A friend loaned me a pleasant little book by Susan Cheever about the Concord of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, the Alcotts and others. It’s called “American Bloomsbury” which is too clever by half.
First because it is anachronistic. If the two artistic nodes of mid-19th century Concord and the early 20th century London neighborhood of Bloomsbury can be argued to be similar, it would be more reasonable to call Bloomsbury the British Concord.
Second because decades after Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and the rest of the Bloomsburys died they had a voyeuristic vogue based on the publication of biographies, letters, and diaries that detailed the groups complicated sexual interactions.
But while the Bloomsburys acted on their attractions, the far more reticent Concord crowd mostly pined quietly. So Thoreau had a crush on Emerson’s wife, Louisa May Alcott on Emerson, Emerson of Margaret Fuller, and Fuller on Hawthorne, but as far as Cheever can tell nothing came of any of them.
As a practicing hypochondriac, however, the most interesting reality described by Cheever reminds us of how unhealthy the mid-19th century was, and indeed, any time prior to the rise of antisepsis, the germ theory of disease, public health precautions, and the like.
Water in early America was often deadly, for which reason many people imbibed alcoholic beverages, tea or coffee exclusively. Much of life was therefore either spent highly caffeinated or three sheets to the wind. Diseases not easily cured also killed relentlessly. Louisa May Alcott’s youngest sister Lizzie and Emerson’s young son Waldo perished due to scarlet fever, Thoreau’s beloved brother, John, of tetanus contracted when he cut himself shaving.
Thoreau himself was thought to have died at 44 of tuberculosis, as did Emerson’s first wife, but there is reason to believe Thoreau’s lung disease was actually caused by inhaling the dust of wood and graphite that filled the air in the family’s pencil factory.
This reminded me of a post-Civil War ancestor of mine in Pennsylvania who was also said to have died in his forties of tuberculosis, as did his brother and several brothers-in-law. Interestingly, they all worked at Mann’s Axe Works, and in one case the cause of death was given as Axe Maker’s Tuberculosis. Clearly, a pre-OSHA factory was killing them as they breathed an atmosphere filled with steel particulates.
And then there were the iatrogenic deaths, a useful word Cheever reminded me of that I hadn’t fully appreciated. Iatrogenic means “doctor caused disease.” For the denizens of Concord it was not a cliche to say that the cure was often worse than the disease.
Long before our present opioid epidemic, the Victorian era had laudanum, a popular medication especially for women thought to be prone to “nervous” disorders. It was actually an opiate that turned them into addicts.
Another omnipresent elixir was Calomel, a tasteless liquid with added sweetening thought to cure worms in children, typhoid, headaches, nerves, you name it. Unfortunately, none of that was true. What was true was that Calomel was mercury chloride which attacks the central nervous system.
Hawthorne’s shut-in wife Sophia was the victim of Calomel poisoning whose pain was so great she was then dosed with laudanum. Louisa May Alcott came down with pneumonia and what sounds a bit like PTSD after the horrors of nursing an endless supply of mangled Civil War soldiers. She, too, was given Calomel which caused her gums to bleed, her joints to ache and her hair to fall out. For her intractable pain, she was then prescribed laudanum to which she remained addicted for the rest of her life.
It is easy to feel superior to those primitive days, but as the opioid epidemic reminds us, doctor prescribed addictive substances are a bigger threat than ever. Prescription opioids killed about 17,000 of us in the last year. A recent “New Yorker” article by Malcolm Gladwell, “Unwatched Pot,” also raises the alarm about cannabis.
Gladwell reports that the rush to legalize is not based on any rigorous research to assure users the substance is safe. In fact, there is some medical research to suggest that frequent users of cannabis are statistically more likely to suffer schizophrenic episodes and other psychiatric effects than non-users, a high price to pay for a high.
And, as any viewer of television programs aimed at a demographic older than 35 knows, one miracle drug after another comes with a list of possible side effects that are terrifying. We are regularly warned, if we listen to the fast-talking fine print, that drugs to treat unpleasant, but hardly life threatening dermatological, digestive, or joint maladies may cause cancer, stroke, heart attack, or suicide.
Perhaps the iatrogenic practices of poor Concord weren’t really that much more dangerous than those of our own prescription-happy sawbones.