Bad Medicine

 As I have been reading, scanning, and transcribing letters written by the Edward McCarty Armstrong family in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, I have been struck by the descriptions of disease and death. The letters are full of references to epidemics of yellow fever and scarlet fever, to the deaths of neighbors, friends, and relatives, and to medicine administered to aid the sick, the depressed, the fatigued. My husband's great-grandfather, Baker White Armstrong (Sr.), was a practicing pharmacist in the last two decades of the 1800s, and his older half-brother William Dillon Armstrong was a physician, as is noted on his tombstone. "Brother Will" was often called out to the Armstrong farm, "Edgewood," to administer aid when a family member was ill. And in our collection of family letters, clippings, and photographs is a pocket notebook of Baker Armstrong's, full of handwritten recipes for pharmaceutical concoctions. We look at those drug recipes today and may think they represent magical thinking more than medicine, but perhaps we aren't so far removed from that magical thinking ourselves.

In the summer of 1883, James (Jimmie), one of Edward's sons from his first marriage to Hannah Pancake, was very ill and went to the home of his father and stepmother for care. His wife, Agnes, pregnant with a son who was to be born three months after his father's death, was there with him. The letters of the family to Baker, who was then living in Baltimore, Maryland, reference Jimmie's illness. Louisa, Baker's mother and Jimmie's stepmother, described some of the details in a letter of June, 1883:

Jimmie is a little easier. William drove him to town for a little while on Friday. The ride did not hurt him we think but he has been much worse since Saturday -- not able to be out of bed. He suffers terribly at times & can be relieved only by Opium. To-day he had been suffering from nausea & vomiting but is somewhat relieved now. William has been with him since 2 o'clock Saturday except for a few hours yesterday evening. He is so changeable -- we do not know one hour what he will be the next. We fear he is in a critical condition; but do not say so to any one but Robert.

In the back of her Bible, Louisa Tapscott White Armstrong recorded the death of her stepson: "James A. Armstrong died July 14th, 1883, about 5 p.m."

In January of 1885, Katie Armstrong, youngest daughter of Edward and Louisa Armstrong, insisted on attending a church "protracted" meeting even though she hadn't been feeling well.  Her father describes the result in a letter of January 27, 1885, to his son Baker, then living in Bryan, Texas.

Mr. Gordon was holding a protracted meeting in Salem and [Katie] and Janie went down to attend it on Tuesday the 13th day of this month and was to return on Thursday to let Fannie and Nettie go down, but the sleet prevented, and they did not go down or get home, until Friday. Katie complained much of her headache and backache when she started to town but was so anxious to attend the meeting, that she went. She attended all the meetings but two, and came home much complaining on Friday. William saw her and gave her some medicine and thought she would be well in a day or two, but she did not get better and William sent her more medicine, and came out to see her on Tuesday the 20th. He treated her but did not think her case serious. That night he got a telegram calling him to see Mrs. Robert Glasgow, who was critically ill. He went, supposing Katie would be all right when he returned, but for fear he might be mistaken, he saw Dr. Bruffey  before leaving, and Bruffey came up in his stead (when we sent for William [the] next day). William returned Thursday night . . . . but nothing they could do seemed to arrest the disease. Delirium came on, and blood poisoning commenced and continued to the end and no remedy seemed to prove efficacious and she quietly and peacefully passed away last night . . . Her dissolution was very rapid . . . I had no idea she would pass away during the night, but her strength gave way, and she breathed her last. O so peacefully and calmly, her life seemed to ebb away, just like the going out of a candle. . .

Katie Armstrong was nineteen years old when she died. Her mother recorded her daughter's death in her Bible: "My dear Katie died Jan. 26th, 1885, at 20 min. past nine P. M. We sorrow not as those who have no hope. She had given herself to Christ some years before."

Many of the Armstrong letters also reference Louisa Armstrong's illness, which lingered for over a decade of letter-writing. What she suffered from is not clear from the descriptions, but she spent weeks at Yellow Sulphur Springs, Virginia, seeking respite from her illness in 1874, and in the years up to her death in 1887, various siblings update Baker on how well or how badly their mother is feeling.

Who knows how many of these family members would have survived their illnesses if they had had access to modern medicine, perhaps to penicillin, which wasn't distributed in significant amounts until World War II. Other illnesses might have been caused by the very medicines being prescribed by doctors and pharmacists. In her letters, Louisa Armstrong mentions the "blue mass" pill, a popular medicine at the time that was administered for illnesses ranging from depression to tuberculosis to toothache to the pains of childbirth. In a letter to her son Baker, dated July 15, 1874, Louisa writes that she is "anxious about [your Pa]" and advises Baker to tell his father "he had better take some more blue mass."

