Amazing Medical Stories (5 page)

By the time he was in his early twenties, Angus weighed nearly five hundred pounds, was seven feet nine inches tall, and wore size fourteen-and-a-half shoes. His fame began to spread, and he became a target for bullies trying to make a name fighting the lad. Being passive and gentle by nature, he generally refused, often rousing the ire of his antagonists. A three-hundred-pound American fishing captain became so rude and insistent that Angus finally picked him up and tossed him over a ten-foot haystack.

As more and more people heard about Angus, he received offers to go on tour to other parts of Canada and to the United States. On one occasion, bandits attempted to rob the train in which the giant was travelling. McAskill stood up to his full seven feet nine inches, glared at the bandits and flexed his muscles, sending the malefactors racing from the train. The giant frequently toured with the famous midget, Colonel Tom Thumb. Crowds loved it when Angus displayed his diminutive partner standing in the palm of his hand.

Angus later visited England and was presented to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. The ruler of the world's largest empire chatted amiably with perhaps the largest of her subjects, and both were charmed. Victoria left Angus with gifts and her compliments.

While he was touring in the United States, several sailors challenged McAskill to lift an anchor that weighed in excess of two thousand pounds. He successfully accomplished the task, even taking the heavy object for a short walk around the dock. But somehow his load slipped as he was
setting it down, and he fell, taking the full impact of the anchor onto his body. Some say he was never the same after this and that the injury may have hastened his demise. In any event, this was Angus's last tour. In the early 1850s he retired home to Englishtown, now affluent from his earnings abroad, and opened a grocery and dry goods store. A kind-hearted and charitable man, he never let the needy leave his store empty-handed. Later, McAskill purchased a gristmill, ensuring its profitability by pushing the millstones himself when water levels were too low.

As time went on, Angus McAskill's health began to fail. On August 1, 1863, he developed a sudden illness, and seven days later the largest and perhaps strongest citizen of British North America was dead at the age of thirty-four. His physician diagnosed “brain fever” as the cause of death. A contemporary medical reference (
Buchan's Domestic Medicine
) describes this as a febrile illness characterized by “pain of the head, redness of the eyes, a violent flushing of the face…, blood from the nose, singing of the ears and extreme sensibility of the nervous system.” The volume states that brain fever or “phrenitis” often followed other infections, and this ailment likely represents meningitis in modern diagnostic terms.

It seems probable that Angus McAskill suffered from hyperpituitarism, with excessive secretion of growth hormone as the cause of his great stature. It is documented that even in adulthood, his hands and feet continued to grow, so we know he suffered from acromegaly, the adult manifestation of elevated growth hormone. His life expectancy, especially in the nineteenth century, would have been limited due to this ailment. People suffering from hyperpituitarism often develop congestive heart failure, hypertension and diabetes. General debility from one or more of these complications would have made McAskill even more prone to develop an infectious illness such as meningitis.

It took six hours and the labour of two carpenters to build Angus's huge coffin. Three men floated the coffin to its final destination, a churchyard overlooking the scenic waters of Englishtown's St. Ann's Bay. A large group of friends and neighbours gathered for the final sendoff of their huge, gentle and well-loved giant.

George Burden

The Reverend John Cameron, a fiery preacher, proved equally adept at healing the souls and the disease-wracked bodies of his parishioners.
BRIDGETOWN AND AREA HERITAGE SOCIETY

The village of Elmsdale, Nova Scotia, where I practice, has European roots going back to 1785. That is when the first land grants were made to settlers at the V-shaped confluence of the Shubenacadie and Nine Mile rivers, where the village is nestled. For centuries prior to this, the area was a meeting place for the Mi'kmaq people who used the lakes and rivers of our province as a natural highway. After the Napoleonic Wars, settlers appeared in the region in greater numbers, but the area contained only a few scattered farmsteads with no focal point until three fateful events occurred: the construction of a canal system, the building of a railroad and, not least, the appearance on the scene of a fiery and determined preacher, the Reverend John Cameron.

