Woodhull had used, Strong invented a code the British never cracked: she would hang a black petticoat out on her laundry line when a drop had been made. She would then scatter handkerchiefs along the line, with a the number of handkerchiefs corresponding to a particular drop zone.

By appearing to simply be carrying out her daily duties, Strong facilitated the safe passage of confidential information across enemy lines for years. What’s more, the Culper Spy Ring was never caught.

On both sides of the American Revolution, women stood up for what they believed in. While many of them did not have their names recorded in the history books, they left their imprint on history. By taking advantage of the sexism inherent in eighteenth-century society, female spies gathered information men could not and, in so doing, changed the tide of the war.

Jordan Baker holds a BA and MA in History from North Carolina State University. A lover of all things historical, he concentrates his research and writing on the history of the Atlantic World. He also blogs about history at eastindiabloggingco.com.

Leave a comment Posted on April 30, 2021 16th Century, 17th Century, 18th Century, 19th Century, 20th Century, America, Ancient History, Contraception, Crime, Edwardian, Elizabethan England, English Civil War, Georgian Britain, Medical History, Medieval History, Sex, The Regency, The Renaissance, The Restoration, Victorian

Contraception in Cookbooks: Herbal Family Planning in the Early Modern Period and Beyond

When condoms began to somewhat resemble their modern form in the sixteenth century, it was a result of centuries of trial and error. Venereal diseases had plagued people since the time immemorial, and various barrier methods had been tried with limited efficacy. Gabriele Falloppio’s De Morbo Gallico recommended wrapping up in linen sheaths soaked in salt. Other reusable condoms were made from sheep intestines that could be washed between uses, but they were tied on with ribbons, so…silver linings?

As you can imagine, these weren’t particularly effective. Madame de Sévigné described condoms as “an armor against enjoyment and a spiderweb against danger.” If they did succeed in preventing the spread of venereal disease, we can only assume it was because they put people off the idea of sex altogether.

Note that as different types of condoms were being developed, it was with the aim of preventing venereal disease, not pregnancy. Why not?

Because there was already something else available.

Eve’s Herbs

By the sixteenth century, herbal contraception and abortifacients had been fairly common for at least two thousand years, and their use wasn’t that big of a deal. Emmenagogues—herbs that stimulate menstruation when delayed for any reason—were common medicine. Physicians and monks provided them when needed, often as cures for non-specific “stomach issues” that plagued women. Saint Hildegard von Bingen wrote of the medical uses of abortifacient plants in the twelfth century, but she wasn’t the first scholar to tackle the subject.

In the first century AD, Dioscorides of Anazarbus published a medical text that included a list of plants that acted as contraceptives or abortifacients alongside treatments for common problems. The list and its accompanying recipes proved so useful that the text in its entirety continued to be copied and consulted for centuries. Both Galen and Pliny the Elder wrote on methods of limiting family size, and in the second century AD, Soranus’s four-volume work on women’s ailments, Peri Gynaikeion Biblia Tetra, showed an advanced understanding of the difference between contraception and abortion.

But for many in later years, the distinction was unclear and largely unimportant. During the Middle Ages, there was some debate about when life truly began—“ensoulment” at birth rather than conception—so contraception and abortion before about three months were seen as essentially the same thing. As it was something women tended to deal with on their own, it didn’t really concern anyone apart from the women, their medical providers, and their confessors. [Read more about the medieval moral view of abortion here]

The study of common plants with abortifacient properties continued for centuries, but those involved with medicine weren’t the only people preserving that knowledge. Women shared that information with each other, passing it between generations one person at a time until a more efficient method of communication became available.

W3271, frontispiece || engraved title page

Contraception in Cookbooks

Knowledge of herbal abortifacients not only survived the Middle Ages, but it became more accessible as time went on. As books became more affordable to the general populace, what had mainly been shared between women and among physicians became available to anyone who could read. While family planning was still very much a private matter, coded recipes appeared in popular cookbooks.

Hannah Woolley was a kind of seventeenth century Martha Stewart, writing books on household management to support herself after her husband passed away in 1661. As a servant to a lady during her younger years, Woolley had picked up a number of recipes for food and home remedies as well as invaluable housekeeping tips. She became a household name after self-funding the publication of her first book in 1661, The Ladies Directory, followed by The Cook’s Guide shortly thereafter. Her books flew off the shelves and sold out of multiple printings.

Between the recipes for perfume and preserves, however, there was advice of a more sensitive nature. The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight—published in twelve editions between 1675 and 1720—contained the following:

1. To bring down the Flowers.

Take of Alligant, Muskadine, or Claret

a pint, burn it, and sweeten it well

with Sugar, put thereto two spoonfuls

of Sallet-Oyl; then take a good Bead of

Amber in powder in a spoon, with some

of the Wine after it: Take this Evening

and Morning.

By the seventeenth century, “bringing down the flowers” was a common euphemism for abortion, or stimulating menstruation that was unexpectedly late. That this recipe was included in the early modern version of The Joy of Cooking gives us some indication of how abortion was viewed in practice: it was a women’s issue best left to women. As before, a woman wasn’t really regarded as pregnant until “quickening,” or the first detectable signs of fetal movement around three-to-five months into a pregnancy. As such, stimulating menstruation early enough was a non-issue.

Though she was respected as an amateur physician, Woolley didn’t concoct this recipe herself; there were more than two hundred plants with known abortifacient properties available in Britain, and this was only one combination. Recipes to “draw down the flowers” or “procure the months” were included in many common books of recipes and herbal remedies, and the ingredients for them could be found growing outdoors or purchased from an apothecary.

Those without access to these cookbooks or household herbals had other ways of finding the same information. Women shared these recipes with each other verbally, and “cunning women” and midwives could also be consulted.

In the 1560s, Elizabeth Francis of Chelmsford was reported as having visited her “grandmother Eve” in Hatfield Peverel, who advised her what herbs to drink to terminate her pregnancy. Alice Butcher reported that similar potions could be obtained from the apothecary in Warrington in 1612. In nineteenth-century Cambridgeshire, it was “Granny” Grey of Littleport to ask for pills of hemlock, rue, and pennyroyal.

Interestingly enough, many abortifacient herbs were anti-estrogenic, which made them effective at preventing pregnancy as well as ending it. A relative of silphium, Queen Anne’s Lace (also known as Wild Carrot) was recorded as a contraceptive as far back as ancient Rome, when its properties were documented by Soranus. Historian John Riddle has reported that the seeds of this plant are a potent contraceptive if harvested in autumn and chewed immediately after sex. Modern clinical studies do support this; the seeds contain estrogen and act as a progesterone blocker, effectively preventing pregnancy in animals.

Additionally, artemisia and juniper were both known to inhibit fertility. There are more than two hundred types of artemisia, among them mugwort, tarragon, and wormwood, the key ingredient in absinthe. In the twelfth century, Trotula recommended artemisia as a “menstrual stimulator,” and in the thirteenth century, Arnald of Villanova advised taking it with capers. Like Queen Anne’s Lace, studies have confirmed that it works: artemisia inhibits estrogen production and can prevent ovulation much like pharmaceutical contraceptives.

Hannah Woolley loved it. Her books contain a number of wormwood recipes, including this one, which would have come out a lot like absinthe:

1. To make Wormwood-Water

Take two Gallons of good Ale, a pound

of Anniseeds, half a pound of Licorise,

and beat them very fine; then take two

good handfuls of the Crops of Wormwood,

and put them into Ale, and let

them stand all Night, and let them stand

in a Limbeck with a moderate Fire.

Licorice is also known to be an effective emmenagogue; it has been used in Asian and Central American medicine for the same purpose. Likewise Artemisia, which is not without its side effects. Wormwood is known to cause hallucinations and changes in consciousness. Ingested in large quantities, it can lead to seizures and kidney failure.

Juniper, an ingredient in gin—enduringly popular since the Gin Craze of the eighteenth century—has been used as a contraceptive since Ancient Rome. Pliny the Elder recommended rubbing crushed juniper berries on the penis before sex to prevent conception. Its popularity continued throughout the Middle Ages; Arabic medical writers Rhazes, Serapion the Elder, and ibn Sina all listed it as an abortifacient, and this knowledge was made more readily available throughout Europe when Gerard of Cremona translated their works in the twelfth century. According to ibn Sina, juniper produced an effect similar to a natural miscarriage, so it could be used without detection.

Medievalpreg

Sit and Drink Pennyroyal Tea

Today most people probably know it from the Nirvana song, but pennyroyal tea has been used as an emmenagogue since antiquity. Aristophanes mentioned it in Lysistrata, and it appears in the Eleusinian Mysteries as kykeon, a ritual beverage drunk in the service of goddesses Demeter and Persephone. Pennyroyal is a fairly common variety of mint with a strong spearmint taste, and its abortifacient properties were known globally. One early depiction that leaves little to the imagination is this illustration of a midwife preparing pennyroyal tea for a pregnant woman in the thirteenth century (above). See that herb? That’s pennyroyal.