The main ingredient in the blue mass pill was mercury, and, according to an article on the National Geographic News website, this pill "[i]f taken at the normally prescribed dose of the time—one pill two or three times a day—. . .would deliver nearly 9,000 times the amount of mercury that is deemed safe for people by current health standards" ["Did Mercury in 'Little Blue Pills' Make Abraham Lincoln Erratic?," Hillary Mayell, for National Geographic News, 17 July 2001]. A typical U. S. pharmaceutical recipe for the blue mass pill contained "mercury (33 parts), powdered liquorice (5 parts), althaea (root of the marshmallow)(25 parts), glycerin (3 parts), honey of rose (34 parts)" ["UK Lab Reveals Shocking Mercury Level in Lincoln's Blue Pills," Royal Society of Chemistry press release, 22 March 2010]. According to Dr. Norbert Hirschhorn, a New York medical historian, the blue mass pill was "really the Prozac-plus of the time because [doctors] used it to treat a lot of conditions . . . for anything they thought was related to the liver."  But the blue mass pill "only poisoned you," and its effects could include "decreased brain-wave activity, irritability, depression, memory loss, and impaired kidney function." [Jeremy Manier, "For Lincoln, ancient cure worse than his malady," Chicago Tribune, 17 July 2001]

Reading of how frequently such poisonous concoctions were prescribed and ingested may horrify us, but then we may wonder what medical procedures touted as effective today will be proven just as ineffective by researchers in the future. Recent studies indicate we may be at the mercy of ineffectively administered cures just as our ancestors were. In his book, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, Ben Goldacre, British physician and science writer, explores how the pharmaceutical industry manipulates the science of drug research, with a deleterious effect on the practice of medicine. In an excerpt from the book published in Salon, Goldacre describes how clinical tests supported by pharmaceutical companies usually conclude positively in favor of the method or drug that the pharmaceutical company is promoting. These positive conclusions can result from conducting faulty research, from suppressing negative results, from choosing participants who are more likely to respond favorably to the treatment being tested,  from halting research before it yields negative results, or just from failing to publish negative results.

Dr. Goldacre writes:

Because researchers are free to bury any result they please, patients are exposed to harm on a staggering scale throughout the whole of medicine, from research to practice. Doctors can have no idea about the true effects of the treatments they give. Does this drug really work best, or have I simply been deprived of half the data? Nobody can tell. Is this expensive drug worth the money, or have the data simply been massaged? No one can tell. Will this drug kill patients? Is there any evidence that it’s dangerous? No one can tell. ["Bad Pharma: Drug research riddled with half truths, omissions, and lies,", in Salon, 27 January 2013.]

The result is that doctors--with the best of intentions but unaware of the full medical research--prescribe medicines and treatments that are no more effective, and perhaps just as injurious, as the blue mass pill.

photocopy of a page from Baker Armstrong, Sr.'s pharmacy notebook

Some Consequences of the Confederacy

E. M.Armstrong, Sr.'s (partial) letter to Baker W. Armstrong, Dec. 20, 1884

Update below
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been immersed in reading letters written by Tom's great-great grandfather and his family, all of Virginia. Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., had been a prosperous merchant in Romney [now in West Virginia] before the Civil War. His father, William Armstrong, had immigrated to America from Ireland as a young boy, settled in what was then Virginia, and eventually represented Virginia in the U. S. Congress.

In 1861, Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr.  was elected a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1861, a convention in which delegates were to discuss and to vote on whether or not Virginia would secede from the Union. He was among those who voted against seceding from the Union. Both representatives of Hampshire County, Virginia--Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., and David Pugh--voted no. But the Ordinance of Secession eventually passed, and a majority of the citizens of Virginia ratified the vote.

We have no letters of the Armstrong family from before the Civil War or from during the Civil War, so I have little insight into why Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., and several of his sons from his first marriage to Hannah Pancake, decided to fight for the Confederacy. One son, Isaac Armstrong, was mortally wounded in the battle of Gaines Mill; lingering for weeks, he finally succumbed to his wounds. I suspect, though, that like many Southerners who weren't connected to the plantation system, the Armstrongs joined the war out of loyalty to their state, to their region, to a sense of place. That doesn't make the decision right--for the Civil War was about slavery--but it makes the decision more understandable to those of us on the other side of Civil Rights.

After the war and now with children from a second marriage joining those from the first marriage, Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., moved to Salem, Virginia. He was never again to be as prosperous as he had been before the War; his last years were spent farming and worrying how to support his family. He also was a board member of the Union Theological Seminary, then associated with Hampden-Sydney College, which today remains one of the few all-male liberal arts colleges.

