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."

Gone to Texas

Click on photo to view an enlarged, easy to read, version.

In the early 19th century, a huge migration took place as people in the United States traveled west. Some of these people left a cryptic sign on their abandoned homes, revealing their destination: GTT, Gone to Texas. In the latter part of the 19th century, more people headed to Texas as the railroads made travel easier. Two of these late-comers to Texas (compared to some of my ancestors who arrived before independence from Mexico and were given Spanish land grants) were my husband's great-grandfather, Baker White Armstrong, and his great-grandfather's brother Robert Armstrong. The two brothers left home and family in Virginia for Texas. Robert settled down in Bryan, Texas, married Cora Cavitt, and practiced law. Baker, a pharmacist, traveled around Texas selling pharmaceuticals, worked as a pharmacist at a drugstore on Main Street, in Bryan, Texas, married Mary Ophelia Nugent, whose family had moved from New Orleans to Virginia in the mid-1880s, and eventually settled in Houston, where he was connected with two or three of those ubiquitous oil companies of the early twentieth century. He also speculated in land.

One of the items handed down in the Armstrong family is the Bible of Baker's and Robert's mother. The inscription in one of the inside leaves reads: Mrs. L. T. Armstrong, From Her Daughters, July 7th 1878. Running sideways and parallel to that inscription are these words: For Baker W. Armstrong, from His Mother. The Bible had been passed on, from mother to son, from Virginia to Texas, with a mother's sorrows, comfort, and anxieties clearly revealed in its pages: handwritten notes on deaths of family members, clippings of obituaries, various flowers pressed between the pages, a newspaper clipping of a beloved son's recent appointment as pharmacist to "Geo. W. Norrell, Druggist, Main St., Bryan---Texas." And on the first pages, notes of her sons' travel, a mother's version of GTT:"Robert left for B--Aug 30, 188?; Baker left for Roanoke, Aug 20, 188?; Baker came home sick Oct 5, 1882 & left for Baltimore Jan 2 1883; Baker & Robert left Sept 18th 1884; Baker left for Texas Oct 8, 1884; Robert left for Romney, Mar 13, 1885; Robert left for Texas Aug 31, 1885; Baker reached home July 7, 1886, from Texas--left for Texas again July 26, 1886."

I'm thinking of starting another blog that just focuses on family history, on those ancestors who left in their wake the blaze: GTT, Gone to Texas.

Gravestone in Decatur Cemetery, Decatur, Georgia