USA > Ohio > Lake County > History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio > Part 12
USA > Ohio > Geauga County > History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio > Part 12
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68 | Part 69 | Part 70 | Part 71 | Part 72 | Part 73 | Part 74 | Part 75 | Part 76 | Part 77 | Part 78 | Part 79 | Part 80 | Part 81 | Part 82 | Part 83 | Part 84 | Part 85 | Part 86 | Part 87 | Part 88 | Part 89 | Part 90 | Part 91 | Part 92 | Part 93 | Part 94 | Part 95 | Part 96 | Part 97 | Part 98 | Part 99
Disease or pain is not the result of design on the part of nature. Some un- seen interference with the development of a parent cell by which it acquires an amorphous character may give the morbid cast to countless numbers of cells, which are to follow and take part with it in giving form and function to the various organs of our bodies. In vegetable life even we daily behold the per- verting influence of morbid growth in the shape of the trunk of the tree,-the unseemly curve, the protruding gnarl, the fungoid excrescence or decay, beginning at the root or the heart of the lofty and graceful monarch of the forest. In the animal organization the perversion of cell growth manifests itself in many ways. Unseen in its small, mysterious outstart, it makes itself known by changes in the forms and functions of the creature. It causes our parts to shrink, swell, ulcerate, and pain us. It may destroy permanently normal functions and powers, without the enjoyment of which life is hardly desirable. So beset are we with the dangers of perverted growth and minor morbid influences that disease and pain are the daily inheritance of our race. Were ignorance and temerity banished from human society there would still remain a moiety of ills ever seeking relief. We cannot, therefore, imagine human society but in which, next after establishing the family relations, there would follow efforts to secure the benefits of some medical system.
* By J. C. Hubbard, M.D.
Digitized by Google
33
HISTORY OF GEAUGA AND LAKE COUNTIES, OHIO.
Were it possible for a people to spring out of the earth like Achilles' myrmidons in a day, ere nightfall some casualty or some disease would be certain to intrude, and compel the sufferer to seek for remedies in the domain of medicine. It would appear needless to remind the world of its dependence on an enlightened organization of therapeutics. But in health we forget that sickness and death are a part of the drama of life,-the unwelcome part of the play on which we fain would drop the curtain ere the final act is finished. The pioneer settlers of the Reserve were sober, earnest, thoughtful men, descended from a race possessed of the highest type of European civilization, and though necessity often com- pelled them to penetrate far into the unbroken wilderness to enforce their civilizing mission, leaving behind them the ministers of medicine, law, theology, and educa- tion, they no sooner had formed a successful settlement than these co-workers were invited into their midst.
As this article is intended to spread before the readers of this history a repre- sentation of pioneer medicine, we must briefly and perhaps imperfectly present a picture as best we can, which shall at least have the merit of brevity and truth. The first practitioners of medicine on the Reserve were almost invariably from the New England States,-the same sort of men as the enterprising, hardy set- tlers themselves. While here and there was to be found a doctor who had a classical education, the great majority of them had, at the outset of their profes- sional career, no literary acquirements beyond that obtained at the common schools and village academies of their native States. Nearly all of them, however, were thoughtful readers, and in a few years became remarkable in their respective com- munities for their general intelligence, and as a body they exerted a decided influ- ence in favor of honor, integrity, and good morals. They were energetic, fearless men, who, after surveying the trials and the almost incredible hardships to be endured in their new sphere of usefulness, deliberately chose it. Here they cast their lot with the stout-hearted settler. They lived in humble cabins as he did, and as he fared so did they.
On their errands of mercy they rode by day from one settlement to another, and in the saddle by night they wended their way by blazed trees along the bridle- paths in the solitude of the interminable forests, without guide, arms, or companion, wading through swamps or fording streams whose depths they scarcely knew, despite the appalling cry of the panther and the baying of the stealthy wolf.
