Just at the turn of the nineteenth century George Washington was stricken with a sickness that in a few days was to prove fatal. As soon as he realized that he was seriously ill, he sent--not for a physician--but for a "bleeder," who took from his veins about fourteen ounces of blood. The next morning the family physician was called, who, discovering the case to be highly alarming, called two other doctors for consultation. While waiting for them, he directed a second copious bleeding. Upon the arrival of the first of his consultants in the afternoon, it was agreed "to try the result of another bleeding, when about thirty-two ounces of blood were drawn, without the slightest alleviation of the disease."--Kennebec Intelligencer, January 11, 1800.
This debilitating treatment was supplemented by the application of blisters, the administration of calomel, repeated doses of tartar emetic, and frequent inhalations of "vapors of vinegar and water." It is not surprising to learn from a contemporary report that Washington's last request, understood with great difficulty because of his weakness, was to be permitted to die without further interruption.
Details of the progress of the illness, and particularly of the methods employed for the relief of the famous patient, were made public, not in any wise as a reflection upon the skill of the attending physicians, but, on the contrary, to give assurance that the beloved leader had received the best of care, and that his untimely death occurred in spite of all that human knowledge and skill could devise to arrest the course of the disease.
Drugs and Opiates Used
The first quarter of a century after the death of George Washington witnessed but very little advance in the general methods of therapeutic practice. Medical books of that period abound with evidence that the strongest drugs and opiates were freely prescribed, and that little attention was given to the causes of disease or to rational methods for its alleviation. In 1810 the senior physician in the Manchester Infirmary issued a book giving the case histories of hundreds of his patients. Here is a condensed report in which he related the experience of James Johnson, a youth of twenty-three years, who came to the hospital for relief from dropsy (Johnson was admitted on August 15):
"After trying some other diuretics, took the infusorum nicotian? in the quantity of eighty drops in twenty-four hours, for three days together." This "produced sickness," but did not produce the desired effect. "Fifteen grains of jallap and two drachms of cream of tartar given at bedtime, vomited him briskly, and reduced the swellings for a time." However, strange to say, "the most powerful diuretics given in large doses" proved ineffective. Toward the end of September he was given, "after a gradual augmentation, one hundred and twenty of the tonic pills in one day."
This treatment brought on a "degree of vertigo," and the pills were therefore "omitted, and some wine prescribed. Thirty drops of spiritus aetheris vitriolici were likewise ordered to be given four times a day." The day after this, "pain in the bowels and a diarrhea came on," so "the vitriolic spirit was omitted." "Opiates and astringents were now given, but with little success." On the fifth of November the patient "was ordered three grains of digitalis, which on the seventh were augmented to four."
By this time the patient was desirous of "returning to his native air," and he was dismissed from the infirmary before there was time to "experience the effect" of the new course of drugging. Though "much relieved," according to the physician, he deemed that Mr. Johnson had "little prospect of being ultimately cured."--John Ferriar, M.D., Medical Histories and Reflections, 93-95. London: Cadell and Davis, 1810.
Bitter Controversies
During this early part of the nineteenth century bitter controversies were waged between various schools of thought among the members of the medical profession. Even regarding the nature of disease itself, as well as its rational treatment, opposing views were held. For instance in New England Dr. Gallup, on one side, and Drs. Miner and Tully, on the other, fought with vitriolic polemics. The first maintained that diseases were almost wholly of an inflammatory nature, and with him bleeding was the sovereign remedy. His opponents took an opposite view of the general nature of disease; and their favorite remedies were opium, calomel, and stimulants.
Dr. Gallup lashed out at his opponents, declaring: "It is probable that, for forty years past, opium and its preparations have done seven times the injury they have rendered benefit on the great scale of the world."
Dr. Tully retorted: "The lancet is a minute instrument of mighty mischief. ... The king of Great Britain loses every year more subjects by this means [that is by bleeding] than the battle and campaign of Waterloo cost him, with all their glories."--Worthington Hooker, M.D., Rational Therapeutics, 13, 14. Boston: John Wilson and Sons, 1857.