Clinical studies have proven its efficacy as an abortifacient, however, pennyroyal is extremely toxic, and it would have been very easy to overdose. Still, its potency and availability made it a very popular method of ending pregnancies.

Drinking pennyroyal tea for this purpose was so common by the early twentieth century that Dr. P.F. Braithwaite wrote a piece for the British Medical Journal in October of 1906 detailing one patient’s experience in hopes of dissuading people from trying it:

On August 5^th at 8.15 p.m., I was sent for to see a young married woman who had suddenly been taken ill. It appeared that, having gone a week beyond her time for menstruating, she had taken some “pennyroyal tea,” an infusion she had made herself from threepennyworth of pennyroyal, with threepennyworth of rum added to it. This had no effect on her in any way, so, on the evening I saw her she had taken threepennyworth of “essence of pennyroyal,” procured at the nearest herbalist’s, again adding threepennyworth of rum. (…) Ten minutes after swallowing this essence she began to feel strange and started to go upstairs; feeling worse, however, she sat on the bottom step and began to retch. (…) She then became unconscious.

Dr. Braithwaite was able to revive the woman and induced vomiting with a mixture of mustard and hot water just as she was experience confusion and numbness in her extremities. Fortunately, she survived:

In view of the widespread habit, amongst women of the working classes, of taking preparations of pennyroyal, and their firm belief in the harmlessness of it, the case seemed to me worth recording, as serious illness was indubitably caused by it, even though recovery was never, perhaps, in doubt.

Pennyroyal is a kind of mint that is not particularly difficult to grow. It could be purchased around the world, and as Braithwaite mentions here, its concentrated essence was available without prescription at any herbalist’s shop. No longer just a tea, by the early twentieth century, it was an active ingredient in abortifacient pills around the world, as well as a potent insecticide.

Changing Laws

Abortion first became a criminal offence in Britain in 1803 under the Malicious Stabbings or Shooting Act, more commonly known as Lord Ellenborough’s Act. Though the act was mainly concerned with those assaulted by weapons, it officially changed when life was thought to begin—it was no longer at quickening, but conception. This was well before the Church, which not officially rule that life began at conception until 1869. Early stage abortion went from common practice to serious felony overnight. Organizing or abetting an abortion became a capital offense, so doctors who would have previously been sympathetic distanced themselves for their own protection. Once again, women were on their own.

As print media became increasingly accessible, advertisements for various mysterious-sounding women’s remedies began to appear in papers with increasing frequency. While once women might have had to visit the village “wise women” for assistance in identifying and preparing herbs, now those same concoctions were available in pill form through the mail. One popular brand was Widow Welch’s Pills. It would have contained a herbal abortifacient like pennyroyal, and it was sold as a cure for “female obstruction” into the twentieth century.

Similar to Widow Beecham's_pills_advert Welch’s were “French Periodical Pills,” “Farrer’s Catholic Pills,” and “Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills,” also advertised in newspapers and women’s magazines. As in previous centuries, they were often advertised as menstrual regulators. In 1868, a medical journal writer replied to ads offering relief to women “temporarily indisposed” and discovered that more than half of them were discreetly advertising abortion. Beecham’s Pills (right) were marketed as a laxative from 1842, and the company spent nearly £100,000 on advertising by 1880, boasting that they sold six million boxes annually. Over-the-counter pills with the same active ingredients were available in Britain, Australia, Europe, and North America.

While abortions laws remained restrictive in Britain throughout the nineteenth century, they were not punished so severely in the United States. If caught, terminating a pregnancy within the first few months was at most a misdemeanor. Over-the-counter menstrual regulators like Widow Welch’s did very well in the States, and during the 1860s, abortion services were also available in bigger cities, including New York, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Louisville, Chicago, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, it is estimated that a shocking 25% of all pregnancies in the United States ended in abortion.

Takeaways

Herbal contraception certainly had its drawbacks. For one thing, it wasn’t always effective. For another, it could prove to be fatal. Many herbs succeeded in inducing miscarriage because they were essentially poison taken in low doses. Taking them wouldn’t have been as simple or painless as taking a prescription contraceptive; it’s no coincidence that many early recipes to stimulate menstruation included opium or alcohol for the pain. That people continued to use them for thousands of years despite the risk of kidney failure, damage to the nervous system, cardiac arrest, or death only shows that despite legislation and social stigma, women have always found ways to control their own reproductive destinies.

Abstinence is not a workable solution, and it never has been. If anyone tries to tell you that people in the past simply did not have sex unless it was for procreation and that contraception of any kind didn’t exist, remember Hannah Woolley. Imagine her books selling out, printing after printing until they reached kitchens across Britain and beyond, providing the recipes many women needed but no one ever talked about. Remember that sourcing pennyroyal was as easy as going to the market. Think of Widow Welch’s and the dozens of other over-the-counter menstrual regulators that sold by the millions well into the twentieth century.

People have always liked sex and, for good or ill, found ways to prevent unwanted pregnancy. Sex in history isn’t always as it appears, and even the most devout, respected, well-behaved figures had their secrets.

Jessica Cale

Sources

Braithwaite, P. F. “A Case Of Poisoning By Pennyroyal: Recovery.” The British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 2388, 1906.

Brundage, James. Sex and Canon Law. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities Volume 1696, Issue 1996.

Burchard of Worms. Decretum (c. 1008).

Burford, EJ. Bawds and Lodgings, a History of the London Bankside Brothels c. 100-1675.

Cadden, Joan. Western Medicine and Natural Philosophy. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities Volume 1696, Issue 1996.

Chamberlain, Geoffrey. British Maternal Mortality in the 19^th and Early 20^th Centuries. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 2006 Nov; 99(11).

Gaddesden, John. Rosa anglica practica medicine. Venice, Bonetus Locatellus, 1516.

Gies, Frances and Joseph. Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages.

Hobson, James. Dark Days of Georgian Britain: Rethinking the Regency.

Nelson, Sarah E. “Persephone’s Seeds: Abortifacients and Contraceptives in Ancient Greek Medicine and Their Recent Scientific Appraisal.” Pharmacy in History, vol. 51, no. 2, 2009.

Payer, Pierre J. Confession and the Study of Sex in the Middle Ages. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities Volume 1696. Issue 1996.

Riddle, John M. Contraception and Early Abortion in the Middle Ages. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities Volume 1696, Issue 1996.

Riddle, John M. Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West.

Sweet, Victoria. Hildegard of Bingen and the Greening of Medieval Medicine. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 73, no. 3, 1999.

Tannahill, Reay. Sex in History.

Arnold, Catharine. The Sexual History of London: From Roman Londinium to the Swinging City—Lust, Vice, and Desire Across the Ages.

Falloppio, Gabriele. De Morbo Gallico.

Woolley, Hannah. The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight. 1670.

4 Comments Posted on March 18, 2021 19th Century, 20th Century, America, Death, Disease, Drugs, Edwardian, France, Medical History, Vice, Victorian

A Cure for (Anything) that Ails You: Cocaine in Victorian Medicine

10.2307_community.28537599-1 Although the medicinal properties of the coca plant had been well known to the indigenous people of South America for thousands of years, cocaine as we know it was first isolated from the coca plant by German chemists in the 1850s. Having observed its status among indigenous people, scientists wanted to explore its uses in medicine. Among other things, the Incans had used it as a painkiller in early brain surgery. It had to be good, right?

No one was prepared for how good.

Not only did cocaine turn out to be an effective anesthetic, but it reduced bleeding by constricting blood vessels. Doctors loved it, dentists used it for toothaches and routine surgery, and Dr. Karl Koller, a friend of Sigmund Freud, confirmed its ophthalmic use when he applied it to his own eye and repeatedly stabbed it with pins. Freud himself was a champion of the drug, using it to fight his own indigestion and depression for years. He wrote a formal report praising the drug, “Uber Cocaine,” a seventy-page opus we can only assume he completed in one sitting.

While medical professionals were experimenting with it, it hit the market in Vin Mariani, a wine fortified with coca leaves developed by French chemist Angelo Mariani in 1863. “French coca wine,” as it was soon called, proved to particularly potent. The alcohol in the wine accomplished what the chemists were attempting in Germany and pulled the cocaine from the coca, so each bottle contained about a teaspoon of cocaine. It doesn’t sound like much, but it only takes about 20mg to produce a high. Each bottle contained approximately 160mg. Pope Leo XIII was so impressed that he gave Mariani a gold medal and kept a hipflask filled with it for easy access.

A Miracle Cure

When cocaine was released to the public as a pharmaceutical, the conditions couldn’t have been better. After the Civil War (1861-65) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), morphine addiction was common among veterans with chronic pain on both sides of the Atlantic. Like laudanum, another common opiate, morphine was available for purchase without prescription. Cocaine was likewise available over the counter, and doctors encouraged its use to fight morphine addiction and alcoholism.

And why wouldn’t they? It was thought to be harmless. In 1877, a doctor in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (now the New England Journal of Medicine) reported: “Coca…diminishes weariness, strengthens the pulse, calms nervous excitement, and increases mental activity. (…) Careful observations lead me to believe that, so far from being injurious, the moderate consumption of coca is not only wholesome, but frequently beneficial.”

