1853

 

__________ 

“And if men cannot cope with women in the medical profession let them take a humble occupation in which they can.” 

Sarah Hale, arguing in favor of allowing women to study medicine.

__________

 

VICTORIAN ERA thinking begins to take hold in America (this date is not hard and fast, but an approximation).

 

    Ruth Finley, writing in 1931, characterizes it this way:

 

Prudery – a modesty so false as to discourage women’s acceptance of masculine medical aid.

 

Piety – not religion, but a dogged adherence to such outworn dogma as that which fought anesthesia.

 

Sentimentalism – most apparent in the overwhelming flood of emotional writing.

 

Hypocrisy – manifested by an artificiality of manners, by an assumed, though of course never actual, suppression of natural instincts.

 

    These four pretenses, breeding inhibitions that hampered in both their observance and their breach, are the “absurdities and errors” – so antagonistic to present-day realism.

 

    Finley sees the queen’s own parental background as illustrating the “debauchery” her era was called upon to correct. Of the Prince of Wales, later George IV, she writes: “The Prince Regent’s private life does not adapt itself to detailed description. He had but a dull mind at best; yet he really was interested in three things, though only three – women, wine and revelry.” (117)

 

* 

“Prejudice in Women Themselves.” 

    Hale repeatedly stood up for the idea that women could enter professions heretofore closed to them. In an editorial in January 1853, she defended the idea that women could be doctors. Male writers posed all sorts of questions, and Hale lost patience: 

    Another says, “You will…drive men out of the medical profession, and even those now in it will starve.”

 

    They may as well starve as the women. And if men cannot cope with women in the medical profession let them take a humble occupation in which they can. (101)

 

    Finley writes, that in this endeavor to change minds, “the lady editor faced an obstacle very much resembling a stone wall.” (103) 

    Her most difficult task was to overcome prejudice in women themselves. Other than for such superficial elements as “megrims” and “vapors,” women as a whole had little recourse to doctors. Home remedies, handed down from mother to daughter or exchanged by neighbors over the back-yard fence, were the housewife’s stand-by. Nauseous, indeed, where the doses thus concocted – “sulfur and molasses,” “lard  and turpentine,” “boneset tea.” There was no community but that boasted at least one woman reputed wise in the art of healing, and, in truth, not infrequently she was more to be trusted than the doctors, whose endless “bleeding” and “cupping” were prescribed for everything from a fractured skull to typhoid fever. There was some excuse for women shying away from medicine as it was then practiced.

 

    In addition to this distrust, there prevailed an attitude of false modesty utterly incomprehensible to the modern mind. It is best expressed in the words of a physician of the times, Professor Meigs of the staff of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.

 

    “The relations of the sexes,” he said, “are of so delicate a character that the duties of the medical practitioner are necessarily more difficult when he comes to take charge of any one of the host of female complaints. … So great indeed is the embarrassment that I am persuaded that much of the ill success of treatment may justly be traced thereto. … nevertheless I am proud to say that in this country generally … women prefer to suffer the extremity of danger and pain rather than waive those scruples of delicacy which prevent their maladies from being fully explored. I say it is an evidence of a fine morality in our society.” (102-103)

 

    In 1850, Dr. Wendell Holmes, professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard convinced the faculty to admit women to the medical school. The undergraduates overruled the decision. Their resolutions were published in the Boston Transcript, copied widely, and “hailed with wide acclaim.” 

    Resolved that no woman of true delicacy would be willing, in the presence of men, to listen to the discussion of subjects that necessarily come under the consideration of students of medicine;

 

    Resolved that we are not opposed to allowing woman her rights, but we do protest against her appearing in places where her presence is calculated to destroy our respect for the modesty and delicacy of her sex. (103)

 

    The Female Medical College of Philadelphia did open that year. Godey’s also hailed the work of Florence Nightingale and urged opening of nurses’ training schools for women. Not until 1873 were the first nursing schools established. As late as 1890, Finley writes, there were only 471 graduate-nurses in the United States. (105) 

