Tag: american history

A few moments with the classifieds

December 5, 2017

Well, I just found out what I’m reading for the next month. Villanova has an online archive of the Illustrated Police News, a proto-men’s magazine of the Victorian and early Edwardian era. It’s tough to make out, since the pulp copies were never meant to hang on as long as they did, but it’s worth the read.

Here’s an assortment of ads from a March 1895 issue.

Attribution: DigitalLibrary@Villanova University. Excerpt from page 14, v. 57, no. 1478, March 2, 1895. Shared under license, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The first ad is the first disguised ad for birth control. What the buyer might receive here — a pessary, a diaphragm, an unhelpful pamphlet — depended entirely on how strongly local Comstock laws were enforced.

The second ad, for Nox-Em-All, struck me as an ad for smut, since it promised “racy samples.” However, looking into it, I see that Nox-Em-All is a kind of card trick. Card tricks can be very old, and the word “racy” did once have a broader sense of “vivid and exciting.” Stranger still, Noxemall (sic) was once a brand of animal feed out of Detroit. And a line of shoes. It’s hard to say. Nonetheless, my guess is still smut.

The next two ads are for quack medicines for “lost power”—which is to say, boners. Offers to “enlarge shrunken or undeveloped parts” were popular then as now. The treatments, whatever they were, could have done nothing for a painful varicocele.

The next ad is, depending on the customer’s timing, either for birth control or for abortion. A pre-20th century ad for a “menstrual regulator” or an “emmenagogue” generally means just that—induction of miscarriage. To “restore their courses,” women resorted to tansy and pennyroyal tinctures; the ad tips its hand by mentioning that. They might work, or they might not, but they would certainly bring on violent illness, and possibly death. How much better Carter’s Relief was, I cannot say.

What follows is, by period standards, a hilariously obvious ad for smut. “The Keyhole in the Door” may or may not have referred to a version of this bawdy song.

The idea of a cure for alcoholism that could be secretly slipped into food is heartbreaking. The name of Dr. Haines’ Golden Specific was no doubt meant to play on the famous gold cure for alcoholism, taken by the well-off at sanitariums. This substance, however, was neither gold nor specific. It could be slipped into food or drink without drawing notice because it did nothing.

Briefly, Mrs. Bradley

November 30, 2017

Chivalry, as a social system, has fewer genuine advantages for women than equality does, but one that it does offer is the occasional free murder.

In 1906, Mrs. Annie Bradley shot Senator Arthur Brown of Utah, who had indeed treated her quite badly, and even put it in writing. This perhaps influenced the jury to return a verdict of “not guilty.” The above melodramatic illustration, together with the accompanying article, blames her for the 1915 murder of one of her sons by another. But Mrs. Bradley, however unhappy, did not die as a tragedy queen; she opened an antique shop and died in 1950, far from the heavy fumes of the Edwardian era.

Smudging at the North End

October 9, 2017

Passed through the North End on Saturday. It is one of the few areas in Boston in which you can see the original colonial layout and architecture of the town, in the form of the Paul Revere House and some very narrow streets. That’s good. It is better to have a thriving city that’s a palimpsest of generations than a lacquered Historical District with a few millionaire’s homes, and a rebuilt International Style wasteland outside of it.

On my way away, I found this protest — unexpectedly, though I might have expected it, if I had stopped to think.

columbus_crop2

This is Christopher Columbus Park at the North End. The crowd was small but energized, and the cops who stood by had little to do. No one was interested in an argument; a few tourists gawked (including me, I suppose) but most people reacted by sitting on the grass and eating sandwiches.

Nonetheless, it is a gutsy place to hold a protest. Boston’s North End is an extremely Italian neighborhood, not just for the purpose of restaurants and tourism but in real, everyday life and character. I used to go to a doctor’s office there — the restrooms were labeled in Italian. It’s spoken in the streets as much as English. Why should this matter?

Columbus mattered very much to the Italian communities of the early 20th century. He was established as a kind of proto-Founding Father after the Revolution, although even at the time everyone knew his claim was weak — he never came to the continent, for one thing; he never even recognized the continent. And, of course, there was the genocide. And the enslavement. But the important thing was that he was not British or Spanish. Plus, his Latinized name looks good on a street sign, or feminized into Columbia.