Thomas Edison and Jules Verne championed it. In fiction, Sherlock Holmes used it to stave off “the dull routine of existence.” US Surgeon General Dr. William Hammond said it was harmless and particularly useful for athletes and “brain-workers,” reassuring the public that it was not addictive in the slightest.

10.2307_community.28561236 Cocaine was touted as a miracle substance, added to every remedy for every purpose. It was sold as a powder—it was claimed it eliminated dandruff when applied to the scalp or treated allergies when inhaled through the nose. The Hay Fever Association named cocaine an official remedy. Beauty columns reported that it cured cold sores when applied to the skin. It was sold in candies or syrups to fight fatigue, toothaches, or sore throat. It came in bottles, tablets, wine, powder, cigarettes, salve, and even with syringes for easy injection. Cocaine is even thought to be one of the secret ingredients of Dr. Keeley’s legendary “Gold Cure,” a concoction administered at his addiction treatment centers throughout the end of the nineteenth century.

Coca-Cola

In Georgia, Dr. John Pemberton unwittingly turned cocaine into an enduring global phenomenon of another kind in 1886. A biochemist and Confederate Army veteran, he spent the decades following the war experimenting with painkillers and other compounds for commercial consumption. Pemberton had survived a sabre wound to the chest during the Battle of Columbus in April of 1865, but it pained him for the rest of his life, leading to a morphine addiction that would last until his death in 1888.

coca-cola_ideal_brain_tonic_1890s He had some success with his Pemberton’s French Wine Coca, which was marketed to veterans and “highly strung” Southern women as a recreational beverage with medicinal properties. A wine fortified with coca and kola nut, it was claimed it fought depression, morphine addiction, alcoholism, and anxiety. Pemberton created his non-alcoholic version when Fulton County enacted temperance legislation in 1886; the wine was replaced with soda water, it was sold at drug stores, and Coca-Cola was born.

The active ingredient certainly sped its success. It woke people up, helped them to work longer hours with greater focus, and it made them feel wonderful. Pemberton marketed it as a “valuable brain tonic…delicious, refreshing, pure joy, exhilarating.”

The public agreed. Coca-Cola survived Pemberton’s death, using his original recipe until the cocaine was removed in 1906.

Coming down

It took several years for the long-term effects of cocaine to become apparent. Freud himself fell out of love with it in the 1890s, when he began to observe increasingly negative reactions among his own patients. He eventually gave it up himself when it began to affect his own performance, causing him to nearly kill of his own patients during a surgery.

Although cocaine was effective for short-term use for toothaches and dental surgery, its effects on the teeth overtime proved to be more than detrimental; it increased tooth decay and erosion, periodontal disease, oral lesions and infections, and loss of taste and smell. 10.2307_community.28556929-1

By 1891, there were thirteen deaths attributed to cocaine, as well as countless reported addictions. Though it worked as a stimulant and painkiller, its other side effects were less appealing. Finally, it was discovered to cause delirium, breathing issues, convulsions, high blood pressure, coma, and cardiac arrest.

Cocaine was outlawed in the US with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. It experienced a further surge in Germany following WWI and was used in Nazi experiments throughout WWII. It is still legal for medical use or decriminalized in many countries around the world as well as the state of Oregon.

Jessica Cale

Further reading

Gardiner, Richard. “The Civil War Origin of Coca-Cola in Columbus, Georgia”, Muscogiana: Journal of the Muscogee Genealogical Society(Spring 2012), Vol. 23: 21–24

Lestrange, Aymon de (2018). Coca wine : Angelo Mariani’s miraculous elixir and the birth of modern advertising ([English translation, revised and expanded edition] ed.). Rochester, Vermont.

Musto, David F. “Why Did Sherlock Holmes Use Cocaine?” Pharmacy in History, vol. 31, no. 2, 1989, pp. 78–80. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41112485.

Ohler, Norman. Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

“Cocaine.” The British Medical Journal, vol. 1, no. 6169, 1979, pp. 971–972. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25431933.

Images:

An Invitation to Cocaine. William Golden Mortimer, 1904.
An advertisement for Hall’s Coca Wine, 1915.
Advertisement for Iron Bitters. Iron Bitters was an over-the-counter cure-all with cocaine as an active ingredient.
Advertisement for Coca-Cola, 1890s.
Advertisement for Cocaine Toothache Drops, 1885. Like Iron Bitters, these were marketed for children.

1 Comment Posted on September 3, 2020September 27, 2020 America, Ancient History, Beauty, LGBTQ+, Persons of Interest, Religion, Sex

Trans and Non-binary Identities from Mesopotamia to Ancient Rome: Inanna, Cybele, and the Gallai

Ishtar. Lewis Spence (1916)

How many times have you heard that trans and non-binary identities are a new thing? With more people becoming aware of differing gender identities and many feeling empowered to share their own, the subject has become a staple of lazy comedy at best and an excuse for horrific violence and harmful legislation at worst. While arguments for the repression of these identities vary, one theme seems to repeat—the idea that trans and non-binary identities are a new thing that manifested spontaneously in the modern world.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

To talk about trans and non-binary identities in history, I’m not going to start with Dr. James Barry. I’m not going to talk about William Dorsey Swann, the Chevalier d’Eon, or even the Molly houses of Georgian London. We’ll get there—don’t worry—but today, we’re taking it all the way back to the beginning.

Mesopotamia

For those of you just joining us, Mesopotamia was home to the first known civilization in human history. Located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where modern-day Iraq is now, the area was populated by the Sumerians and Akkadians from the earliest days of recorded history, around 3100 BCE.

Mesopotamia was polytheistic, and one of the many gods worshiped was Inanna. Also known as the Queen of Heaven, Inanna was the goddess of love, beauty, sex, violence, and justice. Although she was the goddess of sex, it’s interesting to note that she was not a goddess of procreation or indeed a mother herself. She was usually portrayed as promiscuous, but this wasn’t a negative thing—as far as Inanna was concerned, sex was a sacred rite to be enjoyed as an expression of love and not exclusively for the purpose of procreation. Sex wasn’t something shameful yet. An all-powerful goddess with a devoted cult, she is often portrayed with lions. Surviving artifacts from later periods, when she evolved into or was combined with Ishtar, even show her riding a chariot being pulled by lions.

If love, beauty, war, and justice aren’t enough for one goddess to handle, Inanna also had another very important ability.

She could change men into women and women into men.

That’s not just awkward phrasing there—that’s a quote. Around 2280 BCE, Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE), the Akkadian High Priestess of the Moon in the Sumerian city of Ur, wrote a number of poems and hymns for Inanna, including “The Great-Hearted Mistress,” “The Exaltation of Inanna,” an “Goddess of the Fearsome Power.” She describes some of this power here:

Without your consent, no destiny is determined, the most ingenious solution finds no favour.
To run fast, to slip away, to calm, to pacify are yours, Inanna,
To dart aimlessly, to go too fast, to fall, to get up, to sustain a comrade are yours, Inanna.
To open high road and byroad, safe lodging on the way, helping the worn-out along are yours, Inanna.
To make footpath and trail go in the right direction, to make the going good are yours, Inanna.
To destroy, to create, to tear out, to establish are yours, Inanna.
To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna.

This isn’t a metaphor, and it isn’t the only source that mentions this.

In the Epic of Erra, a Babylonian poem, there are references to kurgarra and assinnu, classes of servants of the goddess, “whose maleness Ishtar turned to female, for the awe of the people.” The British Museum has a fragment of a five-thousand-year-old statue with a still clear inscription that translates to: “Silimabzuta, hermaphrodite of Inanna.”

But these are only references to the goddess’s ability to transform gender. The most compelling evidence for trans and non-binary identities among her worshipers is the existence of her priests, known as the Gala.

The Gala were a class of priests sacred to Inanna. It was said they were initially created by the god Enki to sing “heart-soothing laments,” for the goddess, and they certainly did that. To begin with, one of their primary roles was to sing hymns and laments to the goddess in eme-sal, a Sumerian dialect spoken primarily by women that was used to render the speech of female gods. They presided over religious rites, healed the sick, predicted the future, made music, raised money for the poor, and “dissolved evil” during lunar eclipses. Akkadian omen texts said that having sex with them was lucky. They were well-known and respected members of their communities, and many of them were what we would think of now as transgender.

While it can be problematic to apply modern terminology to five-thousand-year-old gender identities, I’ll tell you what we know of them. Whether called in a dream, given a vision of the goddess, or driven by devotion, biological males entered into the service of the goddess and became female for all intents and purposes, taking on feminine pronouns and dressing and living as women. While various sources argue that ritual castration was involved, there isn’t a lot of evidence to support that this early, and in any case, surgery is still not necessary to validate gender identity today. As they saw it, Inanna had made them women, and though they didn’t have the same verbiage for it, their society accepted that identity.* After all, this change was a gift of the goddess.