The Typical Treatment
A physician who wrote in 1858 of conditions within the period of his own memory says of the popular methods of medical practice:
"Confinement by disease, which might have terminated in a few days, was protracted to weeks and months, because the importance of the case, as it was thought, required that the patient should be artificially 'taken down,' and then artificially 'built up.'
"When carried to its 'heroic' extent, artificial medicine undermined the strength, elicited new morbid manifestations, and left more disease than it took away. The question raised was not how much the patient had profited under his active treatment, but how much more of the same he could bear. Large doses of violent and deleterious drugs were given as long as the patient evinced a tolerance of them, that is, did not sink under them. The results of such cases, if favorable, like the escapes of the desperate surgery, were chronicled as professional triumphs, while the press was silent on the disastrous results subsequently incurred in like cases by deluded imitators.
"If diseases proved fatal, or even if they were not jugulated, or cut short at the outset, the misfortune was attributed to the circumstances of the remedies not being sufficiently active, or of the physician not being called in season. So great at one time, and that not long ago, was the ascendancy of heroic teachers and writers that few medical men had the courage to incur the responsibility of omitting the more active modes of treatment which were deemed indispensable to the safety of the patient."--Jacob Bigelow, M.D., Brief Exposition of Rational Medicine, 62, 63. Boston: Philips, Samson, and Co., 1858.
By the middle of the century voices of reform began to be heard among progressive members of the medical profession. In 1846 Sir John Forbes, editor of the British and Foreign Medical Review, wrote a stirring editorial under the title of "Young Physic," in which he sounded a clarion call for substituting natural remedies for the popular methods of drugging. In a concluding summary of his objectives he announced as one of his purposes:
"To endeavor to banish from the treatment of acute and dangerous diseases at least, the ancient axiom, melius anceps remedium quam nullam (a doubtful remedy is better than none), and to substitute in its place the safer and wiser dogma that when we are not certain of an indication, we should give nature the best chance of doing the work herself, by leaving her operations undisturbed by those of art."
Discrimination Urged
Although it is true that by this time (1858) the dangers of the excessive use of the more potent drugs were recognized by observant physicians, only a very few had the courage to discard the use of drugs altogether. Dr. Worthington Hooker, who, as we have quoted, set forth what he regarded as "rational therapeutics," in his book by that name, advocated the "discriminatory use" of these drugs and even of bleeding. Thus he says concerning the use of certain remedies:
"The combination of calomel, antimony, and opium, which in various preparations is now so much used, is a remedy of very great value in the treatment of inflammatory diseases. ...
"Mercury is a remedy of great value in the treatment of many chronic diseases. ...
"[Bleeding] has been in some quarters too much given up. ...
"For a long time the doctrine of the profession was ... that the patient must sleep or die; and that the grand means of securing sleep was opium. ... The profession were right in regard to the first clause of this doctrine, ... but they were wrong in regard to the necessity of opium to produce this result. The agitation can be quieted by other means, as alcohol, for example. ...
"[For colic and intermittent fever] quinine is often given much more freely than it formerly was."--Rational Therapeutics, 23, 24, 27, 32, 33, 36.
As we enter the third quarter of the nineteenth century, we note marked progress in the methods of medical practice. But a single instance will here be cited, that of the knowledge of fevers and their proper treatment. The various stages in this development were well set forth by Dr. J.H. Kellogg, who, writing in 1876, says regarding the old method of treating fevers:
"Twenty years ago, when a man had a fever, the doctors thought he had too much vitality--too much life--and so they bled him, and purged him, and poisoned him with calomel, and blue mass, and sundry other poisons, for the purpose of taking away from him a part of his vitality--his life--in other words, killing him a little."--J. H. Kellogg, M.D., in The Health Reformer, January, 1876. (Battle Creek, Michigan.)
Of course, as Doctor Kellogg points out, only those who were "extraordinarily tough" could survive such treatment; and the heavy mortality led to the adoption of a theory the very opposite of the former. Instead of being an indication of too much vitality, fever was regarded as a sign of too little. And now brandy, wine, and other stimulants were used "to increase vitality." It was a matter of great perplexity that the results of this treatment were found to be no better than the former.
The "Water Cure" for Fevers
A few years later a doctor announced that he was able to cure more fever patients when he used milk with the brandy. Another observed that the mixture of water with the brandy, not only internally as a drink, but externally in the form of baths, was even more effective in reducing fevers.