The letters that Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., wrote his son Baker White Armstrong, the son who moved to Texas and who became my husband's great-grandfather, reveal the man to be kind, generous, loving, and very religious. That he fought for the Confederacy does not make him a bad man; it makes him a misguided man, misguided by the zeitgeist of the plantation economy:  the idea that some people are more equal than others, that some people deserve privileges bestowed on them by an accident of birth and the color of their skin, that some people, by that accident of birth and/or color of skin are providentially destined to be either leaders or laborers. He serves as a reminder of how good people can be persuaded to fight for bad causes--and of how religion can also be used as a tool for a bad cause.

In his letter of October 5, 1883, Edward wrote his son Baker:

I heard a splendid speech from Major Daniel last Monday. He had a full House, and many Re-Adjusters to hear him -- I think it highly probable that this country will gain a democratic majority this fall --Many of the old democrats who were enticed off by re-adjusterism have returned to the democratic fold, [and] others will follow. Mahoneism is a disgrace to our old state, and I can but hope there will be good [and] honest people enough found to throw off the party shackles and redeem the state at the Nov. elections.

The politics behind this letter are murky, the waters muddied by individual expectations and needs and the wider politics of a state that had lost the War. The politics have to do with railroads and debt and government services and the rights of poor whites and blacks freed by the defeat of the South. "Mahone" is William Mahone: he had been a slave owner, he had backed secession, he had been in charge of Virginians who massacred Union Colored Troops, and he moved up the ranks in the Confederate Army to major general. He was also a railroad tycoon, and after the Civil War, he fought to build railroads that would also provide profit for his railroad. Here is where E. M. Armstrong's personal desires probably intersected with politics, for Armstrong had bought land near Salem, hoping to profit from the Norfolk and Western Railroad's building yards, shops and a roundhouse in Salem. This didn't happen, and the family was reduced to what some call "genteel poverty." Perhaps William Mahone's financial success had something to do with E. M. Armstrong's failure to profit from his land acquisition.

During Reconstruction, the Virginia Constitution of 1870 provided suffrage for all men, black and white, over the age of 21, and also instituted state-funded public schools. Later, however, Conservatives used the state's war debt as a way to argue for cutting social services, and thus the access of blacks to education. William Mahone used this argument over debt vs. services as a way to gain political power. He created a biracial coalition of Conservatives and Republicans, and in 1881, was elected to the U. S. Senate. This coalition led by William Mahone was known as the "Readjusters," for its focus on "readusting" the state's war debt downward; this group of uneasy alliances also passed legislation that "abolish[ed] anti-black regulations, establish[ed] Virginia State University, increas[ed] financial support to public institutions, and charter[ed] labor unions." Mahone raised the ire of many Virginia voters, however, by caucusing with the Republicans, and his leadership tended to be autocratic.

A riot in Danville, Virginia, on November 3, 1883, gave Conservative Southern Democrats--the Democrats of the Old South-- the extra fuel they needed to ignite their political campaign to re-take state offices. Some reports describe a scuffle that broke out between some black men and white men after a meeting of prominent white men who were determined to defeat the government of the Readjusters. Other reports describe the riot as having started when black residents failed to give way to white residents on the sidewalks of the town. Whatever the specifics, the riot was obviously the result of the uneasy relationship between white and black citizens, and the repugnant idea of white supremacy. Several people were shot and killed, and the Conservative Democrats used this incident to incite "the fears of white voters."

William Mahone lost the 1884 election to another former Confederate officer, John W. Daniel, the man Edward Armstrong, Sr., had mentioned in his letter of October 1883, to  his son Baker. By the election of 1884, however, Baker W. Armstrong had moved to Bryan, Texas, to seek employment as a druggist with a drug store there. His brother Robert provides the news of the 1884 election, in a letter of November 10, 1884:

"Old Va" I am glad to say went Democratic on last Tuesday, [and] I cannot but hope that Mahone is "done for."

And in a letter written the 20th of December of that same year, E. M. Armstrong, Sr., tells his son Baker:

I wrote to Major Daniel requesting him to send you a copy of his Richmond jollification speech, and, if he could conveniently, his photo which I hope you will receive and appreciate.