Swapping genders and pronouns wasn’t a comment on their sexuality, as it could be in later years. I shouldn’t have to tell you that gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things: gender identity is who you are, and sexual orientation is who you love. We cannot make blanket assumptions about the sexual orientation of the Gala, but we do know that they had relationships as diverse as people do today—many served as sacred sex workers within Inanna’s temples, but others did not. Some were married (to men or women) and had families, often adopting children together. Queer families certainly existed, and homosexuality was not a crime. It wasn’t shameful or a hot-button issue—it was a normal aspect of everyday life, not even mentioned in the Code of Hammurabi, which provided the basis for law in the region for more than a thousand years.

Looking at the Gala in isolation, you might think their existence was an anomaly of the ancient world. Those cults got up to some strange things; that could hardly be common!

Except it was.

Inanna was a very popular goddess, and her worship spread and evolved throughout the ancient world. While her name changed to Ishtar, Rhea, Cybele, Bahucharā Mātā, and Astarte, one thing remained the same: her priests.

Cybele on a cart drawn by lions. Bronze, 2nd century AD. Metropolitan Museum of Art

All Roads Lead to Rome

When Phrygian goddess Cybele became a part of the official state religion of Rome in 204 BCE, her Gallai came with her. At this point, genderqueer priests had served Cybele, Inanna, and other interpretations of the goddess for nearly three thousand years. They were a common sight in the ancient world, but Rome wasn’t quite sure what to do with them.

Concerned with inheritance and property law, Roman citizens were prohibited from becoming Gallai because of the ban on castration. Whether or not they actually practiced this is debatable, but as far as Rome was concerned, anyone who could not procreate for any reason—including disinterest, infertility, homosexuality, celibacy, or impotence—was neither truly male nor female. Castrated or not, the Gallai’s non-binary status meant they could not inherit property.

To the Romans, gender not only depended more on one’s ability to procreate than anything else, but it was subject to change. Greek and Roman medical texts from the time describe gender not as fixed, but fluid depending on humors like heat and moisture in the body. According to them, these factors could determine an infant’s sex during pregnancy, and they could also change one’s gender after birth. While the terminology was not there in the same way it is today, all of this points to the existence and tacit acceptance of a third gender in Ancient Rome, even if they did not have the same citizenship or property rights as their cisgender (and procreating) neighbors.

In spite of this, some Romans gave up their citizenship to become Gallai. Others had been slaves or had come from other parts of Asia. While it’s unclear how many Gallai were castrated or at what point in their service this happened, there is more documentation to support this happening at this point. Pliny does not go into detail but describes the process as relatively safe, and it was said to take place on Dies Sanguinis, “the Day of Blood,” on March 24th.

Still, castration alone does not change gender. Castrated or not, Gallai throughout the Roman Empire dressed, worshiped, and lived as women. They were noted for their saffron gowns, long hair, heavy makeup, and extravagant jewelry. They existed in every part of the Greco-Roman world at every level of society and were mentioned by Ovid, Seneca, Persius, Martial, and Statius as a common sight in the first century. Apuleius even described them in The Golden Ass:

“The following day they went out, wearing various colored undergarments with turbans and saffron robes and linen garments thrown over them, and every one hideously made up, their faces crazy with muddy paints and their eyes artfully lined.”

Statue of a priest of Cybele

If nothing else, the Gallai knew how to make an entrance. One of the ways in which they practiced healing was through a sort of music therapy that involved parading through town while singing and playing chaotic music to induce a sort of transcendental, joyful mania in the crowd. Others told fortunes—along with service to the goddess, castration was believed to give one the ability to see the future—or begged or danced for money on behalf of the poor. They were hard to miss, wonders in their own time. Diodorus called them terata—“marvels, monsters, prodigies, signs.” As historian Will Roscoe so beautifully put it, they were “the sacred breaking through to the level of the mundane.”

Early Christians weren’t as fond of the Gallai. They preached spiritual androgyny, but physical androgyny was complicated; although trans and non-binary identities had existed throughout the ancient world for more than three thousand years, they weren’t mentioned in the Bible. At this point, they may have been such a common part of society that they would have been more or less taken for granted.

Still, early Christian apologists describe the Gallai in less flattering but suspiciously familiar-sounding terms:

“They wear effeminately nursed hair and dress in soft clothes. They can barely hold their heads up on their limp necks. Then, having made themselves alien to masculinity, swept up by playing flutes, they call their Goddess to fill them with an unholy spirit so as to seemingly predict the future to idle men. What sort of monstrous and unnatural thing is this?” – Fermicus Maternus

“Even till yesterday, with dripping hair and painted faces, with flowing limbs and feminine walk, they passed through the streets and alleys of Carthage, exacting from merchants that by which they might shamefully live.” – St. Augustine, De civitate Dei, 7.26

Ugh! Buying groceries. How dare she?

It wasn’t only toxic masculinity and transphobia that fueled this distaste; the cult of Cybele was hugely influential throughout the ancient world and was one of early Christianity’s biggest rivals. In some places, Christians and followers of Cybele had street fights when their religious festivals overlapped in the spring, and the Gallai came to represent to some what they didn’t like about pagan culture.**

Nevertheless, Cybele continued to be worshiped until the fall of Rome, with the religion’s last known rites being celebrated in 394 CE.

So far, so Mediterranean. What about the rest of the world?

But Wait, There’s More

In India, the Hijra are intersex and transgender people with history dating back to antiquity. Like Cybele’s devotees, they are connected to music. They are considered the third gender there, and they were even mentioned in the Kama Sutra. Beyond India, trans and non-binary priests have been documented throughout southeast Asia, Borneo, and Sulawesi. Like the Gala and Gallai, all of these roles involved the worship of a goddess, gender transgression, elements of healing, and actual or symbolic castration. In their capacity as religious figures focused on sacred rites and community care, they were all important and respected members of their various communities.

In the Americas, the term “two-spirit” was coined in 1990 to describe the non-binary people who had existed within Indigenous communities since time immemorial. Although written historical records on this are limited, historical references can still be found.

When Don Pedro Fages wrote his account of the 1769 Spanish Portolá expedition of what is now California, he reported meeting two-spirit people within the local tribes:

“I have submitted substantial evidence that those Indian men who, both here and farther inland, are observed in the dress, clothing, and character of women – there being two or three such in each village – pass as sodomites by profession. (…) They are called joyas (jewels) and are held in great esteem.”

Earlier, Bacqueville de la Potherie described a third, non-binary gender identity among the Iroquois in his Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale (1722).

Trans and non-binary gender identities have existed in many cultures since antiquity, and the fact that they developed independently of each other strongly suggests that they are natural rather than learned. Not only are these identities older than 1960, but they predate Christianity by some three thousand years. So the next time someone tells you they want to “return to traditional values,” you be sure to ask them, “How far back do you want to go?”

Jessica Cale

*Note: worth mentioning that this presumably also happened for trans men, although there is unfortunately less documentation of them from this period.
**Like music, makeup, and having fun.

Sources

Berkowitz, Eric. Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire.

Fages, P.; Priestley, H. I.; Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía (Mexico) (1937). A historical, political, and natural description of California. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press. p. 33.

Lancellotti, Maria Grazia. Attis, between myth and history: king, priest, and God; Volume 149 of Religions in the Graeco-Roman world. BRILL. pp. 96–97.

Morgan, Cheryl. Evidence for Trans Lives in Sumer. Notches: http://notchesblog.com/2017/05/02/evidence-for-trans-lives-in-sumer/

Roscoe, Will. “Priests of the Goddess: Gender Transgression in Ancient Religion.” History of Religions 35, no. 3 (1996): 195-230. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1062813.

8 Comments Posted on July 16, 2019July 16, 2019 19th Century, 20th Century, America, Art, Death, Victorian

A Corpse Goes to a Ball: In Which Jess Ruins Frozen For You Forever

A Frozen Charlotte doll

A lot of today’s fairy tales are sanitized versions of earlier, creepier folk tales with dubious morals and more disturbing endings swept under the rug by sentient broomsticks and cartoon mice. The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty are just a few that come to mind, but as it happens, even Frozen has a surprisingly morbid precedent—not in the story itself, but in a massively popular children’s fad of the Victorian period.

Frozen Charlotte dolls can still be found in antique stories and online auctions, but their photos often raise questions—what is this, is it haunted, and most importantly, why is she in a coffin?

Frozen Charlotte with advice of a different kind

“Bathing babies” have fairly innocent origins in nineteenth century Germany, but America had to make it weird. Originally simple porcelain dolls sold as kind of early rubber ducks for children to play with in the bath, they made their way to America in the 1850s, where they took on a rather creepier life—afterlife?—of their own.

In 1840, the New York Observer ran an article titled A Corpse Going to a Ball. Though it gave no specific location, it reported that on January 1^st of that year, a young woman had frozen to death on her way to a New Year’s Ball. It definitely could have happened, but the story was reprinted and retold until it became almost a parable against vanity, the argument being that if the girl hadn’t been so set on showing off her new dress, she could have covered up in the sleigh and might have survived.