Italian-Americans at the turn of the century had a more immediate concern. They were considered an ethnic rabble by Anglo-Americans, the subject of prejudice and fear, the easy suspect for murders and crime. What they needed was a famous Italian who was key to the heart of the country, someone whose contributions could not be denied. And in Christopher Columbus, they found it. Establishing formal Columbus Day celebrations was a way to establish respectability for Italian-Americans — that is, a way to establish that they, too, were white Europeans.

I wish luck to these protestors, and I hope for a day when Columbus is acknowledged, but no longer celebrated. I also know that there are people who will feel genuine pain and anger if that happens, for genuine reasons. To this, I have no solution; I am always and only just passing through.

Mrs. Sally Morse

October 3, 2017

I went to visit a couple of old friends on Sunday, both of whom I’ve known since high school. One of them is dead.

At age fourteen, I went to boarding school outside of Boston. When my parents and I came to visit Boston, we went to the Central Burying Ground. That is where I happened upon Mrs. Sally Morse for the first time. The inscription on her slate tombstone reads:

In memory of Mrs. Sally Morse

Wife of

(Mr. Samuel Morse)

who died July 25th 1799

of the Cramp in her Stomach

after about one hours Illness

Aged 26 Years & 2 Months

At the time I could not read the bottom, but a good look at the photo reveals a further epitaph, carefully squeezed in:

Compleat she shone through every scene of Life

The tender Parent and Indulgent wife

When you are a teenager, twenty-six seems like old age. And yet, when I saw the grave of Sally Morse in the mid-nineties, it suddenly was no age at all. It was my age. By modern standards, I have had no major physical illnesses, and yet I would have died twice over in Sally Morse’s time. I knew it then and I know it now. I have always had a morbid fear of the inside of my abdomen, of the chance of appendicitis or of ectopic pregnancy. Either of these could have killed Sally Morse. I lay in my narrow dorm-room bed and thought it over.

I was, as I have said before and will say again, the kind of girl who would, “with her disposition, be having a better time in the graveyard.” When I was younger, I had no frame of reference for what Sally Morse’s life would have been like, except for a few dark interstices — vague ideas pulled from Johnny Tremain, from the claustrophobic antebellum houses I had visited. It would have been a hard life and a small one, compared to ours. Sally herself may well have been hard and small. All the tombstone tells us — besides what it says, of course — is that Sally mattered, and Sally’s death mattered. It mattered either to one person with money to spend, or several who could at least put together the money to buy her this tombstone, and to have it carved to order. The suddenness of it left them aghast, and they wanted to tell the world, perhaps to warn them that the Lord was at hand. What else can we know?

If Sally Morse was twenty-six when she died, she was born in 1773. That means she was ten in 1783, when peace was concluded between the armies of Great Britain and the United States of America. It must have been a strange and exciting time to be a child, frightening and hopeful — even for the Loyalists, who fled to Canada, and eventually brought their descendants peace and universal health care. And if my rough research has come to anything, it also means that Sally knew that her father was safe.

The names Sally (Sarah), Samuel, and Morse are very common in colonial New England, so it is not quite possible, without a heavy investment, to confirm her. Still, it appears to me, from Ancestry.com, that Sally Morse was born Sally Dix, the daughter of John and Mary Dix, in Reading. A Reading birth record names such a child, who would have been twenty-six years and three months old at the gravestone’s death date (take that as you will). One John Dix of Reading, according to an application for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution, was a commissioned officer in the Continental Army, who resigned in 1779.

A marriage record shows that Samuel Morse of Boston and Sally Dix of Newtown (sic) married in March of 1794. What became of the children to whom she was a “tender Parent,” I cannot tell from here. If my guess is correct, her husband did not have an easy time of it in death himself. One Samuel Morse, roughly three years older than Sally Morse, died in Boston on January 7, 1826, of “gravel.” By that, the recordkeeper meant kidney stones. Being “cut for the stone” (PDF) was such an arduous, humiliating experience, even by the standards of premodern medicine, that Samuel may have chosen to avoid treatment. Whether he chose to do it or not, he must have suffered greatly.

Across the way from the Central Burying Ground is the Public Garden. Until I passed through the other day, I had never yet noticed the Ether Monument. Anesthesia as we know it was first demonstrated in Cambridge in 1846. Ether would have greatly alleviated the pain of Samuel Morse, and perhaps made a successful treatment possible. Although anesthesia could not have saved Sally Morse, its availability made abdominal surgeries conceivable as a regular practice, rather than as a desperate measure, and laid the groundwork for the surgeries that might have saved her.

(For a story about quite another woman who noticed the Morse tombstone and was shocked, see here: “Indelicate and Unladylike.”)