And so the experiments in white and black coalition governments in the South came to an end, with the stoking of racial fears. Major John W. Daniel was also to serve as a delegate to Virginia's 1901-1902 Constitutional Convention, the focus of which was to disfranchise African-Americans. Conservative Democrats had campaigned for the convention, touting the need for "electoral reform and better state government," code words then --and even now-- meant to obscure the marginalization of a minority group. But make no mistake--disfranchisement of African-Americans was the convention's main goal:

The main question for the delegates was how to eliminate the black vote without violating the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Eventually they proposed that under Virginia's new constitution, a man would be eligible to vote if he could satisfy one of the following three requirements: he could read or understand the state constitution; he had paid taxes on property worth at least $333; or he was either a U.S. or Confederate veteran or the son of a veteran. All three conditions were loopholes designed to protect white voters. Further narrowing the pool of possible voters, minimum requirements were set for age, residency, and literacy, and a poll tax requirement was also instituted.[ "Virginia's Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902", on the web site of the Virginia Historical Society]

To make sure that blacks would not be able to vote on a constitution that would disfranchise them, "the Convention instead took the unusual step of proclaiming it the law of the commonwealth." ["Virginia's Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902," on the web site of the Virginia Historical Society]

And so are good people manipulated and deceived through fear, personal interest, and a misguided sense of superiority.

Unfortunately, plantation politics continue today, and the myth of the Lost Cause obscures the horrors of slavery, of the debasement of one people to the enrichment of another.

Election "fraud" is still used as an excuse to make voting more restrictive even when the "fraud" is practically non-existent. [See "UFO Sightings are More Common than Voter Fraud," Hamed Aleaziz, Dave Gilson, and Jaeah Lee, Mother Jones, July/August 2012.]

And yesterday the politically-evenly split Virginia state senate pushed through a re-districting map while one of their Democratic colleagues (a civil rights veteran attending the presidential inauguration)  was absent and then afterward adjourned their session on Martin Luther King Day by paying tribute to Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. Perhaps there is a way to honor "good" men who fight for bad causes. This is not the way: publicly honoring a white man who fought for the enslavement of African-Americans on a holiday established to honor a black man who fought for the political and social freedom of African-Americans. This was also the day our first African-American president was inaugurated for his second term. Anyone who sees such actions as purely accidental and devoid of political motivation is willfully blind or ignorant. [For more juicy details, see: the blog of Blue Virginia, "Breaking: While Dems Distracted by Inauguration, Virgina Senate GOP Stages a Coup," in which Republican state senator Deeds is described as "rambling" on about Stonewall Jackson's love of peaches, lemons, and women.]

The poisonous fruit of the Confederacy continues to blossom. Let's hope that good men and good women are not deceived. The murky waters of politics require an alert and engaged citizenry.


UPDATE:
As one of the readers of this post has noted, although Edward McCarty Armstrong did vote against secession, he eventually did sign the ordinance to secede. The majority of the delegates elected to the convention were Unionists, and the debate'"raged on for months." You can read about that debate on the Encyclopedia Virginia website here: "Virginia Convention of 1861".

Writing for the Encyclopedia Virginia, Nelson D. Lankford describes how the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the Fort's surrender and then Lincoln's proclamation "calling for all loyal states to send their militias to put down the Confederate rebellion" swayed many of these southern Unionists to change their vote. They had withstood months of prolonged debate and the fiery rhetoric of secessionists, but in the end:

[t]he tragedy of the Unionist majority in the convention was that, though its members loathed the thought of leaving the United States, in the end they could not countenance fighting against fellow white Southerners. [Lankford, Nelson D. "Virginia Convention of 1861." Encyclopedia Virginia. Ed. Brendan Wolfe. 23 Jan. 2013. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. 5 Apr. 2011 .]

See a copy of the Ordinance of 1861 here: Virginia's Ordinance of Secession.

President Obama's Inaugural Speech

I listened to President Obama's inaugural speech after the fact, because I was immersed in 1884 and forgot the time while transcribing a letter written by Edward McCarty Armstrong, Tom's great-great grandfather. Edward McCarty Armstrong was  a "good" man in many ways but a man who was on the wrong side of history and steeped in the myth of the Confederacy for which he had fought, a man who, in 1884, wrote to his son, recently moved from Virginia to Texas, about his happiness that the Democratic party of the Old South had taken back the legislature. The man elected that year, Major Daniel, mentioned by name by EMA, was later to participate in the Virginia Constitution of 1902, which instituted Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising African-Americans who had been given that right in the Virginia constitution of 1870--other Southern states were doing the same.

And so the South stood -- segregated, resistant to Lincoln's Proclamation of Emancipation with its institution of  "slavery by another name"-- until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, an act which was avidly opposed by another Democrat and segregationist from Virginia, Chairman of the Rules Committee, Howard W. Smith. But President Johnson, a Democrat, too, from the South, used the bully pulpit of the presidency to help get the votes for the act, and an unprecedented parliamentary procedure enabled the bill to be moved to the Senate floor for debate.