These dismal journeyings were often made without hopes of pecuniary reward. They were endured through two and three decades in behalf of humanity, in the broadest and purest sense of the term. They were done in the interest of society, of civilization, and to sustain professional propriety and honor, and to lay a suc- cessful claim to manly personal respect. The ambitious soldier in quest of glory, and imbued with the spirit of patriotism, willingly perils his life in a few cam- paigns, and then prefers to leave the "tented field" for the easier pursuits of peace. War-worn and scarred, he sheaths his sword and rests contented with honors won. But these sturdy ministers of mercy voluntarily pursued their calling, undaunted by toils not less than herculean and heroic, to the end of their lives. They enlisted in the advance-guard of civilization, in the spirit of a forlorn hope; they sought no golden fleece, no public honor, no glittering renown ; and we appeal to the memory of those who knew them for a verification of our views, or else to point us to a body of our countrymen who were more self-sacri- ficing, more abounding in mercy, kindness, charity, and all good works. As a profession, they no doubt had faults, but they were such faults as the world readily forgives. We do not fear contradiction from the descendants of the pioneers when we say that take them all in all they were noble men,-stalwart in form, broad-shouldered and erect, with manly faces, genial, agreeable, and all that society had a right to require. Most of them were educated for their profession in country towns and villages by a preceptor. A few of them were graduates of New England country medical schools, notably that of Castleton, Vt. A few had enjoyed the rare privilege of attending lectures and practical instruction in the medical department at Yale or Harvard. Some came with licenses from the medical societies of the eastern States, while others were licensed by the medical societies of the Reserve. Up to the year 1824 the title of M.D. was an honor somewhat difficult to obtain, and was therefore highly prized by the possessor and appreciated by the public.
They detested quackery with an honest and conscientious disgust, for the em- piricism of the forefathers made no pretensions to science or learning. It based its claims to skill upon intuition, in which its votaries more than half believed. Age had not then taught it to wrap itself around about in the flimsy garb of erudition. It had no dogma even to stand upon till Thompson, in 1834, an- nounced that " Heat was life, and cold was death." The pioneer doctors were tenacious of the few legal rights and privileges they possessed. They were the medical profession, and quackery was unfashionable. Here and there a self-styled doctor, remarkable for ingenuity and audacity, flourished. But he lived from day to day at his peril. The eccentric, the ignorant, and the hopeless cases of
.
disease made up his list of patients. He was ridiculed to his face and at his back by the regular profession, abused by the people, and hunted about till he dis- appeared out of sight and out of memory, like the wild beasts of the forests. His means of subsistence was frightened away from him. The force which crushed acknowledged empiricism as often as it raised its head from the earth was the relentless order of things. For there were plenty of people then, as now, who really preferred its legitimate medicine. But the honor, dignity, and merit of scientific medicine, as it has grown from age to age, had never been success- fully disputed. It was, as we trust it is now, a solid part of organized society. Like church, law, and kindred forces, it was armed like an iconoclast that crushed all opposition. Settled opinions and customs are in their day invulnerable. We must allow that the pioneer doctors were as a body much influenced in their practice by authorities. Inductive philosophy, while it had shed a flood of light on medical science, though it was interrupted now and then, since the study of anatomy and experimental physiology was first introduced into the medical schools at Alexandria, had not really unfettered the medical mind from the domi- nation of leaders who were men of genius and acquirements sufficient to saddle the profession from generation to generation with successful dogmas. They were mostly closet philosophers, who instituted hypotheses for investigation and un- founded theories for verification.
In the days of the pioneer doctors, the bondage of hereditary medical opinions was not wholly broken. New opinions were slow in forcing their way into posi- tions no longer tenable for mere metaphysical systems which science had blasted and were crumbling down. Conservatism in science, religion, and politics, and all social questions, is slow to yield. It is in the very nature of things, and it is well ; for underneath and over all the surface-works of man are the unalterable laws of nature, which govern and shape everything, from the most inorganic molecule up to the most subtle and delicate affairs of society. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the theories and practices of Boerhave, Sydenham, and others, as modified and improved to keep pace with the growing knowledge of the times by Cullen, Brown, and Broussais, were the opinions of the men whose pro- fessional lives we are considering.
