USA > Illinois > Illinois in the fifties; or, A decade of development, 1851-1860 > Part 8
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119
The Colporteur
T
consult the weather predictions of the Patent Medicine Almanac. Let it be known, however, that the Govern- ment Weather Bureau had not yet come into existence.
In many homes an Almanac would be procured at the beginning of the year and hung up in the kitchen for ready reference. Meanwhile it would become dog -. eared, and with the advent of the fall months it would come to be studded all over with brown spots which in unmistakable terms told it was a convenient and much- used fly-roost. But little cared the members of the household for this desecration, and the Almanac would continue to be consulted till it was superseded by its successor at the beginning of the New Year.
The Colporteur found much more encouragement in his work in the 50's than he does today and prosecuted it with much vigor. Several times a year he would visit every house in the village and leave his religious tracts and sell Bibles and Testaments at an astonishingly low price, to all who would buy. In a gig or on horseback he would visit every house in the country and distribute his literature and sell his books .. No stress of weather or other handicap would stop his work or dampen his zeal.
That was the golden era of the weekly newspaper, and subscribers looked forward with the greatest inter- est to the day when their paper would come through the postoffice. People had not yet been educated to the point where news a day old is considered stale. The two leading merchants in the village each took a St. Louis daily, mainly for the markets, but no one else thought of such a thing as taking a daily paper. In- deed in that time not one person read a daily where hundreds do today. Many families took a religious
120
Newspapers and Magazines
weekly, and to the credit of the newspapers of that pe- riod it can be said that the "Yellow Sheet" had not as yet come into existence.
St. Louis, Missouri, forty miles west of our village, was our nearest large city, and here was published the Missouri Republican, a paper Democratic in politics. In the late fifties in that city there sprung into being The Missouri Democrat, Republican in politics, and which exists today as the last half of the hyphenated name of one of St. Louis's leading newspapers. After a career; of the greater part of a century under the name Missouri Republican, that paper changed to St. Louis Republic.
Horace Greeley was in the zenith of his great news- paper career and a great many took his New York Trib- une and received its teachings like gospel.
Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's were about the only illustrated papers with character and standing.
Magazines were vastly less common than today. Har- per's New Monthly Magazine had but recently come into existence. The Atlantic Monthly was launched late in the fifties and had the same appearance and characteristics that it has today. These two magazines had the field to themselves. Putnam's Magazine, good in its way, had a short-lived existence.
From the foregoing it will be seen that reading mat- ter was as much too scarce then as, in some particulars, it is too plentiful today. One result of this was to make people more appreciative of what they had. So true was this that some of the old school readers were kept in the homes because of the fine literary selections . in them. This was especially true of Murray's English Reader and of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Readers of
121
Literary Longings
the McGuffey series, all of which were in a sense studded with literary gems. Addison, Dryden, Pope, Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, Scott, Shakespeare, Campbell, Thomp- son, the Bible, Milton, Byron, Irving, Cooper, Bryant, were some of the authors and sources from which these selections were made. Further than this, well written and interesting articles were_cut out of newspapers and other periodicals and pasted in serap books where they could be preserved and read by all.
There can be little doubt that numerous young per- sons of that era suffered from a sort of literary starva- tion; I myself recall with what longing eyes I sometimes looked, from afar, upon some attractive book or maga- zine.
I saw a boy with eager eye Open a book upon a stall, And read, as he'd devour it all; Which, when the stall-man did espy, Soon to the boy I heard him call : "You, sir, you never buy a book, Therefore in one you shall not look." The boy passed slowly on, and with a sigh He wished he never had been taught to read. Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need. -- Mary Lamb.
About the middle of the fifties the villagers got to- gether a fund and purchased the books for a small cir- culating Library which was destined to supply a long- felt need. Two young men who attended college and acquired some literary enlture were the most active members of a committee appointed to select the vol- umes for the much-talked-of and much-thought-of Li- brary. I now realize that this committee was at least
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A Village Library
measurably qualified for the work assigned it, and among the books recommended and in due time pro- cured I recall Hume's History of England, Macaulay's History of England, Macaulay's Essays, Addison's Speetator, Abbott's Lives of Caesar, Xerxes, Cyrus Hannibal, Cleopatra and other Ancient Worthies, Plu- tarch's Lives, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, Milton's Poems, Bryant's Poems, Irving's Works, Pope's Poems, Mrs. Heman's Poems, Baneroft's History of the United States, The Life of Webster, Wirt's Life of Patriek Henry, etc. It is needless to add that this little library was a God-send to some of us.