With the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democratic party lost the segregationists of the Old South (and over the next few years, much of its southern support). We would do well to remember this history in our time, when certain forces are again calling for the passing of laws that would disenfranchise particular populations of our citizens, using the same language of the legislators of the Old South--ostensibly to prevent voting "fraud."

With this history so vividly called to mind by my research and my reading of old family letters, I was even more moved by the words of President Obama:

"We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth."

A New Year, New [and Old] Goals

one of our cats in the middle of Christmas packaging

Two months have passed since I last wrote a post. My absence is partly due to the business of the holidays, partly due to my usual turning inward during the cold winter months--even here in not-so-cold southeast Louisiana--and partly due to my resolve not to be drawn into the poisonous rhetoric of today's politics. I'm just tired of the hatred directed toward and the conspiracy theories projected onto our first African-American president. Facts do not seem to matter to a great number of people. Other bloggers are writing more consistently and engagingly about politics than I am, so I've decided occasionally to link to a post I find interesting and to focus my writing on my own projects--or on more positive events in the world than the latest right-wing, fear-mongering topic, though I won't rule out the occasional post on politics. 

Most of my goals for the new year are the same as the past year: I will spend a great deal of time gardening, and maybe this year I will begin clearing out the brush that has grown along the fence line of this acre of land on which our hundred-year-old cottage is located. Last year my husband and I put in 8X8-foot raised garden areas for herbs and flowers behind our house, and my husband finished tilling and adding compost to a large row garden on the north side of our property for vegetables.  We began building a shed for my garden tools; the shed is almost complete, and now I have to paint it. My goal is to have the shed ready for use before spring planting.

One of my new goals for this year is to become more engaged in my community. My move here was a difficult one for many reasons--the older I get, the more stressful moving seems to be. I grew up in a community of relatives, where five or six generations of families had developed relationships, many of the ancestors of my contemporaries having migrated to that area of Texas together. My adult life, however, has been a very mobile one. When I was younger, the moves seemed much easier, the friendships more quickly established. I easily found employment teaching at local universities and colleges, joined local churches, immersed myself in work, family, community. Now I no longer attend church--and in the South, church attendance is the quickest way to establish one's self in a community. The children, also, are grown, away at universities in other states, so their activities no longer pull me out into the community. And since I decided, after over twenty-five years of college-related work, not to continue teaching, I find myself unemployed at the age of fifty-five. I have a natural tendency towards introspection and am not averse to spending a great deal of time alone, and now none of these external demands--children, church, career--temper those tendencies. I have to work against them myself.

I have already begun work on one of my goals for this year: to scan and transcribe many of the hundreds of family letters my husband and his sister inherited. The bulk of these letters were written from the middle of the 1800s to the middle of the 1900s, and they follow the movements of an educated and genteel class of Southern families after the Civil War. I began this work a few years ago on my Left for Texas blog, and am continuing that work, though with a great deal more concentration and commitment.

The work is tedious, as I am creating digital files linking documents of the transcribed letters to images of those letters. But some of the letters are fascinating, full of chatty news about the family's activities as well as historical events, and in the research that I'm doing concurrent with reading and transcribing the letters, I am learning a lot more about history, especially history of the South after the Civil War--and the attitudes of those who fought for the Confederacy. In another post, I'll write about what I perceive to be the burdens of this work--and those burdens are not restricted to the tedious work of the amanuensis.

Last year--and the year previous--I spent a lot of time making things out of recycled materials and yarn: folk art felted wool quilts and throws, necklaces and scarves of my own design, felted wool pouches, felted wool pins, etc. I sold some of these items at a couple of festivals, but at the end of the year, I gave away as presents some of my best pieces and decided that this year I would concentrate on making quilts of my own design. So when I'm not immersed in family history or gardening, I'll be stitching on quilts, some made conventionally on a quilt frame and others made out of felted wool from recycled sweaters. In late spring of last year, I finished a felted wool folk art quilt, and last summer, I finished a quilt top inspired by a friend's photograph; this year I plan to finish quilting it. 

quilt top inspired by a friend's photo--cotton and felt

 These are my goals: seeking more community involvement; digitally recording old photographs and letters with the intent of editing those letters eventually; gardening and beautifying the grounds of our "cottage"; quilting. Any personal growth will have to arise out of those activity-oriented goals. I gave up on aspiring to become a better person beyond what might be a natural outgrowth of what I do.