Medical care in 1802 – Pain management

To modern eyes, health care 200 years ago was primitive at best, lethal at worse. A recent knee replacement inspired me to consider medical care and pain management. (A friend of mine told me that a knee replacement is essentially an amputation of one’s leg.) However, it is described, it is a painful procedure.

The choices for treating pain were limited. I think we have all heard the story of the wounded man being treated with a glass of whiskey and a stick clamped between the teeth. Alcohol was used to help the patient into insensibility as well as a disinfectant.

Another choice was salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin. Of course, it wasn’t aspirin. yet; the distilling of salicylic acid did not take place until late in the nineteenth center. No, it had to be used in its natural state. The leaves of the willow tree was steeped into a tea which was given to the patient as an analgesic. As a blood thinner and an anti-inflammatory, it is given to surgical patients and heart attack patients alike. It is still one of the most widely used medications in the world.

Finally, there were the opiates. The sap of the opium poppy has been used for millennia to treat pain. Of course, none of the stronger extracts had been distilled from the poppy until 1820 (morphine) and beyond.

One of the early methods of gaining the analgesic effects of the opium was to steep the straw into a tea. (I allude to this in Death in Salem with a character addicted to ‘straw tea’.) But the most common method of ingesting opium was as laudanum, a tincture of opium and alcohol. A reddish brown liquid, it was extremely bitter. By the early eighteen hundreds, laudanum was common and during the eighteen hundreds it became an ingredient in many patent medicines. It was frequently prescribed to women for menstrual cramps and various aches and pains. As might be expected, addiction was prevalent. Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s wife, was an addict. Another fun fact: nurses would spoon feed laudanum to the infants in their care to help them sleep. And if that doesn’t make your hair curl, I don’t know what will.

Laudanum is still available by prescription.

Our world of Tylenol and Ibuprofen seems almost like paradise in comparison.

The Feral Chicken

In the interests of accuracy, I research many many things for inclusion into my books. I’ve dyed with indigo, for example . (And what an adventure that was; it smells like rancid pee.) I’ve gone interesting places, such as Salem (for Death in Salem) and the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia (for Death in the Great Dismal).

And I try different recipes and eat things I might not otherwise eat, such as a Shaker pie made of heavily sugared sliced fresh lemons (so sour it could not be eaten) or ployes (a kind of pancake made from buckwheat and not bad.)

My latest experiment – a free range chicken. My husband and I belong to a CSA. They have a chicken share but this offering was not from the share. It was a hen past her egg laying days. So, in the spirit of adventure – and tasting a chicken as our ancestors might have, I took a chicken.

I was warned to stew it gently which I did. I have tasted venison that was more flavorful and tenderer than this chicken. In addition, the chicken was so small it would not have fed a hungry man. The drumsticks had about an oz of meat on them. If this was an example of the chickens available back then, it is no wonder the early colonists relied on hunting.

Goodreads Giveaway – Cradle to Grave

Beginning November 1, I am beginning a giveaway of twenty copies of Cradle to Grave.

cradle to grave

This is my third book and of the four I have published, and the one coming out next spring, is the one with the most emotional resonance for me. My daughter had had a baby the year before. There were some problems and she had to have a C-section. Then there were some problems with the baby, most of which he has grown out of of. That poor kid was in the hospital more times than I can count.

I had already come across the practice of warning out in my research for A Simple Murder and Death of a Dyer but it wasn’t an appropriate topic for those books. (And I must say, the research for the first two and then Death in Salem were a lot more fun. I love Salem, the Shakers are fascinating and, for Death of a Dyer, I messed around with dyes for months. The research was pretty grim for Cradle.) But I started thinking, what happens to single mothers? How would I feel if I had children and was trying to feed and raise them? What happens to orphans? How could a single mother even try to fight the power structure?

At the same time, I read an article in the New York Times about the practice in Las Vegas of rounding up the homeless and shipping them to California. The more things change, the more they remain the same, right?

I was also babysitting some older children so their mother could work. So, I based Jerusha, Simon and Nancy  on these kids, and the mixed race foundling that no one wanted is my first grandson.

I had to have a happy ending. Spoiler alert.

It may not be the best mystery of the lot but, for me, it has the most heart and the one that means the most to me.