Inspired by the story, Maine author Seba Smith published his poem A Corpse Going to a Ball in The Rover on December 28^th, 1843, just in time for the anniversary of her death. Also known as “Young Charlotte” or “Fair Charlotte,” it was set to music that inspired a seventy-year trend in toys. Here’s a sample:

“How very fast the freezing air
Is gathering on my brow.”
With a trembling voice young Charlotte cried,
“I’m growing warmer now.”
And away they did ride o’er the mountainside,
And through the pale star light,
Until the village inn they reached,
And the ballroom hove in sight.

When they reached the inn, young Charles jumped out,
And gave his hand to her,
“Why sit you there like a monument,
And have no power to stir?”
He called her once, he called her twice,
She answered not a word;
He called all for her hand again,
But still she never stirred.

He stripped the mantle off her brow,
And the pale stars on her shone,
And quickly into the lighted hall,
Her helpless form was born.
They tried all within their power,
Her life for to restore,
But Charlotte was a frozen corpse,
And is never to speak more.

He threw himself down by her side,
And the bitter tears did flow,
He said, “My dear and intended bride,
You never more shall know.”
He threw his arms around her neck,
He kissed her marble brow,
And his thoughts went back to the place where she said,
“I am growing warmer now.”

They bore her out into the sleigh,
And Charles with her rode home,
And when they reached the cottage door,
Oh, how her parents mourned!
They mourned the loss of their daughter dear,
And Charles mourned o’er her doom,
Until at last his heart did break,
Now they both slumber in one tomb.

Of course they do, because Victorians.

charlotte The poem and song that followed were a phenomenon. Not to be outdone by Victorian England’s cult of mourning—in full swing throughout the second half of the nineteenth century—the United States capitalized on the popular morbid fascination with the story and packaged it for mass consumption. Made of china or bisque and often missing limbs, they were usually painted ghostly white with minimal features, and could be bought alone, in coffins with blankets/shrouds, or even as jewelry between 1850 and 1920.

They were so popular that black versions were made as well as boys, like an early undead Ken—Frozen Charlies, after her young lover who died of a broken heart. It seems they missed the opportunity to make mini mausoleums like creepier Barbie Dream Houses, but not to worry — like Frozen Charlottes and Charlies, you can also find those on Etsy.

They could still be played with in dollhouses or the bath, but because of their small size, they were often used as charms in Christmas cakes or puddings. King cakes are still baked with a tiny figure of a baby inside, which is supposed to bring luck and prosperity to whoever receives that slice. Traditionally, similar charms would be baked into cakes for holidays, weddings, or birthdays to determine the fate of the recipient for the following year. If a coin is wealth and a ring is marriage, what do you think getting the corpse means?

By the twentieth century, poor Charlotte had even become a dessert. “Frozen Charlottes” were the frozen version of the Charlotte Russe, a popular dessert made of ladyfingers and Bavarian cream, so they were a bit like an ice cream cake with a tragic backstory.

Even though Charlotte’s demise was repackaged along with her effigy, like all the best stories, this one probably has some truth to it.

You don’t have to be that cold to freeze to death. The baseline temperature for a human body is 98.6 degrees, but it only has to fall to 95 before it starts to shut down. The symptoms of hypothermia make getting help difficult; speech slurs, confusion sets in, energy fades, and the person loses coordination. They eventually lose consciousness, but before they do, they start to feel hot (“I’m feeling warmer now”), leading the person to believe they are out of danger when the need for help is greater than ever. In severe weather, one could freeze to death within an hour. If the ball was sixteen miles away, how long would it have taken them to get there in a horse-drawn sleigh?

Best case scenario? Two hours.

It’s a tragic story, and one that held an enduring fascination for nineteenth century America. With several states experiencing extreme weather and daily travel sometimes spanning great distances, hypothermia was a real threat. “Young Charlotte” was sung all across the country, and you can listen to it here.

Not quite as catchy as Let it Go, is it?

Jessica Cale

3 Comments Posted on January 3, 2019 20th Century, America, Beauty, Death, Drugs, Medical History

Boiling to be Beautiful in 1930s America

Advertisements and articles about pills containing DNP. The Food and Drug Administration.

About the time radium cosmetics went out of fashion, a new deadly beauty product hit the market: 2,4-Dinitrophenol, known as DNP.

DNP’s use as a diet pill took off in 1933, when the Journal of the American Medical Association published the discovery that the chemical could raise metabolism by up to fifty percent, causing a weight loss of up to two pounds a week with little to no effort. Reported as “not demonstrably harmful,” DNP quickly became the key ingredient in dozens of new weight-loss pills, only the latest in a tradition of dangerous treatments that had at various times contained amphetamines, snake oil, and even tapeworms.

By the 1930s, the diet industry was booming. While ideal silhouettes for both men and women have always been subject to change, women’s bodies in the ‘30s were shrinking faster than ever. When Hollywood’s Hays Code was finally enforced in 1934, even voluptuous figures could be viewed as obscene.

The Hays Code, also known as the Motion Picture Production Code, was a set of strict moral guidelines applied to the film industry’s major studios from 1930 until 1968. The Hays Code controlled or prohibited any content that could be deemed immoral, especially anything sexually suggestive. While it eliminated shared beds for married couples, first night scenes, heavy kissing, and sex work, it also inadvertently changed the way women looked–or wanted to look–across the nation. A curvaceous silhouette à la Mae West suggested licentiousness, and actresses became thinner to avoid the problem, changing the fashionable figure from the Victorian hourglass into the leaner frame that would remain in vogue for most of the twentieth century.

Women across the country followed suit, and the boyish figure popularized by the flappers of the ‘20s endured. In a time of economic uncertainty, their bodies were something they could control. Fad diets, amphetamines, laxatives, and cigarettes were as popular as ever, but nothing brought results like DNP. Within a year, at least 100,000 people were habitually taking pills containing DNP in the US alone. More than 1.2 million pills were distributed from a single clinic in San Francisco. It was cheap, available over the counter in most states, and very effective. It was so effective, in fact, that there was some concern that companies producing gym equipment and plus-sized clothing would go out of business.

DNP wasn’t a new substance. It had been used in pesticides, preservatives, and explosives for years. Highly flammable, it has eighty-one percent of the explosive strength of TNT, and it tastes like sulphur. It was its explosive properties that made it so effective for weight loss. Instead of converting food to fat or energy, DNP turns it into heat, “setting tiny internal fires” that can raise the body’s temperature high enough to cause brain damage and essentially cooking people from the inside out.

What could possibly go wrong? As it so happens, quite a bit. In addition to excessive sweating (often yellow) and shortness of breath, DNP can cause lesions, yellowing of the eyes, severe lethargy, cataracts, liver problems, damage to the brain and nervous system, loss of bone marrow, and heart failure. It should be no surprise that all those “tiny internal fires” make people overheat, sometimes fatally. DNP is incredibly dangerous, and deaths have been reported after even limited use.

Within three years of the initial report on its benefits, more than one hundred women in Los Angeles had lost all or part of their sight due to cataracts. A San Francisco doctor overdosed and quite literally cooked to death. Seven people were known to have died in the US as a direct result of taking DNP by 1936, but by then, it was used as a supplement around the world. In the Soviet Union, it was given to soldiers to keep them warm in the winter.

Even so, there was nothing prohibiting its sale in the United States. The Food and Drugs Act of 1906 didn’t apply because obesity wasn’t considered a medical condition. DNP continued to be sold under various names until the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act was passed in 1938.

Under the new act, cosmetics and supplements had to be proven safe before they could be sold. Pills containing DNP were pulled from the shelves and makeup companies were finally regulated, effectively ending a long tradition of putting known toxic substances–including lead, arsenic, belladonna, mercury, and radium–into cosmetics.

But by then, the damage was done. DNP is widely regarded to be the most effective weight-loss drug of the twentieth century, but it is also the most lethal. Although it’s illegal to sell for consumption, its efficacy has ensured that people still find ways to buy it in spite of the near certainty of death.

Jessica Cale

Sources

Cutting WC, Mehrtens HG, and Tainter ML. Actions and uses of dinitrophenol: Promising metabolic applications. The Journal of the American Medical Association. 101 (3). 1933.

Haynes, Gavin. The Killer Weight Loss Drug DNP Is Still Claiming Young Lives. Vice. August 6th, 2018.

McKinney, Kelsey. Hollywood’s devastating gender divide, explained. Vox. January 26th, 2015.

Medicine: Again, Dinitrophenol. Time Magazine. June 29th, 1936.

McGillis, Eric. Rapid-onset hyperthermia and hypercapnea preceding rigor mortis and cardiopulmonary arrest in a DNP overdose. North American Congress of Clinical Toxicology Abstracts 2018.

Scutts, Joanna. The Depression Era’s Magic Bullet for Weight Loss. New Republic. May 27th, 2016.

Leave a comment Posted on December 6, 2018December 5, 2018 19th Century, America, Drugs, Edwardian, Guest Posts, Medical History, Persons of Interest, Vice, Victorian

Nellie Bly Takes the Gold Cure

Nellie Bly in 1900

When Nellie Bly died in 1922, at least one obituary described her as “the best reporter in America.” She was certainly an impressive investigative journalist. As an advocacy journalist, she wasn’t shy about putting her opinions in her stories, and she could even be seen as a precursor for the later New Journalism, where the writer is part of the story.

