Instruments of intervention in early American medicine - Cover Story

Magazine Antiques, July, 1999 by Nan Wolverton

1 Mary Way was one of the first professional women artists in the United States. She spent eight years (1811-1820) in New York City making her living as a miniaturist before returning to her birthplace, New London, Connecticut, when her sight failed her.

2 Letter from Anna Fitch to Eliza Way Champlain, December 15, 1818 (Way-Champlain correspondence, 1792-c. 1904, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts). Many of the Way-Champlain letters have been published in Ramsay MacMullen, Sisters of the Brush: Their Family, Art, Life and Letters, 1797-1833 (Past Times Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1997). Anna Fitch was a family friend visiting Mary Way in New York City and reporting about her condition to Eliza Way Champlain, Mary Way's niece in New London.

3 Letter from Mary Way, New York City, to Eliza Way Champlain, December 6, 1818 (Way-Champlain correspondence). See MacMullen, Sisters of the Brush, p. 124.

4 Cantharides are used to form cantharidin, a bitter crystalline compound which forms the active blister-producing ingredient.

5 For more about the Greco-Roman origins of nineteenth-century medical theory, see Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (W. W. Norton, New York, 1997).

6 George Washington, who received what was considered the best medical treatment of the day, endured heroic efforts during his last hours in 1799. He was bled and blistered and received a dose of calomel, after getting a sore throat. The bleeding cost him at least four pints of blood, and he died not long thereafter.

7 Dry cupping merely drew blood to the surface of the body without removing it. It was believed to relieve pain by drawing blood away from the affected part of the body.

8 Mary Way had chronic acute-angle closure glaucoma - a very painful condition (see MacMullen, Sisters of the Brush, pp. 133, 143, and p. 496, n. 8).

9 George B. Wood and Franklin Bache, The Dispensatory of the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1833), p. 338.

10 Not all women could afford to enjoy a lying-in period. Primarily middling to wealthy women with domestic help as well as family and friends could rest after childbirth.

11 Fleetwood Churchill, On the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (1842, Philadelphia, 1851), p. 487.

12 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) in 1843 became the first American doctor to claim that puerperal fever was a contagious disease.

13 Charles White, Treatise on Management of Pregnant and Lying in Women (1773; Worcester, Massachusetts, 1793), p. 20.

14 Analyzing urine samples was another routine procedure used by early doctors. Both this and the taking of a pulse were based on the humoral theories of the body.

15 The binaural stethoscope we are familiar with today was devised in 1852 by Dr. George P. Cammann (1804-1864) of New York City.

NAN WOLVERTON is the curator of decorative arts at Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, Massachusetts.