In the late fifties, from the school fund of the town- ship a certain sum was devoted to the purchase of a library of well-selected books, comprising for the most part histories and biographies.
Harper and Brothers were the principal publishers of that time. Most of the books were in relatively small type and closely printed with long paragraphs and nar- row margins, consequently the printed page of the mid- dle of the Nineteenth Century was not as attractive as it came to be fifty years later.
CHAPTER XIII.
TWO VILLAGE DOCTORS.
The blacksmith ailed, the carpenter was down, And half the children sickened in the town.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes. Up and down the village streets, Strange are the thoughts my fancy meets.
-Whittier.
In the early fifties a heavy forest of shellbark hick- ories, burr-oak, ash and syeamores stretehed like a dense, thiek curtain along the banks of a stream that in its course riverward turned many mill-wheels.
A mile west of this stream the forest frayed out into a thin fringe of stunted hickories, pin-oaks, crab-apple bushes and hazel brush as it touched the prairies.
In this fringe-like margin of the forest lay a little pioneer village which had been most aptly named Prairiedge. It was like all of its class, a quiet village, and of mornings its inhabitants found their chief inter- est center about the coming of the stage coach from the east, while in the afternoons their main diversion . was experienced when the stage arrived from the west.
Through the center of the village ran a common dirt- road, dignified with the name National Road, and for about a fourth of a mile this highway constituted the one principal street of Prairiedge, and upon either side of this simple thoroughfare were the dwellings of the villagers.
Upon the north side in a little unpainted cottage with
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The "Mineral" Doctor
its eaves to the street lived the Old School, or Mineral doctor. Upon the opposite side of the street in an equally unpretentious dwelling with its gable to the front, lived the New School, or Botanie doctor.
Beside the dwelling of the Old School doctor was a little frame structure, boarded up square in front, with a door opening from the sidewalk, and beside which was a solitary window. Hanging upon a rusty iron rod, cooing in the zephyrs of June and creaking and groan- ing in the blasts of November, was a tin sign upon either side of which were the words: Salmon Tartar, M. D., Physician and Surgeon. Upon entering this lit- tle office of Dr. Tartar's, for such it was, you would see in a plain walnut case at one side of the room a number of well-worn volumes, among which were Wat- son's Practice of Medicine, Druit's System of Surgery, Churchill's Science . and Art of Midwifery, Williams' Principles of Medicine, Dunglison's Dictionary, etc. You would also see full files of that sterling old medical periodical, The American Journal of the Medical Sci- ences. U'pon shelves at the other side of the room were a few jars, bottles and packages, containing for the most part drugs. Upon looking closely, however, you would find that more than one package was labeled "Smoking Tobacco".
Sitting in a splint-bottom chair could almost always be found Dr. Tartar, a round-faced, self-contained ap- pearing man, seemingly about forty-five years of age. He further impressed the observer as being a quiet, good-natured, contented man who was disposed to re- gard this a pretty good old world, notwithstanding the many, mean things said about it.
At the rear of Dr. Tartar's office was a door from
125
A Miniature Highway
which led a well-worn path to the kitchen door of the doctor's dwelling. Were you permitted to become ac- quainted with the inside history of this miniature high- way you would probably find that very little of the good doctor's shoe-leather had contributed to its for- mation, but as regards his wife the same could not be said. Mrs. Tartar was a tall, angular woman with high cheek bones and flashing black eyes. She was possessed of great energy and a tongue that upon occasions could be as entting as a knife.
Innumerable were the times when Dr. Tartar, sitting quietly smoking, reading, or lost in one of his day- dreams, having and desiring no companion but his meer- schaum, which a grateful German patient had given him and which he smoked incessantly-innumerable, I was about to say, were the occasions when Dr. Tartar's studies or reveries were interrupted by the sharp voice of his wife at the back door of his office scolding him for delaying a promised professional visit or berating him for permitting his competitor across the way to get from him another patient prominent in the village.
