What Hath God Wrought (69 page)

The careers of several prominent figures in American natural science illustrate the unspecialized quality of their intellectual life and times. Henry Schoolcraft, son of a farmer and glass manufacturer, never went to college. As a government Indian agent with the Ojibwa (also called Chippewa), he described his hosts’ language, folklore, and customs with the aid of his wife, who was half Ojibwa and half Irish. In this way he became one of the earliest anthropologists to live with the people he studied. The immigrant Constantine Rafinesque combined prolific identification of new plants and flowers with the study of the Mound Builders and other Amerindian peoples. Some of the leading figures in American natural history are remembered today as both scientists and artists, such as John James Audubon and Charles Willson Peale. Books like Audubon’s
Birds of America
, Jedidiah Morse’s
American Universal Geography
, and Alexander Wilson’s
American Ornithology
, along with Peale’s museum in Philadelphia, displaying its celebrated mastodon skeleton, brought natural history to a broad public. Only two American women of this period considered themselves professional scientists: Emma Willard, who taught mathematics and natural philosophy at Troy and published on physiology, and Maria Mitchell, who discovered a comet in 1847 and later became professor of astronomy at Vassar.
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It was an age when scientists, like other scholars, placed a premium on organizing, classifying, and presenting their discoveries in readily intelligible form. Taxonomy (the classification of biological species) was understood as reflecting the rationality of the Creator rather than a process of natural selection. The exploration of the globe went hand in hand with improvements in cartography (mapmaking) as well as the discovery of species and varieties. The introduction of the metric system rendered measurements uniform. The organization of scientific data into statistics and graphs accompanied the development of accounting and bookkeeping. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and law codes excited the imagination. Just as Americans formed voluntary organizations and publications to promote religious, benevolent, and political causes, they also formed scientific ones. The American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences had been founded before 1815; they were joined over the years by a host of societies, institutes, and lyceums, often local or regional in nature, and frequently concerned with the presentation of science to the lay public. Silliman’s
American Journal of Science
appeared in 1818, devoted to the publication of new research for a professional audience. In short, scientific activity reflected the dramatic improvements taking place in communications and information retrieval, as well as the increased public interest in accessing information.
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The antebellum federal government played a somewhat larger role in scientific research than in education, as its three great exploring expeditions demonstrate. Another federal enterprise producing much scientific knowledge was the U.S. Coast Survey, which charted the oceanography of the expanding American empire. Conceived during the Jefferson administration, it was reinvigorated during Jackson’s. Designed to facilitate ocean commerce, the Coast Survey reflected the interest of the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians in international trade. Even John Quincy Adams’s much maligned call for a federal astronomical observatory gained implementation before long. The Jackson administration found money within the Navy Department to construct a small observatory in 1834 as an aid to celestial navigation, and the first Whig Congress passed an appropriation for a larger one in 1842, to Adams’s delight. The U.S. Naval Observatory remains today in Washington, D.C.
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But one of the most significant federal scientific undertakings, the Smithsonian Institution, was thrust upon the government from outside. A wealthy English scientist named James Smithson willed his estate to the U.S. government to found “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” President Jackson denied that he had authority to accept the gift and referred the matter to Congress, where Calhoun opposed it as unconstitutional. After Congress agreed to take the money, the bequest came across the Atlantic in a packet ship laden with half a million dollars’ worth of gold coins, arriving in New York harbor on August 28, 1838; a Democratic administration would not accept mere paper. A dozen years of further wrangling ensued over what to do with the endowment, and not until 1846 did Congress create the Smithsonian Institution, with a museum, laboratory, library, and art gallery. Among those in Congress deserving credit for the outcome were Benjamin Tappan of Ohio (brother of the abolitionists Lewis and Arthur), Robert Dale Owen of Indiana (son of Robert Owen), and John Quincy Adams.