    Hale also published a new novel in 1853, titled Liberia. As Finley explains, Hale 

set forth her idea of the solution of the great problem, which was first education of the slave for the responsibilities of emancipation, and then purchased freedom, the price to be paid either by the United States government or earned by the slaves themselves. Finally these freed exponents of a Christian civilization were to be sent to join the African colony of Liberia, that historic experiment, as benevolent as it proved impractical, which had been started by the American colonization society as early as 1820. Up to the Civil War itself many people hoped Liberia might solve the problem of “the African who,” to quote Mrs. Hale, “among us has no home, no position, and no future, since two races who do not intermarry can never live together as equals.” (176)

 

    Finley’s use of “negro,” with a small “n” is telling in itself. Nor does she seem to question Hale’s premise.

The Liberian flag today clearly indicates American roots.

 

* 

A NEW YORK convention of women was broken up by hoodlums who shouted, “Sit down,” “Get out,” and barked like dogs at Ms. Anthony. 

    Anthony encouraged one desperate mother to kidnap her own daughter when her husband cruelly denied her any contact with the girl…completely legal in that era. 

    “You stir up Susan and she stirs up the world,” a friend once explained to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. 

    Susan B. Anthony remarks: “One half of American women are dolls, the rest are drudges, and we’re all fools.”

 

* 

February 21: Joaquin Murrietta and his gang attack a ferry crossing the Stanislaus River, in California. Eight Chinese are massacred. Murrietta’s “killing spree put such fear into the Chinese prospectors of Calaveras County that an undetermined number of them quit their claims and moved to cities.” 

    In a new book, Bring Me the Head of Joaquin Murrietta, the author John Boessenecker calls into question the way the California bandit was once portrayed. 

    As one reviewer explains,   

    The popular image of Murrieta, a product of fanciful 19th-century artist renderings and adventure fiction, is a vivid one. He wore silver-buttoned calzoneras (split-leg trousers) and rode like the wind, his long black hair swirling. He moved so fast, draped in a thick serape, as to seem bulletproof to hapless pursuers. He was charming and debonair; the vilest murders associated with him were actually the work of a sadistic henchman known as Three-Fingered Jack. 

 

    Boessenecker paints a more realistic picture, more Billy the Kid, less Zorro. As a reviewer notes, “Three-Fingered Jack (a.k.a. Bernardino Garcia) was indeed a bloodthirsty goon, but Murrieta (who didn’t even have black hair) did plenty of his own killing, too.” 

    As far as the idea that he liked to “taunt his pursuers with handwritten witticisms,” that was the work of storytellers. 

    The real bandit was illiterate.

 

    In the old legends, the bandit leader is an honest man, done wrong by racist white settlers. It is said that he was attacked repeatedly by rowdies, and his bride, Rosa, was assaulted. 

    Murrietta, then, “developed a profound hatred” for the new owners of California. 

But although Murrieta’s depredations against white men generated contemporary outrage, he also targeted fellow Mexicans and Californians of Mexican ancestry, and nearly half of his gang’s murder victims were Chinese Americans, who rarely used guns or horses. 

 

    California was a wild place in those days. “The annual homicide rate in present-day Chicago is around 20 per 100,000 people. In 1850 alone, 19 murders were committed in Sonoran Camp – population, 5,000.”

 * 

May: A YELLOW FEVER outbreak in New Orleans, lasting into October, kills 9,000. A British paper makes report of the disaster: 

The most deplorable havoc is being made in New Orleans by the yellow fever. Thousands have been carried off by its ravages, and every day adds 200 more to the ghastly record. The dead are buried in trenches by chain gangs of negroes, hired at a guinea an hour. The New Orleans Crescent, after describing the horrible system of burial adopted adds, “The stoical negroes, too, who are hired at 5 dollars per hour to assist in the work of interment, stagger under the stifling fumes, and can only be kept at their work by deep and continuous potations of the fire ‘water.’...And thus, what with the songs and the obscene jests of the gravediggers, the buzzing of the flies, the sing-song cries of the huxter-women vending their confections, the hoarse oaths of the men who drive the dead carts, the merry whistle of the boys, and the stifling reek from the scores of blackened corpses, the day wears apace, the work of sepulture is done, and night draws the curtain.” In the meantime, amusements, regattas, balls, &c. are proceeding as usual, as if no such appalling pestilence were in the doomed city. 