Strange to say, Mrs. Tartar's maiden name was Sweet, and in her home she was one of those intensely energetic housekeepers who manage to keep things in a perpetual state of disorder by reason of continuous and misdirected efforts at setting them to rights. One of the articles of furniture in the Tartar household was an old melodeon which in her girlhood Mrs. Tartar had played on with some skill. Indeed, it was said that it was the melodious tones of this old-time instrument that first enticed the attention of Dr. Tartar to the black-eyed, energetic maiden. Those, however, were the good old days that had become ancient history, and
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Dr. Tartar-" Mineral" Doctor
some of the profane villagers went so far as to say that later all the music the good doctor ever heard from his wife were the piereing and discordant notes of "Hell on the Wabash".
So much for Dr. Tartar. What of his competitor across the street, Dr. Tobias Tansy ? beside whose dwell- ing was a little frame structure the almost exaet coun- terpart of Dr. Tartar's office save that it was adorned with a most conspicuous sign in big letters and which was as follows: "Infirmary of Dr. Tobias Tansy, Bo- tanie and Re-Form Physician". Upon entering this structure one would see one side of the room occupied by shelves upon which were many jars, bottles and paper boxes filled with herbs, roots, and other products from the vegetable kingdom, and prominent among which were packages and containers labeled "Lobelia". Upon some shelves on the other side of the room were a few books and periodicals, prominent among which were Dr. Samuel Thompson's Manual of Practice, while among the medieal papers were the "Lobelian", "The Lobelia Advocate", "The Lobelia Sentinel". There was also "The Botanic Recorder", in the pages of which occurred many times, in reproachful reference to the Dominant School of Medicine, the words, "Regular", "Medical Monopoly", etc. Standing in the middle of the room could not unfrequently be seen a tall, lean man with a hooked nose and large mouth, and who in accord with the fashion of the times was without whis- kers, though his face was covered with the bristly prod- uct of a weeks's neglect of the use of the razor. It perhaps need not be said that this man was Dr. Tansy, who had a much-jointed appearance from seemingly
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Dr. Tansy-a "Botanic" Doctor
possessing a profusion of knees, ankles, elbows and wrists.
Such was Dr. Tobias Tansy, whose dress was as little attractive as his figure was awkward and ungainly. His "store-clothes" hung upon him in a way that formed unseemly wrinkles and doubled into many ungraceful folds, and upon his head was a high ("plug") hat that was pushed down till it nearly rested upon his big ears. Unlike Dr. Tartar, Dr. Tansy was a great talker and intensely energetic as well. He never tired of expa- tiating upon the many claims and virtues of the "Bo- tanie", or as he termed it, "The Re-Form System" of medicine.
But ungainly and unattractive as was Dr. Tansy, he had for a wife a sweet, comely woman who had the es- teem and respect of all who knew her.
Thus it was the easy-going Dr. Tartar had his ener- getic, ambitious wife to prod him up and make him pull up his end of the professional double-tree; and the always energetic, over-zealous and always-talking Dr. Tansy had a wise, tactful and popular wife to smooth out and make more tolerable her husband's shortcom- ings and eccentricities.
But notwithstanding the domestic influences exerted upon these two disciples of Aesculapius, it came to be a saying in the village of Prairiedge, that Dr. Tartar was all right if you could ever get him, and that on the whole Dr. Tansy was well enough if you could ever get rid of him.
As time went by it came about that about half the villagers preferred a quiet, self-poised, still-tongued physician who stirred up their livers with calomel, loos- ened their phlegm with tartar emetic, and physicked
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A Fair Division
them with Epsom salts; and so very naturally this half of the community employed Dr. Salmon Tartar.
The other half preferred an energetic, fussy, talkative doctor, who sought to account for and explain every- thing, and who touched up their livers with leptandrin, physieked them with mandrake, puked them with lobe- lia and loosened their phlegm and "inards" at the same time. So very naturally the latter half of the Prairi- edgers employed Dr. Tobias Tansy.
The principal diseases these doctors had to contend with were, in the colder season, pneumonia, commonly known as "winter fever", colds, coughs, and an occa- sional frost-bitten limb. In the warmer season, bowel troubles of various kinds, such as diarrhoea, dysentery, usually called "bloody flux", "summer complaint", cholera morbus, etc.