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The new Smithsonian was fortunate to get as its secretary (chief executive officer) America’s leading physicist, Joseph Henry, professor of natural philosophy at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) since 1832. Henry’s researches into electromagnetism had already helped prepare the way for both the electric motor and Morse’s telegraph, though Henry had not realized how close his “philosophical toys” were to marketable applications and had taken out no patent. A devout Old School Presbyterian, Henry believed in the intelligent design of the universe and in the compatibility of reason with revelation; he enjoyed a close friendship with the conservative Calvinist theologian Charles Hodge of Princeton Theological Seminary. A capable administrator, Henry concentrated the Smithsonian’s endeavors on scientific research and publication and turned its book collection over to the Library of Congress. Together with Alexander Dallas Bache, the head of the Coast Survey, Henry led in the formation of a self-conscious American scientific community and founded the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1848, modeled on the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
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The young American republic enjoyed a Protestant Enlightenment that bestowed an enthusiastic religious endorsement upon scientific knowledge, popular education, humanitarianism, and democracy. The most widespread form of Christian millennialism added faith in progress to this list. The spread of literacy, discoveries in science and technology, even a rising standard of living, could all be interpreted—and were—as evidences of the approach of Christ’s Second Coming and the messianic age foretold by the prophets, near at hand.
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V

Improvements in travel and transportation had their downside: the spread of contagious disease. Endemic in the Ganges River Valley of India, cholera moved along trade routes in the early nineteenth century to Central Asia, Russia, and across Europe from east to west. In the summer of 1832, it crossed the Atlantic with immigrants to Canada and the United States. Cholera hit the great port cities of New York and New Orleans hardest, but the disease spread along river and canal routes, exacting a heavy toll wherever crowded and unsanitary conditions (polluted water in particular) prevailed. Of course, the poor suffered the most.
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In response to the epidemic, the Senate passed a resolution introduced by Henry Clay calling upon the president to declare a day of national “prayer, fasting, and humiliation.” Jackson, following the example of Jefferson rather than that of Washington, Madison, and the elder Adams, decided that compliance would violate the separation of church and state. The Evangelical United Front supported the resolution, but some denominations backed the president, including Roman Catholics and Antimission Baptists. To Jackson’s relief, the resolution did not pass the House of Representatives. Most churches observed the day anyway, on their own authority, and twelve state governments endorsed it. The political issue remained alive, a partisan one. When another cholera epidemic occurred in 1848–49 and both houses requested such a day, Whig president Zachary Taylor issued the proclamation. Whatever the effect of the prayers, at least they did no harm to the victims of the disease—more than one can say for the remedies of the physicians: bloodletting and massive doses of poisonous mercury.
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Of all major branches of science in this period, possibly the least well developed was medicine. Vaccination against smallpox constituted one of the few valid medical interventions practiced. The germ theory of disease had been suggested (under the name “animalcular theory”) but remained untested, an eccentric speculation. That rotting garbage and excrement fostered disease had long been recognized, blame focusing on their evil-smelling fumes (“miasma”). Recurrent epidemics prompted cities to start to improve sanitation provisions, but they did not act decisively until much later in the nineteenth century. Physicians practiced neither asepsis nor antisepsis and often infected a patient with the disease of the last one they had seen. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes the elder, professor of medicine at Harvard, published a paper showing that unhygienic doctors bore grave responsibility for spreading puerperal fever among women in childbirth.
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Physicians like Jacob Bigelow of Harvard Medical School, looking for
materia medica
(medicinal drugs), classified large numbers of plants and herbs for the benefit of natural history, but in practice the pharmacopoeia chiefly consisted of laxatives and opiates. Holmes remarked with a candor uncommon among his profession that if the entire
materia medica
of his time could be thrown into the sea, it would be “all the better for mankind, and all the worse for the fishes.” Physicians acted as their own pharmacists, selling the medicines they prescribed. The invention of the stethoscope in France in 1819 helped diagnosis, but there was little doctors could do to help even a correctly diagnosed patient. Few therapies of the day had any efficacy beyond symptomatic relief. “Heroic,” that is, drastic, measures of bloodletting, purging, and blistering found favor with physicians for a wide variety of diseases. They carried the endorsement of Benjamin Rush, still America’s leading medical authority long after his death in 1813, despite criticism from Bigelow in 1835. One of the few therapeutic improvements was the isolation of quinine from cinchona bark in 1820 and its gradual application to treating malaria.