Soon there followed an announcement by an observant physician that still better results followed when milk alone was used, with no brandy. So for a time the "milk cure" for fevers attracted wide attention. Certain German physicians, who experimented with the brandy-water method, were convinced that it was a little in advance of the brand-ymilk mode, and they finally discovered that the use of "water alone" was still better than any of the other plans of treatment. Finally it was found that "water cure" was the best remedy for fevers.
Regarding the mistaken instruction given to medical students about 1860, a physician wrote retrospectively forty years later:
"Learned professors had their own ideas and opinions, and these ideas and opinions were generally derived from someone equally emphatic who had preceded them, probably amplified from time to time as light gradually began to show itself on the medical horizon. Yet most of their ideas and opinions had not fact, scientific or otherwise, for their basis, but an absolutely empirical origin; in other words, true science had not yet dawned upon medical practice and medical thought."--John Janvier Black, M.D., Forty Years in the Medical Profession, 126. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1900.
Diet and Sanitation
As for diet, the importance of which is now recognized as a prime factor in the maintenance of health and in the cure of disease, the same writer tells us that in those days "little was said about it, and less was taught concerning it in the medical schools. All, or nearly all, at that time believed, empirically believed, in antiphlogistin system of treatment [treatment designed to reduce inflammation, understood at that time as bleeding, and the use of salts and antimony]; and almost every sick man, or wounded man, or crazy man, for that matter, was put on a diet as near bread and water as possible."--Ibid., 187.
With such an absence of true scientific knowledge regarding diet, sanitation, and rational therapy among the profession, it was inevitable that among the laity there should be a deplorable prevalence of suffering due to unhealthful practices. Of this there is abundant evidence in the literature of that time and in the testimony of our grandparents. Said a physician in 1867:
"That people are sick needs no argument. From almost every hamlet the wail of the sufferer is heard, and very few houses exist under whose roof some poor victim has not ended his sufferings, and been relieved from his misery by the King of Terrors. And most who die at the present time die prematurely. ...
"The customs of society are not favorable at the present time to healthful living. No sooner is life commenced than the stomach is made the recipient of some poisonous nostrum, which weakens it; and, with many, this practice is kept up from the cradle to the grave. The brain is stupefied at one time with a poisonous dose, and at another time it is excited by poison; food of a very unhealthful nature is supplied for the nourishment of the body; the body is very unhealthfully clothed; and the habits of mankind are so generally perverse that it would seem that the ingenuity of man had been taxed to the utmost to invent means to waste vitality, impair the constitution, and shorten life."--J.F. Byington, M.D., in The Health Reformer, May, 1867.
A woman practitioner of the same period bewailed the prevalence of sickness among those of her sex; and she asserted that the women of America "are, with scarce an exception, diseased." Addressing the feminine readers of a health journal, she said:
"Could each and all of the diseased within your ranks, with one fell swoop, be set aside, how many think you would remain? So few, I trow, that it would be scarcely worth the while to count; for upon those on whom no definite disease is preying, nervousness and debility have so strong a hold that life seems scarce worth the effort you are compelled to make in order to keep even your slight hold upon it."--Mrs. E.P. Miller, M.D., in Herald of Health. (Quoted in The Health Reformer, September, 1866.)
The Family Medicine Chest
With sickness so prevalent, and with the natural reluctance to call for the services of a physician except as a last resort, it was inevitable that home remedies should be eagerly sought. The nature of these may be learned by perusing the pages of books especially prepared for family reference in case of sickness.
Let us look inside one such work, one bearing the imposing name of The Family Medicine Chest Dispensatory. This book was published in 1835. Here are recommended various standard assortments of medicines. The first is "for a physician practicing in the country" and is priced at $100. For this he may secure forty-eight bottles of medicine, fifty-three wide-mouthed bottles of powders, etc., besides various and sundry ointments and miscellaneous substances. For the convenience of the physician both the common name and the Latin term for prescription use were given. Adapted either for the physician or for the family, there were other assortments of medicine graded in size and cost to suit the financial status of nearly everyone.