"Summer complaint" was the warm weather disease that most affected infants and was often fatal. Im- proper food was in most instances the cause of cholera morbus in grown people and "summer complaint" in children. Violent vomiting attended the inception of many diseases.
With the approach of the fall months a great many were stricken with "ehills and fever", which certain ones always referred to as "ager" and others called "the shakes". Bilious fever was another form of ma- laria. Typhoid fever prevailed to an extent but was never called by that name, but was known as "nervous fever", "slow fever", "autumnal fever", etc.
Among accidents were broken bones, ax-cuts, snake- bites, and lacerated wounds from various causes and an occasional bullet wound.
A boy or girl that had not had measles, scarlet fever,
-
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Some Ailments in the Fifties
chicken-pox and whooping cough was looked upon by his or her associates as little short of abnormal.
Flies, fleas, bed bugs and other insects doubtless spread eatching diseases, but as the germ theory of dis- ease was as yet many years in the future, no one ever so much as dreamed of the danger which these pests might have in store for humanity.
At times real Asiatic cholera would elaim its victims from among the residents of the village and surround- ing country. When this disease was prevailing as an epidemie some one would visit St. Louis, unfortunately contraet the disease and later give it to others.
My kind reader, for the moment I am going to take the liberty of imagining you in your younger years and a resident of Prairiedge and a victim of, say a severe attack of ehills and fever -- so severe, in fact, that your parents decide to send for Dr. Tansy. One of Dr. Tan- sy's virtues was prompt response to professional ealls, and consequently it was not long till that worthy was at your bedside. He feels your pulse, looks at your tongue, clasps your forehead with his long, bony fingers, and meanwhile has a great deal to say about your foul "stomie", gorg'd "bill-yary" passages, con- gested intes-tines and the promptness with which the "Re-form system of treatment would bring relief. He asserts that "lobely" will act like a charm in your ease, and straightway gives you a vomit with that drug that is vastly worse than the disease he is striving to cure.
Meantime he charges your mother not to give you a drop of water while your fever is up! Next he observes that some doctors give quinine in such troubles but that medicine is liable to "settle" in the bones and should
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130
"Tricks in All Trades"
not be used. Having said this and a good deal more along the same line, Dr. Tansy puts up six large pow- ders that you are to take three hours apart till all are used. As the medicine is known to be very bitter your mother decides to administer it in baked apple. Ac- cordingly she covers a spoon with a layer of apple, puts the contents of one paper in the middle of this, and spreads over all another layer of apple. Then she directs you to swallow all at one gulp! This you en- deavor to do. But unfortunately you get only half the apple and the whole of the bitter taste of the medicine, enhanced by the acid in the fruit. This experience makes you more cautious with the next dose, with which you are more fortunate, and in the end you manage to get down all the powders.
As a result of the treatment your ague was broken and you and your parents rejoice in Dr. Tansy's skill. But alas for fallible humanity ! for after reaching man- hood you learn that Dr. Tansy's blue powders were a mixture of quinine and Prussian blue !- that the qui- nine was the efficient ingredient and that the Prussian blue was used to disguise it and give the impression that an entirely different drug was being used. Thus the uninitiated were led to believe they were using an equally efficient but a far less dangerous drug than quinine.
Many years ago, you, my imaginary resident of Prai- riedge, obeying the behests of fortune, took your leave of that village; and in the hard battle of life that you were compelled to wage you became absorbed in your surroundings. Meanwhile the months run into years, the years into decades, the decades into tens, twenties, thirties, forties, when one day, tired of the
A Mid-Nineteenth Century Ideal Milk-Maid ..
131
Looking Backward
strife and turmoil, the memory of Prairiedge and the peaceful associations of your childhood come up in perspective and seem so sweet and restful that you find yourself filled with a longing to once more tread the green pastures, stand beside the laughing waters and loiter for a time in the land that gave you birth. Finally this longing so preys upon you that one beautiful morn- ing in June you find yourself aboard a railway train bound for Prairiedge. Very naturally, for the time being you are living in the past, and as you look down the dim perspective, a thousand memories crowd your brain. Prominent among these is the memory of the old times, the old place and the old friends, and you recall those beautiful lines of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes :
"There is no time like the old time when you and I were young, When the buds of April blossomed and the birds of spring- time sung ;
The garden's brightest glories by the summer suns are nursed, But O, the sweet, sweet violets, the flowers that opened first.