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Reacting to the futility of scientific medicine, many patients resorted to a variety of alternatives: homeopathy, hydropathy, Thomsonianism, Grahamism, phrenology, spiritualism, and folk remedies (Euro-American, African American, and Native American).
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To defend their turf, a group of leading orthodox physicians founded the American Medical Association in 1847. But, like religion, American popular medicine reflected the free marketplace of ideas. Though unorthodox practitioners could be unscrupulous charlatans, some of them had sounder ideas and did less harm than the M.D.s. The unorthodox included Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister who combined millennial preaching with advice on health. He advocated temperance, vegetarianism, and avoiding tobacco, heavily salted food, and “stimulating beverages” like coffee. He claimed that most diseases could be prevented by a wholesome diet, exercise, and cleanliness, both personal and public. Graham’s teachings made virtues of ordinary Americans’ necessities. With heating water so inconvenient that it discouraged bathing, Graham recommended washing in cold water. With most households having a scarcity of beds, he endorsed sleeping on a hard surface. With finely ground flour expensive, he promoted the coarse-grained flour of his famous Graham cracker. With many women hoping to limit the size of their families, he cautioned men that frequent sex would debilitate them. Graham’s lectures and writings on physiology exerted influence and provoked controversy throughout the 1830s and ’40s. The Seventh-day Adventists perpetuated Graham’s dietary program after the Civil War; one of them, John Kellogg, invented corn flakes.
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As the country grew, medical schools multiplied but remained small, unlicensed, and sometimes poorly equipped. Many practitioners never attended one anyway, but learned their profession through apprenticeship. (According to one estimate, in 1835 only 20 percent of Ohio physicians held a medical degree.) Gross anatomy was the aspect of medicine then best understood; yet, facing a chronic shortage of cadavers, anatomists made themselves unpopular by grave-robbing. Medical students who wanted the best training went overseas.
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The only recognized medical specialty was surgery, long regarded as an occupation altogether different from that of the physician; most doctors engaged in general practice.

The benevolent causes of the period included medical philanthropies like hospitals, insane asylums, and care for the deaf and blind. But in the absence of effective therapies, hospitals did not do their patients much good. They generally treated only the poor and recruited convalescents to “nurse” those sicker than themselves; professional schools for training nurses did not yet exist. People who could afford to pay for treatment usually received it at home, with care from family members between the doctor’s visits. The medical care of slaves reflected their masters’ financial stake in their productive and reproductive capacities but suffered from their often unsanitary living conditions and, of course, from the poor state of therapeutic knowledge. Sometimes physicians experimented on slave patients in ways they would not have done on free white ones.
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Not only cholera but other infectious diseases like typhoid spread more readily than in earlier years, as more people traveled and population density increased, especially in unhygienic commercial centers. Schools transmitted disease as well as literacy to children. Even rural families came under increased risk when they moved into the malarial lowlands of the Mississippi and Ohio river basins. Endemic contagions like tuberculosis (then called “consumption”) and malaria (“ague”) actually constituted a graver health threat than startling unfamiliar epidemics like those of cholera and yellow fever.
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With medical science unable to understand, prevent, or cure most of these illnesses, the health of the nation deteriorated during the first half of the nineteenth century. Between 1815 and 1845 the average height of native-born white males dropped from 173 to 171.6 centimeters; life expectancy at age 10, from 52 to 47 years. Increasing democracy and economic productivity, even rising real wages, did not offset the spread of contagious diseases, which stunted the growth of young people even if they survived. Economic development outran medical science, and those who lived through this era paid a real physical price.
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