Yay for May!
Okey-dokey,
so my neighbors and I were chatting about stuff a couple of evenings ago. I
recommended they watch The Knick,
which was a Cinemax series starring Clive Owen as Dr. John Thackery, a sort of
early-days House, if you’ve ever seen
that series. House starred Hugh
Laurie, whom I still think of as Bertie Wooster, but that’s not his fault.
Anyway, my neighbor began watching The
Knick and is enjoying it. He doesn’t mind gore as much as I do.
All
this contemplation of early medical practices and cures got me to thinking
about why I write historical novels. The reason, I concluded, is that I like to
think of the 1920s as somehow nicer than the 2000s. I’m wrong, of course, and
one only needs to think about what was and wasn’t around back then to realize
it.
For
instance my mother, who was born in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1913, remembered
cholera epidemics, flu epidemics, dysentery problems and all sorts of other
conditions we hardly consider these days. So I started Googling (Google wasn’t
around in the 1920s either, natch). By the early 1900s people routinely got
vaccinated for smallpox, thanks to Edward Jenner. Jenner noticed that people
who contracted cowpox didn’t come
down with smallpox, and the realization prompted him to invent a vaccination
for smallpox. But other than that, there was no penicillin, no other
antibiotics, and the only pain reliever people knew about until the mid-1880s
was either laudanum or morphine, both derived from the opium poppy. Unless, of
course, you wanted to go out and find the right kind of willow tree and gnaw on
the bark thereof. Not too many people knew about the pain-killing properties of
willow bark, however.
By
the way, my mother’s father, William Jones Wilson, a circuit-riding Methodist
minister, died two days after my mother was born in November of 1913. The
family’s regular doctor was away from Roswell, and the substitute thought my
grandfather was suffering from sympathetic labor pains. He wasn’t. He had a
ruptured appendix. But that’s a story for another day.
Here’s
a fun semi-medical fact: Dr. Pepper was originally touted as a “brain tonic” (I
could use one of those, but I don’t care for Dr. Pepper). The drink was first
bottled and distributed at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, informally known
as the St. Louis World’s Fair, in 1904. From 1889-1914, its advertising slogan
was the “King of Beverages”. And people still drink it today. Well, except for
me, since I don’t like it. However, I don’t believe it ever contained any
actually medicinal properties.
A
guy named General John Pemberton, a former Confederate surgeon, invented
Coca-Cola after the Civil War (actually, he’d probably have called it the War
of Northern Aggression) in the 1870s or 1880s as a cure for his own morphine
addiction. He formulated the original product in his Eagle Drug and Chemical
House in Columbus, Georgia. Coca-Cola originally contained a combination of
caffeine and cocaine. Coca-Cola was intended to be a patent medicine, but folks
found other uses for it. It still has the caffeine, bless its heart, but
somewhere along the way the cocaine was dumped. Probably disappointed a whole
lot of people, as it undoubtedly gave folks a happy lift. Don’t have a clue if
it helped cure Dr. Pemberton of his morphine addiction. Oh! And when my mom was
a kid and got an upset stomach, her mother would give her Coke syrup. Don’t
even know if you can get that stuff these days (or even what was in it).
Laudanum,
an opiate, was routinely sold over the counter for people who suffered from any
kind of pain. I know for a certified fact that if I’d been around in the early 1900s
(providing I could afford to buy the stuff) I’d have been a laudanum addict
because I’ve had so much trouble with various painful conditions for most of my
life. That’s kind of a lowering reflection, but it’s true. People could also
obtain morphine OTC for many years. In the series House, Dr. House was addicted to Percocet or Vicodin (can’t
remember which). In The Knick, Dr.
Thackery is addicted to morphine and cocaine. Some things never change, I
reckon. Anyhow, Dr. Thackery is delighted to discover heroin because he
believes it will be a cure for his addiction. After all, since heroin is sold
by the Bayer Company, it has to be
safe, right? Well… Maybe not. 
Then
there’s cocaine, which was used for lots of medical problems. Nobody thought
anything about it. After all, it was medicine, right? Again, maybe not. I found
this ad when I was browsing:
Oh! We
definitely shouldn’t forget acetylsalicylic acid. In 1899 the
Bayer Company made pills out of the ingredients and began marketing it to the
general public as a product called Aspirin. Prior to the Bayer Company’s naming
and marketing of the drug, one could buy salicylic powders, dump some into a
glass of water or another beverage, and drink the resulting concoction. It must
have tasted vile, but it was a heck of a lot less dangerous than morphine or
heroin. However, by the time aspirin came along, people like me would have been
laudanum or morphine addicts for decades. Or dead. I’d certainly have been dead
because when I was twenty-two or -three, I got hellishly sick, was headed
toward encephalitis or meningitis, and was only saved from extinction by the
administration of antibiotics. Which, by the way, were prescribed for me by Dr.
Benjamin, who is a frequent visitor in the Daisy Gumm Majesty books.
If
I’d had that illness before the accidental discovery of penicillin by a
Scottish gent, Sir
Alex Fleming, in 1928, I’d have been a goner. Penicillin wasn’t available for
general consumption until the mid to late 1940s. Luckily for me I got sick in
the 1970s. Back in the olden days (1970s and before), you got a shot of
penicillin, took two aspirin tablets, and called the doctor in a day or two.
These days, antibiotics are generally prescribed in pill or tablet form. Times
have unquestionably changed.
Then
there were the so-called “operating theaters”. In The Knick’s days, the operating theater really was a theater!
And
we’d better not forget X-rays. Invented in 1895
by German (well, really, he was a Prussian, but there’s no Prussia any longer) mechanical
engineer and physicist, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, X-rays
revolutionized medicine. Doctors could see inside
a human body using Röntgen rays (or X-rays). Back then no one knew
that a person needed to be extremely cautious when using these electromagnetic
wavelength rays. Sometimes things went wrong and patients (and sometimes
technicians) suffered severe burns or even death. Gotta be careful with that
stuff.
At
any rate, times have definitely changed since the early 1900s. Because I have
such honestly terrible back pain, I’m
kind of sorry one can’t just waltz into a pharmacy and buy a bottle of heroin
anymore, but I’m sure I’m wrong to think that way. Probably. Or perhaps not.
Phooey. Don’t suppose it matters. I’m sure not going to hang out on street
corners and pray a drug dealer strolls past.
Anyhow,
I’ll be in touch with the winners of April’s giveaway book, UNSETTLED SPIRITS,
individually. At the end of May, Bam-Bam, my winner-picking wiener dog, will
select winners of SPIRITS REVIVED. SPIRITS REVIVED is Daisy Gumm Majesty’s
seventh adventure, but since I can’t get the rights back from the original
publisher, it’s sort of languishing out there in publishing limbo and there’s a
hole in the Daisy series. Maybe one of these days all of the books can reunite
and Daisy will throw a big party. Or maybe not.
If you’d
like to enter the contest, just send me an email (alice@aliceduncan.net) and give me your
name and home address. If you’d like to be added to my mailing list, you may do
so on my web site (http://aliceduncan.net/) or email me (you
won’t be smothered in newsletters, because I only write one blog a month, and
that’s an effort). If you’d like to be friends on Facebook, visit my page at https://www.facebook.com/alice.duncan.925.
Thank
you!
Fascinating.
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