In an introductory paragraph the following caution is given: "The least active remedies operate very violently on some individuals, owing to a peculiarity of stomach, or rather disposition of body, unconnected with temperament. This state can only be discovered by accident or time; but when it is known, it should always be attended to by the practitioner."--Family Medicine Chest Dispensatory.
It was deemed advisable to give special warnings against some of the drugs included in the sets designed for family use; and the readers were informed that "medicines, such as the mercurial salts, arsenic, etc., are apt to accumulate in the system, and danger may thence arise if the doses too rapidly succeed each other. The action also of some remedies, elaterin and digitalis, for example, continues long after the remedy is left off, and therefore much caution is requisite in avoiding too powerful an effect by a repetition of them even in diminished doses."--Ibid., 19, 20.
Typical Home Remedies
Glancing through the pages of this family adviser, we note here and there mention of, and recommendations for, such drugs as the following: prussic acid, "administered with advantage in consumption for allaying the cough"; asafoetida, "a medicine very serviceable in those hysterical affections to which delicate females are liable"; calomel, which is recommended as a cathartic, "children requiring larger doses in proportion than adults"; lunar caustic, "employed internally in epilepsy and externally for lotions"; ipecacuanha, to produce perspiration in colds, no medicine "more useful in the family than this"; laudanum, "for procuring sleep"; and nux vomica, "administered to excite the nervous system, especially in palsy."
A Dr. Chapman is quoted as recommending the use of tobacco as a remedy for the affections of the lungs, "the vapor to be produced by smoking a cigar," and advising "that the patient should frequently draw in the breath freely, so that the internal surface of the air vessels may be exposed to the action of the vapor."--Ibid., 24, 35, 43, 48, 88, 108, 165.
Pity the poor youngster who had croup in those days, and whose parents consulted another authority on the subject of home treatment. He would find by sad experience that for this affliction "the remedies principally relied on are bleeding, emetics, and calomel." Before beginning such heroic treatment on the poor victim, his parents probably would mark, and during the treatment would frequently consult, the place in the book where were found the following directions:
"Let the little patient be bled very freely at the commencement of the case. Then give to the child of three years old or upwards a teaspoonful of antimonial wine [made by dissolving a scruple of emetic tartar in a pint of sherry wine], and repeat it, if necessary, in half an hour. If the second dose does not cause vomiting, double its quantity, unless the case be very mild. ... The vomiting should be encouraged by warm drinks, and the nausea should be continued for a few hours."--Dr. J. Boyd, in Family Medical Adviser, 118. Philadelphia: 1845.
It was during this period of general ignorance of the laws of life and health that the youthful pioneers of the advent movement were laying the foundations of a work that was to fit men and women for translation at the second coming of Christ. And for that fitness it was necessary that there be not only spiritual and mental, but also physical, reform.
Those privileged to have a personal acquaintance with many of those pioneers remember most of them as men of vigor and endurance. Although some of them curtailed their lives by overwork, yet they seem to have been endowed with remarkable physical powers. However, almost without exception, there was a time in their earlier life when the vital forces were burning low because of physical ailments due to their lack of knowledge of some of the elementary principles pertaining to the maintenance of good health.
Elder Loughborough's Experience
The childhood and youth of Elder J. N. Loughborough, who died at the ripe age of ninety-two, may be cited as typical of his contemporaries. At the age of eight he peered one day through the thick blankets that curtained and covered the tall posts of the bed on which his father lay dying of typhoid fever. The sufferer had been faithfully and lovingly dosed with drugs, and then had been forbidden by his attending physician the comfort of a drink of cold water or even a refreshing breath of pure air.
After his father's death the orphaned boy was reared in the family of his grandfather, who lived on a farm. Every fall four large, fat hogs and one beef were slaughtered as winter provisions for the family. Nearly all parts of the hogs were eaten "except the bristles and the hoofs." Of his diet at that time he related:
"I was a great lover of animal flesh as food. I wanted fat pork fried for breakfast, boiled meat for dinner, cold slices of ham or beef for supper. One of my sweetest morsels was bread well soaked in pork gravy."--The Gospel of Health, October, 1899. (Battle Creek, Michigan.)