"There is no place like the old place where you and I were born, Where we opened first our eye-lids on the splendors of the morn,
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From the milk-white breast that warmed us, from the loving arms that bore
Where the dear eyes glistened o'er us that shall look on us no more.
"There is no friend like the old friend who has shared our morning days,
No greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise; Fame is the senseless sun-flower with gaudy crown of gold,
But friendship is the breathing-rose with sweets in every fold."
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132
Some Old Friends
Arrived at Prairiedge, the first person you meet in getting off the train is an old schoolmate whom you had last known as a round-faced boy with laughing bright eyes. But now he is a gray-bearded, dim-eyed grandfather. With this old schoolmate you go over the history of the Prairiedgers of your boyhood days. You are pained to learn that whole generations of Browns, Harneds, Smiths, Plamts, Joneses, and aye, of Johnsons, have found their last and final home in the village graveyard, since last you set foot on the cher- ished soil of Prairiedge.
But you are pleased to find that Dr. Salmon Tartar is yet living and a resident of the village as of yore. His wife, whom you supposed would have long since tormented the life out of her husband, you learn, died many years ago.
Dr. Tobias Tansy, too, you find has been in his grave for many years, but his sweet-tempered wife, after the death of her husband, accepted the superintendency of a Home for the Friendless in an adjoining county, into whose borders had gone the story of her many virtues.
While you are talking a fine, hearty-looking old gen- tleman comes along the street who you learn is none other than Dr. Salmon Tartar. You approach him, shake hands, fall into conversation and learn that he eats well, sleeps well, plays with his grandchildren and is in the enjoyment of a green old age of satisfaction and contentment. In due time you part company with this fine old octogenarian with the wish that he could somehow convey to the world his secret of knowing so well how to grow old gracefully.
Having thus met and conversed with one of the vil- lage doctors of your childhood days, you find yourself
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"Physician, Heal Thyself"
curious to learn the particulars of the death of the other, Dr. Tobias Tansy. So you again accost your old schoolmate and get the desired information.
It seemed that in the month of March, late in the fifties, Dr. Tansy took a violent cold and at once there rang in his ears the scriptural injunction, "Physician, heal thyself"! So at five o'clock one evening he soaked his feet in warm water, drank a quart of Composition tea and went to bed. Failing to get relief after an hour or more he arose, drank a saucerful of a decoction of red-pepper, and with the assistance of his wife took a hot steam bath from an infusion of catnip, pennyroyal, horehound, boneset, tansy, chamomile, dogfennel, smart- weed and some half-dozen other herbs. Failing to get relief from the steam bath, and especially failing to sweat as freely as he had hoped to do, the patient got out of bed, stripped off his clothing, and against the earnest protests of his wife, poured a bucket of iee- water over his shoulders, rubbed himself down with a coarse towel, and ended by taking a teacupful of a strong infusion of lobelia. "There's a whole lot in the Re-form System of Medicine", remarked Dr. Tansy as he onee more sought his couch.
Next morning he was found dead in bed, and at the coroner's inquest, held a few hours later, Dr. Tartar had enough of the true milk of human kindness in his make-up to assign "heart-disease" as the cause of death.
At last, after having met the few living who can talk over with you the people and things of forty-odd years before, your thoughts turn to the dead, and with the thought of meeting other, though sad, reminders of the past, you direct your footsteps toward the "burying- ground" a half-mile north of the village. Surrounded
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God's Acre
by a rough board fence upon a little elevated spot in the timber is this God's-acre of the good people of your childhood, and as you approach its precinets a pair of turtle doves are cooing mournfully as though chanting a solemn dirge for the dead. The enclosure is thickly sown with graves, and upon the stones above these are many names familiar to your eyes. Among the rest one slab arrests your special attention, for in addition to being over the grave of an old acquaintance, the in- seription in conciseness and pithiness bears the ear- marks of Dr. Tartar. You approach and read, "Ma- tilda Sweet, wife of Dr. Salmon Tartar, born March 18, 1815, died June 30, 1859". And below this sim- ple record of birth and death are just two words, "She Sleeps !"
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