The leading idea of the humoral theory, as taught by Galen, was that the fluids of the body were the source of the materies morbi, or proximate cause of all diseases; it held undisputed sway for more than a thousand years, and yet lin- gers in the popular mind. No doubt this theory has its grain of truth ; but as an exclusive dogma it has long ceased-as have all other dogmas-to exercise a controlling influence over the medical world. One of the most mischievous fea- tures of dogmatical systems, of all kinds whatsoever, is their necessity for assert- ing their own finality. Science, on the contrary, is always aspiring for more and better light. The celebrated Dr. Wm. Cullen, who flourished in the latter part of the eighteenth century, was remarkable for his learning, industry, and sagacity. He rejected hypotheses as bases for practice, and while he indulged in theories as a necessary sequence of induction, he founded therapeutics and pharmacy as far as possible upon actual experiment and clinical observations. His work on " Practice" was the text-book and guide of our earliest physicians. His teach- ings and great example, together with the physiological discoveries of Haller, paved the way for a new departure, which began with the date of the discoveries of these true philosophers, but which did not fully declare itself in the western States of our country till about the years between 1830 and 1840. Nowhere among the most civilized nations was there more need of medical reform than on this Western Reserve. The imperfect acquirements of a considerable number of these practitioners-then isolated from the great medical centres of the country -all predisposed them to desert the patient and cautious ways of Cullen, and to embrace and found their therapia on extravagant and meddlesome theories. Not all of them, by any means, but many of them, justly fall under this criticism. They eagerly indorsed the practice of copious bleedings in nearly all diseases as taught by the versatile and brilliant Dr. Rush. They used the lancet even in the pleurisy of consumption, and to check hemorrhage from the lungs in that disease. They bled in all sthenic disease for " spasms of the extreme arteries, for congestions," etc. They employed venesection to break up fevers, which were then well known to be endowed with a certain number of days in which to exist, as are insects or flowers. That the free use of the lancet was and is now sometimes demanded, we do not hesitate to believe, but it was fearfully abused ; because its use was based upon dogmas and speculative assumptions, which could not be satisfied till the potent little blade should be asserted as a general means of cure rather than as occasional necessity. Prof. Hamilton, of Edinburgh, Scotland, early in the present century, was an ardent and able advocate of drastic purgation in nearly all febrile and inflammatory affections. His extravagant notions were taught in New England by Professor Gallup with abounding zeal, and an ability worthy of a better practice.
The graduates of these schools who settled here from about 1818 to 1830
Digitized by Google
34
HISTORY OF GEAUGA AND LAKE COUNTIES, OHIO.
were especially remarkable for their penchant for the use of active cathartics and the lancet. Having been brought up among a robust population, who fared well, in a simple, quiet way, in a pure and bracing atmosphere, and being themselves men of iron constitutions, they no doubt often overrated the limits of endurance among common humanity, and between excessive purgation and unindicated bleeding, furnished disagreeable proofs of the old adage, " the remedy may be worse than the disease." The most sanguine of this school of doctors gave now and then most extraordinary doses of cathartics and emetics. They did not hesitate, as we know from actual observation, to give a teaspoonful of calomet at once in severe cases of disease, if the patient was young and robust. Often tartarized antimony or ipecac was added to the cathartics, to produce a double action,-i.e., emeto-catharsis. The amount of evacuation resulting from these doses would now be considered marvelous. Quantities of bile, viscid matter of various hues, and water would be thrown up, while the bowels were relieved of additional bile, tenacious mucus, half-digested food, and feces of course. If it was a case of fever in its initial stage, the skin often became moist, the headache and backache ceased, and general relief for a considerable period obtained. Occa- sionally excessive salivation followed the heroic use of mercury, and a nice set of teeth were nearly destroyed. Doubtless these strong purgative drugs sometimes produced intestinal inflammation and other evils. The fevers of that day were mostly remittent and intermittent. Sometimes during their course they changed their type from one to the other. For instance, a case would begin as a remittent or bilious fever and change into ague, and vice versa. Typhus and typhoid were then unknown in the west. Typhus, we think, has never prevailed on the Re- serve with the exception of a few cases termed ship-fever in the commercial towns. Typhoid was first noticed here between the years 1832 and 1840, according to the best dates we can obtain. (Our venerable friend, Dr. H. H. Webster, of Kingsville, Ohio, informs us that typhus prevailed in the years 1823-25. After these years fevers were sthenic until 1832, when the cholera invaded the country. This disease for years afterwards seemed to stamp the diathesis of other diseases with the typhoid type.) Owing to ulceration of the bowels and diarrhoea, which are features of this disease, the necessity of milder plans of treating fevers became apparent, and were adopted. According to the opinions of the pioneer doctors about this period, the diatheses of all diseases which were severe and somewhat protracted became typhoidal, and they saw very plainly the necessity of pursuing more conservative ways of treatment. The constitutions of the early settlers, their simple habits, their diet of pork, corn-bread, and other heavy carbonaceous foods, their freedom from the cares, expense, and vexations of modern society, enabled them to bear, as a body, very well the active treatment of the day. Had the type of their fevers corresponded to these of later days, the treatment in fashion then would have been very pernicious; its evil effects would have been so palpa- ble that all the authorities and preconceived notions in the profession and among the laity could not have sustained it for a day.