"If in the spring of the year we felt langour (really the result of consuming so much fat and flesh meats during the winter), we resorted to sharp pickles, horse-radish, mustard, pepper, and the like, to 'sharpen the appetite' and tone up the system. We naturally expected a 'poor spell' in the spring before we could get newly grown vegetables."--The Medical Missionary, December, 1899. (Battle Creek, Michigan.)
Liquor and Tobacco Used
Although the grandfather was a devout Christian and a class leader in the Methodist Church, he did not realize the harmfulness of the milder intoxicants; and every fall he, like his neighbors, rolled into the cellar several barrels of hard cider. It was customary to serve this drink freely to company and to the laborers in the field. Ministers in many popular churches were free to use tobacco and to drink alcoholic beverages without criticism.
Medicines were used freely to relieve the various maladies that resulted from the pernicious habits of living. On one occasion, when the Loughborough family moved, there was carted to the dump heap an accumulation of two bushel baskets of empty bottles that had contained sarsaparilla, syrups, medical discoveries, and painkillers. Pills were considered indispensable for daily regulation.
At the age of eighteen, when young Loughborough was just beginning to preach, he was advised to use tobacco as a remedy for a lung difficulty which followed a slight hemorrhage. He accepted this advice as good counsel and formed the habit of smoking cigars. About two years later there passed before his mind the contrast between the filthiness of the tobacco habit and the clean lives and purity of those who would dwell in the New Jerusalem. A deep and vivid impression that there would enter into that city nothing that should defile led him then and there to throw a partly smoked cigar into the river and to abandon forever the use of tobacco.
In later years, as the health reform movement made progress among Seventh-day Adventists, a number of the ministers bore testimony to the benefits they had received through adopting its principles. In so doing they naturally looked back to the "hole of the pit" whence they had been digged, and they could clearly see that their former weakness and suffering were due to their lack of knowledge of the laws of life. Among those who bore such testimony was Elder J. N. Andrews, best known, perhaps, as the author of the scholarly work entitled The History of the Sabbath, as well as being the first missionary of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to carry the message overseas.
Elder Andrews's Experience
In 1863, at the age of thirty-four, Elder Andrews found himself in very poor health, with a congested brain, nervous dyspepsia, catarrh, salt rheum, and suffering from periods of utter prostration. "My general strength," he wrote, "was easily exhausted. I found it difficult to perform the labor which devolved upon me as a preacher. ... I had no degree of hope that I should ever again possess a sufficient measure [of health] to make life in itself anything desirable."--The Health Reformer, July, 1869.
He recognized that the foundation for this condition had been laid in his youth, regarding which he wrote:
"I was not instructed in the principles of hygiene, for my father and mother had neither of them any just knowledge of these. I was kept from the use of tobacco, and from even tasting strong drink; but I learned almost nothing of the evils of unwholesome food--at least, of such as was common in our own family. I did not know that late suppers, and 'hearty ones' at that, were serious evils. I had no idea of any special transgression in eating between meals. ... I supposed old cheese was good to aid digestion.... As to mince pie and sausage, I had no thought that these were unwholesome, unless too highly seasoned, or, as it was termed, 'made too rich.' 'Hot biscuit and butter,' doughnuts, pork in every form, pickles, preserves, tea, coffee, etc., were all of common use."--The Health Reformer, December, 1871.
To such ignorance of good dietetic principles Elder Andrews added the confession that, in common with most people of his time, he did not see the relation between the transgression of the laws of health and the resulting physical ailments. He said:
"I had little other idea of headache, dyspepsia, nausea, fevers, etc., than that these were things that for the most part were wholly out of our control, and that like the various phenomena of nature they were ordered by God's hand, and man had generally no agency therein. Do not smile at this strange notion. It is strange, indeed, that such ideas should prevail; but that they do prevail even now, you may satisfy yourself by calling out the ideas of the very next person you meet."--Ibid., 170.
It is only as we picture this background of health conditions as they were a century ago, that we can truly appreciate the great advance in the knowledge of physiology, hygiene, dietetics, and therapeutics that has been made in this generation, and which is the rich heritage of those who live today.
Seventh-day Adventists, we shall show, were providentially led to accept as a matter of religious principle the sound reforms in health habits--and that at a time when these health principles were not popular--and to throw their energies into the campaign of health education that time has demonstrated to be rational and progressive.