She also was a feminist pioneer, and ran her husband’s iron works company after his death, patenting or co-patenting a better metal oil drum. She was a celebrity in her own right. Her name appeared in the headlines of many of her stories, and board games and playing cards were designed with her image. She was a phenomenon.

Bly is best remembered for her 1887 career-making series Ten Days in a Mad-house and for besting Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg’s time—and that of a rival journalist—by traveling around the world in seventy-two days in 1889. Both are still readily available online and in book form.

The Keeley Institute and the Gold Cure

Bly’s articles about the treatment of madness were written in New York near the start of her career. Near the end, Bly investigated a so-called “alcoholism cure” for the well-to-do in White Plains. In a way, this lesser-known chapter is a thematic bookend to her life as a reporter.

The Keeley Institute in White Plains, NY

While Mad-house dealt with life-and-death issues—the need for mental illness treatment reform among the mostly poor, foreign-born women on Blackwell’s Island—her 1894 story Nellie Bly Takes the Keeley Cure was less serious and ran in a single installment. It was as concerned with Bly’s preparations to pass herself off as a high-functioning absinthe drinker as the cure itself. It exposed The Keeley Institute, a fraudulent alcoholism cure clinic. While the mental asylum was making people worse, Keeley’s clinic may have been helping alcoholics, even though its “cure” was hokum.

Founded by Leslie Keeley in 1879 in Illinois and expanding to branches throughout the United States and Europe, the Keeley Institute’s slogan was “Drunkenness is a disease and I can cure it.” It also claimed to work for “opium inebriates” and “morphine fiends.” They treated people with Keeley’s proprietary “gold cure” for alcoholism, not available anywhere else.

Gold_Cure The gold cure was a potion that included something Keeley called “double chloride of gold.” Independent analyses found that the gold cure was a witches’ brew of varying ingredients—gold salts, alcohol, morphine, cannabis, and other substances—in colored water.

Despite the toxic and/or addictive nature of many of these ingredients—and remember, morphine was then legal and even heroin was sold over the counter in the United States until 1924—there were few if any claims of negative side effects or new addictions associated with the cure other than vomiting or dizziness.*

It was snake oil, but enough people reported that it worked—Keeley claimed a 95% success rate—that Bly’s antennae were out. Her stepfather had been an alcoholic, and she didn’t believe in easy cures. The cost was a hundred dollars paid in advance. Bly managed to negotiate a one-week stay for twenty-five, though she was told that was normally not allowed.

The cure was administered by syringe four times a day for four weeks, with tonics given at two-hour intervals. Bly rightly noted with horror that the male patients were all injected with the same needle, which was not cleaned between injections. Female patients, of which there were few at the time of Bly’s visit, were administered privately in their rooms.

1891-1892-CD-Keeley-Institute-300x184 Each patient was also given a bottle of whiskey by the institute so they could taper off their drinking on their own. Bly said she “gave it to an expert, who pronounced it the worst rot-gut he had ever tasted.” As a purported absinthe drinker, Bly had to buy her own bottle from a local shop.

Some of the staff had taken the cure themselves. Bly noted approvingly that the attending medic Dr. Millspaugh had a red nose, assuming it revealed a past love of drink.

“It is as it should be, thought I, to have for a doctor one who has tasted the bitter and sweet of loving cups . . . For who could better doctor a man with snakes than one who killed many a one of his own? And who could better tell the condition of a head the next morning than one who had drank all the others under the table?”

Later, when he told her he was not and never had been a drinker, Bly wrote, “How can a doctor who doesn’t know the symptoms of drink doctor one for the complaint?”

Nelly Bly (Absinthe Fiend) Investigates

Bly was less impressed when she discovered that rather than one-and-done, some patients had taken the cure multiple times. The wife of one patient said she had no faith in the cure lasting, though her husband had stopped drinking after a week:

“They give the same tonic, the same injection to each and every man. What will cure the boy of twenty cannot surely cure my husband, who has drank so many more years. And they treat them the same number of times and the same number of weeks.”

Still, she told Bly, “So long as my husband believes it is all I ask. If he can be cured for even a few months, it is well worth the expense and time.” Their doctors had warned that he would be dead in a month if nothing was done.

Mr. J.J. Brown, the manager, explained to Bly why patients sometimes came back. “It puts people back where they were before they began to drink, (but) there must be a desire on the part of the patient not to drink. We can’t make it impossible to drink if they feel so inclined.”

Bly was unconvinced. She wrote: “I would not for the world cast discredit upon anything that would turn people from drink for even four weeks. But it is my honest opinion that the cure is no cure in itself.”

She declared that being “away from temptation, (with) plain, wholesome food, pure, bracing air (and) plenty of rest” make the patient “feel better. He credits it to the cure, and his faith grows stronger . . . He believes he is cured. That is the great thing. So long as he believes that and does not taste, he is all right, but woe to the Keeley patient who tries a drink!”

Advertisement for the Keeley Institute in Greensboro, NC (Blandwood Mansion)

Bly was mostly correct in her analysis, but she was missing one thing. The reason the Keeley Institute worked as well as it apparently did was that it wasn’t just a vehicle to sell snake oil—though it undoubtedly was that—but it offered something else: dignity. The alcoholic was treated not as a lowlife, weak, or evil, but as someone with a disease.

In Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America, William L. White explains: “The atmosphere was informal and friendly at the clinics, with a marked absence of the bars and restraints that were typical in most inebriate asylums of the period.” Also dissimilar to later programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Keeley didn’t include religion as a component. The institute didn’t include addiction counselors, though most of the doctors were former alcoholics themselves. According to White, “There were enough doctors on staff to go around.”

Apart from the dubious gold cure, modern addiction treatment does follow many of Keeley’s tenets, including the way alcoholism is viewed. The US Surgeon General’s 2016 Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health clearly states that “Addiction to alcohol or drugs is a chronic but treatable brain disease that requires medical intervention, not moral judgment.”

The institute promoted “mutual sharing and alternative diversions” as part of the therapy, much like the peer support groups recommended today. Bly credited much of the institute’s success to the healthy food, exercise, and fresh air, and these are often components of modern addiction rehab treatment too. It is now recognized that relapse is not uncommon among addicts, and that rehabilitation rarely works unless the patients want to get better.

nellie bly keeley institute white plains

Nellie Bly tries the “gold cure” at White Plains Keeley Institute

What makes the Keeley story an almost perfect bookend to Bly’s career is that alcohol and drug addiction often co-occur with mental health issues. They are related problems, also known as dual diagnoses—alcohol or drugs may be used to self-medicate for a mental health problem, or drug and alcohol use may exacerbate mental health problems.

Keeley was a conman, but he seems to have helped others in spite of himself, inadvertently using his bogus “cure” as a spoonful of sugar to help the real medicine go down. Call addicts irredeemable, and they’ll stay away. Pretend you have a cure, then distract them with healthy food and exercise, and maybe they will get better.

Nellie Bly knew that Keeley promised more than he could deliver and acted accordingly. A claim of a 95% success rate is crazy, and maybe that put her on her mettle. A better story would have been to find out how many people the Keeley Institute actually helped and why, or to compare its success rate to more traditional inebriate asylums.

Nellie Bly threw herself into her stories, tilted at windmills, slew dragons, suffered defeats, and left behind a record of achievement of which anyone would be proud.

Stephen Bitsoli writes about history, science, addiction, and related topics for several blogs. A former journalist and lifelong reader, he enjoys learning and sharing what he’s learned.

Sources

Arlen, Michael. “Notes on the New Journalism.” The Atlantic, May 1972. Web. Accessed July 26, 2018.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1972/05/notes-on-the-new-journalism/376276/
“Remarkable Nellie Bly’s Oil Drum.” American Oil & Gas Historical Society. Web. Accessed July 26, 2018.aoghs.org/transportation/nellie-bly-oil-drum/
Conliffe, Ciaran. “Terrible People from History: Elizabeth “Nellie Bly” Cochrane Seaman, Intrepid Journalist.” Web. Accessed July 26, 2018.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/elizabeth-nellie-bly-cochrane-seaman-journalist/
“5 May – Nellie Bly.” Widow’s Weeds. Web. Accessed July 26, 2018.thewidowsweeds.blogspot.com/2012/05/5-may-nellie-bly.html
Bly, Nellie. Ten Days in a Mad-House. Ian L. Munro, Publisher, 1887. Nellie Bly: The Pioneer Woman Journalist, A Resource Website. Web. Accessed July 26, 2018.nellieblyonline.com/herwriting
Himmelfarb, Ben. “Local History: Addicts & Addiction Pt. 1: The Keeley Institute.” October 30, 2017. White Plains Public Library. Web. Accessed July 26, 2018.whiteplainslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/1984-6-10-NYWorld-Bly-1.jpg
Hanson, Dirk. “The Strange and Secret Keeley Cure for Addiction.” September 11, 2011. Addiction Inbox. Web. Accessed July 26, 2018.addiction-dirkh.blogspot.com/2011/09/strange-and-secret-keeley-cure-for.html
“The Keeley Cure.” Digger Odell Publications, 2009. Bottlebooks.com. Web. Accessed July 26, 2018.bottlebooks.com/Keeley/keeley_cure.htm
Detwiler, Jacqueline. “History’s Scariest Addiction Treatments.” The Fix, August 23, 2012.Web. Accessed July 26, 2018.thefix.com/content/grisly-addiction-treatments-history90510
“Alcoholism is a Disease and I Can Cure It”: Dr. Leslie Keeley and the Keeley Institutes. Alcohol Problems & Solutions. Web. Accessed December 4, 2018. https://www.alcoholproblemsandsolutions.org/alcoholism-is-a-disease-and-i-can-cure-it-dr-leslie-keeley-and-the-keeley-institutes/
Nickell, Joe. “Historic ‘Gold Cure’ For Addiction.” Center for Inquiry, March 18, 2016.Web. Accessed December 4, 2018. https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/historic_gold_cure_for_addiction/

*There have been some vague and undocumented claims of deaths, but if there were actual deaths, it’s hard to imagine Bly or other journalists ignoring them or making light of the Keeley cure thereafter.