 

Acquired immunity helped many African Americans survive – with a death toll from the fever of only 0.2 percent. For whites it was 7.4 percent. Newly arrived Irish immigrants, with zero immunity, were hit the hardest.

 

*

 

ON A POSITIVE NOTE, at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York, a culinary revolution is brewing. George Crum (born George Speck), an African American cook is fuming.

 

    Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon, has sent back a plate of food, complaining that the fried potatoes he ordered are too thick. According to Smithsonian, “Crum sliced some potatoes as thin as he could, fried them to a crisp, and sent them out to Vanderbilt as a prank. Rather than take the gesture as an insult, Vanderbilt was overjoyed.”

 

    So were born “Saratoga chips,” history’s first potato chip. More than three decades later the New York Herald would call Crum “the best cook in America.”

 

    American Heritage would label him, simply, “the Edison of grease.” In 2022, Smithsonian would note that American ate 1.85 billion pounds of potato chips annually, or 6.6 pounds per person. The market was worth an estimated $10.5 billion.

 

* 

“There was led an ideal life.” 

December 22: In Roswell, Georgia, Theodore Roosevelt (later “Sr.”) and Martha Stewart Bulloch are married. They will produce four children, including one raging alcoholic and one President of the United States. Martha’s half-brother James Bulloch and full brother Irvine Bulloch will fight for the South during the Civil War. James would build the famed Alabama, and Irvine would serve aboard the raider. 

    He is said to have fired the last shot from the Alabama, during the losing battle with the U.S.S. Kearsarge. 

    “Mittie,” as Mrs. Roosevelt was called, came from a background unlike anything her New York relatives had known. Her father had died young, and her mother had taken charge of the family’s affairs. In the Census of 1850, Mrs. Bulloch listed her occupation as “farmer,” and reported owning nineteen slaves, including eight children. There was even a slave named Bear Bob, who had had part of his scalp torn off by a bear. 

    Eventually, pressed for money, Mittie’s mother, called “Grandmamma Bulloch,” and sister Anna, had moved in with their relatives in New York. 

    David McCullough offers several insights: 

For the Roosevelt children, stories of the life in this [Roswell] house, the parties, the games of tableau vivants, the constant stream of friends, family, neighbors, servants, all the people, white and black, recounted by the hour by their mother, aunt, and grandmother, were as magical, as different from what they knew, as anything in books. Mittie herself, with her liquid southern-gentry voice, her everlasting interest in people, her gift for mimicry, her overflowing romanticism, could not have been more unlike the Roosevelts her children encountered if she had been reared in some distant foreign land. … Inherent to her stories was a great love of the heroic.

 

    Slaves were always described as “the servants.” 

Daddy Luke had been the coachman; Mom Charlotte, the head housekeeper and cook. Mittie and [her sister] Anna had been served hand and foot by a nurse called Mom Grace, but each also had her own slave child, her little black shadow, as was the expression. Mittie’s was called Toy, Anna’s, Bess; and Toy and Bess slept on straw mats on the floor of the girl’s bedroom. Another black child slept beneath Grandmamma’s big four-poster, “to run errands for her in the night,” it was explained, which probably meant to empty her slop jar.

 

    Half-brother Daniel Stewart Elliott once had to be sent abroad for a year of travel, so full of remorse was he. In a fit of rage he had shot and killed his “little shadow,” who by then, like Daniel, was no longer very little.

 

    Yet, to the Roosevelt children, the romance of the “Old South” seemed real. Said one, “In the roomy old home,” in Roswell, “with its simple white columns there was led an ideal life.” 

    In fact, the Bulloch family had been pressed for money. To pay for Mittie’s wedding and trousseau, four slaves “had” to be sold, including Anna’s Bess. A bill of sale indicates that the buyer, John F. Martin, paid $800 for Bess and her son John. (112/43-47)