To pursue a little further the account of the treatment of fevers by our medical grandfathers : after thorough evacuation, if the febrile symptoms partially or wholly abated, Peruvian bark in powder was given in tablespoonful doses, to arrest the further manifestations of pyrexia, precisely as we now give quinine to interrupt intermittent and remittents, and to lower the temperature in fevers of various kinds when it becomes dangerously high. This cooling power of quinine is a discovery of the last decade, and is as novel and surprising as any discovery in therapeutics. At the beginning of this century quinine was unknown. It lay like a hidden treasure in the coarse fibres of cinchona bark, which the pioneers gave so freely in substance. They knew that rare virtues were in the nauseous bark, but it remained for science to solve the mystery by separating and salifying the alkaloid or alkaloids into salts, one of them quinine, the chief of all remedies. The pioneer patients swallowed as best they could the heaping large spoonfuls of bark, and were cured.
Let us imagine if we can the condition of the poor patient's stomach after swallowing a half-dozen doses of the nauseous stuff, and be thankful for quinine. It comes as near dining on saw-dust pudding as anything we can think of. The early settlers directed all their energies to felling the forest and clearing the land for the plow. Drains and ditches were practically unknown. The water of the wells, streams, and superficial springs, running over and percolating through new soil, was laden with organic matter, and was as a rule far more unwholesome than at present. The air, and rude dwellings of the people, were more damp than at present, and we might infer from these conditions that pneumonia and other inflammatory diseases of the respiratory organs were more prevalent than now. An epidemic pleuro-pneumonia of a typhoidal type appeared in the eastern States in 1812 and 1813, and swept over the western territories. We have often listened to a very good description of this epidemic from the late Dr. Elijah Coleman, of Ashtabula, who was a surgeon in Harrison's army, and participated
largely in its treatment. He says that it struck down many of the strongest men, and that often the premonitory symptom was a sudden darting pain in the fingers or toes, the sufferer otherwise feeling as well as usual. At the end of an hour or two a chill, excruciating pleuritic pains, high temperature, and delirium came on, death often resulting in twenty-four hours. The surgeon-in-chief of Dr. C.'s division, a Rushite, officially advised free bleeding, and other depressing remedies. The disastrous results of this treatment soon led to the adoption of more successful methods. Authorities and theories were ignored for the safer and surer guidance of clinical observations. The better treatment consisted in the early administration of ipecac as a nauseant, soon followed by homely sweat- ing, doses of hemlock tea, and steaming, hot blocks of wood, stimulating expec- torants, such as serpentaria, carbonate of ammonia, senega, etc. Among the early cases of this fearful disease related to us by Dr. Coleman was that of a stalwart Kentuckian, who was spending the evening with the doctor's mess, card-playing. Suddenly he dropped his cards and cried out with pain in the thumb, and said to the doctor, " What does this mean ?" " Poor fellow !" replied the doctor, " I am afraid you will know too well in an hour what it means." Soon came the chill and the other symptoms of the epidemic, and he died the following morning.