1 Comment Posted on October 10, 2018December 5, 2018 19th Century, 20th Century, America, Crime, Disease, Edwardian, Guest Posts, Law, London, Medical History, Politics, Religion, Sex, The Regency, Victorian, Violence

Sex and the Asylum: Imprisoning Inconvenient Women

f95ddecebd8d712ca785b34b065d7231 Nymphomania, masturbation, sexual derangement: just some of the reasons a nineteenth century—and indeed twentieth century—woman could find herself locked away in a lunatic asylum. In fact, many of the reasons women were incarcerated were related to their sex or sexuality. Around one third of female patients were diagnosed with nymphomania. Some had born illegitimate children, been engaged in prostitution, or been raped or sexually assaulted.

For others, being deemed promiscuous or flirtatious was enough to seal their fate. In both Great Britain and the United States, it was perfectly legal for a husband or father to have their wives or daughters committed to an asylum without any right of appeal. Cures for nymphomania included separation from men, induced vomiting, leeches, straitjackets, and, in some cases clitorectomies.

In 1867, seventeen-year-old Alice Christina Abbot was accused of poisoning her stepfather after he threatened to send her to a reform school. At her trial, Abbot claimed that her stepfather had put her through years of sexual abuse, and that she had told other people, but they had mostly considered her mentally deranged. The court rejected her allegations as singular, and in August of that year she was committed to Taunton Insane Asylum, where she seems to have vanished into the dark realms of history. Whether or not Abbot really was a murderer, or whether she saw poisoning as the only way of freeing herself from her stepfather, we shall never know. The fact remains that she was treated neither as a victim of sexual abuse, nor a sane woman who had committed murder. Instead, she was labelled as insane, and her identity was effectively erased.

Edna Martin was fifteen when her grandfather saw her going to the pictures with a sixty-two-year-old married man. He called the police, and Edna was taken to juvenile court. The judge asked her whether they’d had intercourse, but she had no idea what that meant. Her grandfather said he never wanted to see her again, so she was taken to Parkside Approved School, where she was diagnosed as an imbecile, mentally defective, and feeble-minded, and transferred to Calderstones Asylum. Edna described twenty years of hell moving between various asylums:

They kicked the chamber pots into you . . . they also kicked in your food on a tin plate and you had to eat it off the floor. They used enemas for punishment . . . they thought nothing of giving you a cold-water bath, or they’d get a wet bath towel, put it under a cold tap, twist it, and hit you with it.

In the wider community, asylums were used as tools to control large numbers of women who were considered a threat to the status quo. Prostitution was seen as a social disease, and those fallen women associated with it needed to be shut away for the greater good, until such time as they were fixed. Correcting women who had taken the wrong path was the main idea behind three different kinds of establishments: Magdalene asylums, benevolent societies, and lock hospitals.

A Magdalene Asylum in Ireland, early 20th century

Madgalene asylums were established by the Catholic Church for sex workers, as well as other women who had deviated from sexual norms, for the sake of penitence and redemption. Life in Magdalene asylums was grueling: the women were given new names, forbidden from talking about their past or talking to their families, and had to work (usually doing laundry) in complete silence.

In London, any sex worker found to have a venereal disease could be forcibly put in a lock hospital for up to a year, while benevolent societies gave the women huge amounts of religious instruction, and then retained them as seamstresses and servants.

Many lesbian women were also labelled as mentally ill, with doctors claiming that life without continued male interaction could cause anemia, irritability, and tiredness. Women who had chosen alternative lifestyles and defied accepted gender norms were considered a threat to the patriarchal society. In asylums—supposedly places of safety— they could face sexual abuse under the care of doctors, who believed that repeated sexual activity with men could cure them.

This put women in an incredibly vulnerable position: those who refused to obey their husbands or fathers, behaved in a manner which was deemed immodest or unwomanly, or refused to submit to their husbands’ demands faced being torn away from their children and families, and were often subjected to the most brutal conditions.

Asylums became a convenient place to put society’s inconvenient women. These stories are more than just reminders that we’re lucky not to have been born two hundred years ago—they are also reminders of how much people in the past were entrenched in ideas of feminine norms, and the lengths they would go to in order to preserve patriarchal dominance.

e70af166925101afcb722a622b94505d (1) 1

Emma Rose Millar was born in Birmingham—a child of the seventies. She is a single mum and lives with her young son. Emma left school at sixteen and later studied for an Open University degree in Humanities with English Literature. She has had a variety of jobs including chocolatier, laboratory technician and editorial assistant for a magazine, but now works part-time as an interpreter.

Emma writes historical fiction and children’s picture books. She won the Legend category of the Chaucer Awards for Historical Fiction with FIVE GUNS BLAZING in 2014. Her novella THE WOMEN FRIENDS: SELINA, based on the work of Gustav Klimt and co-written with author Miriam Drori was published in 2016 by Crooked Cat Books, and was shortlisted for the Goethe Award for Late Historical Fiction. Her third novel, DELIRIUM, a Victorian ghost story, will be published in 2018, also by Crooked Cat Books. It was shortlisted for the Chanticleer Paranormal Book Awards in 2017.

Follow Emma Rose Millar on Twitter, Facebook, or Goodreads. Her new book, Delirium, is out now.

9 Comments Posted on May 16, 2018December 5, 2018 18th Century, 19th Century, America, Art, Beauty, Death, Disease, Georgian Britain, London, Medical History, Sex, The Regency, Victorian

Drop Dead Gorgeous: 19th Century Beauty Tips for the Aspiring Consumptive

swoon Picture the ideal nineteenth century English beauty: pale, almost translucent skin, rosy cheeks, crimson lips, white teeth, and sparkling eyes. She’s waspishly thin with elegant collarbones. Perhaps she’s prone to fainting.

It shouldn’t be difficult to imagine; numerous depictions survive to this day, and the image is still held up as the gold standard for Caucasian women. At this point, it’s so embedded in the Western psyche as beauty that it doesn’t occur to us to question it. Of course that’s beautiful. Why wouldn’t it be?

By the nineteenth century, beauty standards in Britain had come a long way from the plucked hairlines of the late Middle Ages and the heavy ceruse of the Stuart period. Fashionable women wanted slimmer figures because physical fragility had become associated with intelligence and refinement. Flushed cheeks, bright eyes, and red lips had always been popular, particularly among sex workers (they suggested arousal), and women had been using cosmetics like belladonna, carmine, and Spanish leather for years to produce those effects when they didn’t occur organically.

Bright eyes, flushed cheeks, and red lips were also signs of tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis—known at the time as consumption, phthisis, hectic fever, and graveyard cough—was an epidemic that affected all classes and genders without prejudice. Today, an estimated 1.9 billion people are infected with it, and it causes about two million deaths each year. At the time, it was mainly associated with respectable women (although there are no few depictions of sex workers dying of it*) and thought to be triggered by mental exertion or too much dancing.** Attractive women were viewed as more susceptible to it because tuberculosis enhanced their best features. It was noted to cause pale skin, silky hair, weight loss, and a feverish tinge to the face (along with less desirable symptoms including weakness, coughing up blood, GI upset, and organ failure), and it was treated with little to no effect with bleeding, diet, red wine, and opium.

Although having an active (rather than latent) case of consumption was all but a death sentence, it didn’t inspire the revulsion of other less attractive diseases until the end of the 19th century when its causes were better understood.

In 1833, The London Medical and Surgical Journal described it in almost affectionate terms: “Consumption, neither effacing the lines of personal beauty, nor damaging the intellectual functions, tends to exalt the moral habits, and develop the amiable qualities of the patient.”

John Keats. Joseph Severn, 1819.

Of course it didn’t only affect women. The notion that it was caused by mental exertion—along with the high number of artists and intellectuals who lost their lives to it—also led to its association with poets. John Keats died of it at 26. His friend Percy Shelley—also infected—wrote tributes to Keats that attempted to explain consumption not as a disease, but as death by passion. Bizarrely, a symptom that is unique to consumption is spes phthisica, a euphoric state that can result in intense bursts of creativity.*** Keats’ prolific final year of life has been attributed to his consumption, and spes phthisica was viewed by some as necessary for artistic genius.

As Alexandre Dumas (fils) wrote in 1852: “It was the fashion to suffer from the lungs; everybody was consumptive, poets especially; it was good form to spit blood after any emotion that was at all sensational, and to die before reaching the age of thirty.”

Because of its association with young women and poets, the disease itself came to represent beauty, romantic passion, and hyper sexuality. As far as illnesses went, it was considered to be rather glamorous, and in a culture half in love with death, it inspired its fair share of tributes. There are numerous romantic depictions of young women wasting away in death beds at the height of their beauty. Women with consumption were regularly praised for the ethereal loveliness that came from being exceptionally thin and nearly transparent.

Picture that ideal nineteenth century beauty again: that complexion is almost a pallor, and you can see her veins through it. Those lips, eyes, and cheeks are all indicative of a constant low-grade fever. Her teeth are so white they’re almost as translucent as her skin. And her figure? She’s emaciated due to the illness and the chronic diarrhea that comes with it. If she faints, it’s more to do with the lack of oxygen in her blood than the tension of her corset. The sicker she gets, the more beautiful she becomes, until she’s gone; the beauty is all the more poignant because of its impermanence. This beauty can’t last, and it’s as deadly as it is contagious.

Only a fool would wish for it, so what’s a healthy girl to do?

If you didn’t have consumption but wanted the look, there were two things you could do: wait (at its peak between 1780 and 1850, it is estimated to have caused a quarter of all deaths in Europe. Statistically, you would have had a fair chance of getting it), or fake it. Corsets could be made to narrow the waist and encourage a stooped posture, and necklines were designed to show off prominent collar bones. As for the rest, people could try:

Arsenic Complexion Wafers

Although arsenic was known to be toxic, it was used throughout the nineteenth century in everything from dye to medication. Eating small amounts of arsenic regularly was said to produce a clear, ghostly pale complexion. Lola Montez reported that some women in Bohemia frequently drank the water from arsenic springs to whiten their skin.

Stop Eating

In The Ugly-Girl Papers, S.D. Powers offers her own advice for achieving consumptive skin: “The fairest skins belong to people in the earliest stages of consumption, or those of a scrofulous nature. This miraculous clearness and brilliance is due to the constant purgation which wastes the consumptive, or to the issue which relieves the system of impurities by one outlet. We must secure purity of the blood by less exhaustive methods. The diet should be regulated according to the habit of the person. If stout, she should eat as little as will satisfy her appetite.”

How little? Writing in the third person, she uses herself as an example: “Breakfast was usually a small saucer of strawberries and one Graham cracker, and was not infrequently dispensed with altogether. Lunch was half an orange—for the burden of eating the other half was not to be thought of; and at six o’clock a handful of cherries formed a plentiful dinner. Once a week she did crave something like beef-steak of soup, and took it.”

Olive-Tar

For “fair and innocent” skin that mimics the effects of consumption, The Ugly-Girl Papers offers the following recipe: “Mix one spoonful of the best tar in a pint of pure olive oil or almond oil, by heating the two together in a tin cup set in boiling water. Stir till completely mixed and smooth, putting in more oil if the compound is too thick to run easily. Rub this on the face when going to bed, and lay patches of soft old cloth on the cheeks and forehead to keep the tar from rubbing off. The bed linen must be protected by old sheets folded and thrown over the pillows. The odor, when mixed with oil, is not strong enough to be unpleasant—some people fancy its suggestion of aromatic pine breath—and the black, unpleasant mask washes off easily with warm water and soap. The skin comes out, after several applications, soft, moist, and tinted like a baby’s. The French have long used turpentine to efface the marks of age, but olive-tar is pleasanter.”

White Lead

800px-Madame_X_(Madame_Pierre_Gautreau),_John_Singer_Sargent,_1884_(unfree_frame_crop)

Madame X. John Singer Sargent, 1883-4

Lead had been used as the primary ingredient for ceruse and other forms of foundation and powder for centuries. It was known to cause skin problems over time (and, you know, lead poisoning). In the nineteenth century, it was still used for the same purpose and appeared in paints and skin enamels in Europe and the United States.

Lavender Powder

If the pallor of consumption didn’t occur naturally or with the aid of arsenic, it could be imitated with the use of lavender colored powder. Usually applied over ceruse or other foundation made from white lead, it gave the skin a bluish, porcelain shade. Perhaps the best known example of this is John Singer Sargent’s Madame X. The model, Virginie Gautreau, was known to use lavender powder to create her dramatically pale complexion. She was said to be a master of drawing fake veins on with indigo, and she painted her ears with rouge to add to the illusion of translucence.

Rouge

Commonly sold and sometimes made at home, rouge was everywhere. Made from toxic bismuth or vermilion, or carmine from cochineal beetles, it was applied to cheeks, lips, ears, and sometimes even nostrils to make them appear transparent. It came in liquid, cream, and powder forms, and Napoleon’s Empress Josephine is said to have spent a fortune on it. The Ugly-Girl Papers offers this recipe for Milk of Roses, which sounds rather nice:

“(Mix) four ounces of oil of almonds, forty drops of oil of tarter, and half a pint of rose-water with carmine to the proper shade. This is very soothing to the skin. Different tinges may be given to the rouge by adding a few flakes of indigo for the deep black-rose crimson, or mixing a little pale yellow with less carmine for the soft Greuze tints.”

Ammonia

The Ugly-Girl Papers recommends ammonia for use as both a hair rinse and, worryingly, a depilatory. For healthy hair, Powers recommends scrubbing it nightly with a brush in a basin of water with three tablespoons of ammonia added. Hair should then be combed and left to air dry without a night cap.

Lemon Juice and Eyeliner

To achieve the ideal feverish “sparkling eyes,” some women still used belladonna (which could cause blindness) while others resorted to putting lemon juice or other irritants in their eyes to make them water. Eyes, eyelashes, and eyebrows could also be defined. Powers advises: “All preparations for darkening the eyebrows, eyelashes, etc., must be put on with a small hair-pencil. The “dirty-finger” effect is not good. A fine line of black round the rim of the eyelid, when properly done, should not be detected, and its effect in softening and enlarging the eyes is well known by all amateur players.”

Jessica Cale

Sources

Day, Carolyn. Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease. (2017)

Dumas, Alexandre (fils). La Dame Aux Camélias. (1852)

Klebs, Arnold. Tuberculosis: A Treatise by American Authors on its Etiology, Pathology, Frequency, Semeiology, Diagnosis, Prognosis, Prevention, and Treatment. (1909)

Meier, Allison. How Tuberculosis Symptoms Became Ideals of Beauty in the 19^th Century. Hyperallergic. January 2^nd, 2018.

Montez, Lola. The Arts of Beauty: or Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet. (1858)

Morens, David M. At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art. Emerging Infectious Diseases, Volume 8, Number 11. November 2002.

Mullin, Emily. How Tuberculosis Shaped Victorian Fashion. Smithsonian.com, May 10^th, 2016.

Pointer, Sally. The Artifice of Beauty: A History and Practical Guide to Perfumes and Cosmetics. (2005)

Powers, S. D. The Ugly-Girl Papers, or Hints for the Toilet. (1874)

Zarrelli, Natalie. The Poisonous Beauty Advice Columns of Victorian England. Atlas Obscura, December 17^th, 2015.

Notes

*Depictions of sex workers dying of tuberculosis: La Traviata, Les Misérables, La Bohème, and now Moulin Rouge, etc. In the 19^th century, consumption was portrayed as a kind of romantic redemption for sex workers through the physical sacrifice of the body.

**Although dancing itself wouldn’t have done it, the disease was so contagious that it could be contracted anywhere people would be at close quarters—dancing at balls with multiple partners could have reasonably been high-risk behavior.

***You know what else does that? Tertiary syphilis. How do you know which one you have? If you’re coughing blood, it’s consumption. If your skin is falling off, it’s syphilis. Either way, you’re going to want to call a doctor.

Dirty, Sexy History

Dirty, Sexy History

Skipping to the good stuff with Jessica Cale

America

Treating the (Last) Pandemic: Heroin, Aspirin, and The Spanish Flu

“We are determined to foment a rebellion”: Women and Espionage in the American Revolution

Contraception in Cookbooks: Herbal Family Planning in the Early Modern Period and Beyond

A Cure for (Anything) that Ails You: Cocaine in Victorian Medicine

Trans and Non-binary Identities from Mesopotamia to Ancient Rome: Inanna, Cybele, and the Gallai

A Corpse Goes to a Ball: In Which Jess Ruins Frozen For You Forever

Boiling to be Beautiful in 1930s America

Nellie Bly Takes the Gold Cure

Sex and the Asylum: Imprisoning Inconvenient Women

Drop Dead Gorgeous: 19th Century Beauty Tips for the Aspiring Consumptive

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