Before draining the soil became customary, inflammatory croup was common in damp localities. The treatment was by blood-letting and mercury, and was very successful when used sufficiently early. From the earliest settlement dysentery prevailed over a large extent of country about once every decade. The most urgent symptoms in the bad cases were great loss of blood and general prostra- tion. The treatment pursued in the earliest times was first a mild cathartic of castor oil or calomel and rhubarb; ipecac in frequent and increased doses ; opium by the mouth ; and enemata to control pain. This treatment, which we saw employed from 1842 to the present time, was, as we think, as successful as any plan whatever. Owing to coarse food, and the use of surface and other con- taminated water, intestinal parasites abounded in early days. The lumbricoid, or common round worm, was very troublesome. A pioneer doctor informed us many years ago that on one occasion, while treating two children under twelve years of age for pneumonia with repeated doses of calomel, one of the little patients voided one hundred and fifteen and the other one hundred and thirty-five round worms in a day, and he added that the strangest part of the matter was that the children were not much better for several days after their surprising riddance. Ague never prevailed extensively along the lake-shore east of the mouth of Cuyahoga river till after the year 1836. During the previous spring the water of the lake rose about three feet higher than it had done within the remembrance of any white man. The swamp-oaks, which had grown on com- paratively dry land, near the mouths of Grand river, Ashtabula and Conneaut creeks, many of which were a foot in diameter, were killed by the overflow. The water level fluctuated annually for nearly twenty years next following, exposing the fresh deposits to the sun, and ague was at different periods very prevalent at all the harbors along the shore of the lake.
Mankind, restive under present evil, have always indulged in the ideal of a past golden age and of a future millennium of unalloyed bliss. The medical pro- fession had its good time past, when empiricism did not even claim the basis of knowledge, but practiced by charms and nostrums upon the yet fetish elements in civilized society. Had the errors of practice in the old profession yielded more readily and in quicker response to the spirit of scientific progress, quackery would not have gained its present foothold. Exploded evils, and long since abandoned, are the sustenance on which it feeds. While the other great profes- sions trace a long line of descent, and possess a hereditary succession of knowledge through accumulating ages, medicine alone can, it would appear from the isolated dogmas and plausible theories of empiricism, spring into full being like an armed Minerva, from the head of some Thompsonian Jupiter. Thus to ignore the slow and experimental course of science is to fasten upon the innovations of the inductive system of physic the stamp of superficialism. But no great revolution of any polity, social or scientific, takes place without extreme and radical views sloughing to the surface; remedies and systems of remedies, under a quickened mental inquiry, obtain a mushroom growth ; consequently, though it seems paradoxical, the surest evidence we can have of the change in the practice of medicine, and its conformity to the wisest and best system of therapeutics, is the comparative prevalence and popularity of empiricism, which exists and fattens on the fruits of errors long since corrected or abandoned.
Digitized by Google
35
HISTORY OF GEAUGA AND LAKE COUNTIES, OHIO.
CHAPTER XIII. EDUCATIONAL MATTERS.
IN GEAUGA COUNTY.
THE educational history of the territory now comprised in Lake and Geauga Counties commences with the dawn of the present century. Wherever the in- domitable Puritan pioneer pushed his way into the western wilderness there was soon to be found the monument and the symbol of his enlightenment and his principles, the school-house and the church. In looking backward over the time that has elapsed since the first settlers came into the new Connecticut-a period so brief that the space of man's allotted life of threescore years and ten wellnigh covers its duration-one is altogether too apt to lose sight of the slow, patient, and persistent steps by which great results were attained, and to imagine that the people of this new country swept onward unopposed towards success. Such was far from being the case. Whatever has been the advancement made, whatever the good achieved, it has been made slowly, achieved with difficulty and with pain. It was only natural that the men who had the hardihood to leave homes which, to say the least, were comfortable and safe, to enter an uninhabited and almost unknown territory, should also have the hardihood to overcome the difficulties with which they were beset and create for themselves in the west such homes as they had known in the land of their birth. They came from a country of churches and school-houses, and they were not long without them in their new home. The Western Reserve was the new Connecticut in something more than name.
THE GERM OF WESTERN RESERVE COLLEGE.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.