On September 17, 1844, just four days shy of his twenty-seventh birthday, John Cameron was inducted at the one poor church in the area. He was the only clergyman for many miles around, and had inherited a parish with much lawlessness. The hard-drinking and profane denizens of the local gold mines and lumber camps patronized the saloons and licensed boarding houses in the community, making the streets unpleasant and sometimes unsafe for more law-abiding residents. In his first year, Reverend Cameron covered thirty-five hundred miles of trails on horseback, spreading the gospel to often-isolated households. Suffering ill health, he spent the winter of 1845 to1846 in Philadelphia. Realizing that there was very little available in the way of medical care in his home con-stituency, Cameron supplemented his knowledge of the Lord by attending medical lectures at Philadelphia medical colleges, obtaining information which was to prove invaluable in his later ministrations.

By 1858, the good reverend had whipped the lawless township into a
God-fearing community. Even the miners knew better than to incur the wrath of Cameron and were behaving themselves. Not so
Coryne-bacterium diphtheriae
, the causative agent for diphtheria, which was ravaging the province. Records show that in the nearby community of Shubenacadie, a hundred and fifty people were infected and eighty died from the disease. The illness caused a greyish-white membrane to form in the throat of its victims, and in addition to blocking the upper airways, this bacterial growth produced toxins or poisons which spread through the blood stream to other parts of the body. The membrane made breathing difficult, if not impossible, and the toxin affected the heart and nerves, causing inflammation and damage to these organs. At the time, the only known treatment was the application of caustic soda to the infected tissues of the throat, which presumably shrank the thick membrane and kept it from obstructing the airway. (It's ironic that I have patients now who absolutely refuse immunization against an agent which was killing their great-grandparents in such large numbers.)

Cameron was not one to let his parishioners die off while he did nothing. He had no caustic soda on hand, so he fired off a note by messenger to the doctor in Shubenacadie, asking for the loan of some caustic soda until he could order his own supply from Halifax. Not only did the local physician refuse to supply the material, but he also threatened legal action if Cameron treated anyone. (I would like to think this was done out of concern for untrained personnel managing the deadly ailment and not from fear of competition and financial loss.) Undeterred, Cameron undertook the arduous horseback ride to Halifax. There, his friend Dr. Parker trusted the cleric's medical abilities more than did his colleague in Shubenacadie and happily provided the reverend with the needed caustic soda. For the next two months John Cameron seldom got any rest, working night and day to save, not the souls, but the lives of his flock. The church elders reportedly said, “Forget the sermons; they can wait. Look after the sick.” Implementing what he had learned in Philadelphia about the treatment of disease, in conjunction with some new information on the importance of sanitation, Cameron attended nearly two hundred people in his district, and it was said that not one of them died. After the epidemic settled, his grateful parishioners voted him ten pounds cash and a fine horse, a very handsome gift indeed for those times.

We do not know whether Reverend Cameron was called on to provide medical care on such a large scale again. We can presume that in the absence of a doctor he continued — when required — to tend to the physical needs of his flock. He looked after the spiritual needs of his little community in Elmsdale and the surrounding area until 1879. Then he moved to Bridgetown, Nova Scotia, where he continued to work until his death in 1907 at the age of ninety and in the sixty-third year of his ministry. A plaque can still be seen in Elmsdale's hundred-and-fifty-year-old Presbyterian church, commemorating Cameron's thirty-three years of service there. He chose to be buried in Elmsdale's little community cemetery, where a simple headstone marks the final resting place of this remarkable man, a cleric by profession and a physician by necessity.

George Burden

The giantess Anna Swan with her beloved husband, Captain Martin Bates. Their great stature brought them triumph, tragedy and a place in the
Guinness Book of World Records
.
DALE SWAN / PUBLIC ARCHIVES OF NOVA SCOTIA

This is a tale of love and passion and tragedy, and its protagonist was almost eight feet tall. I refer to the life of Anna Swan, the Canadian giantess who astounded the world in the mid-nineteenth century. Anna was fated to be wooed away to New York City by P.T. Barnum and to be feted by Queen Victoria and the monarchs of Europe, but her life began simply with her birth in the tiny village of Millbrook, Nova Scotia. The third of twelve children, she was born on August 6, 1846, and her parents knew something was a bit odd when their new baby girl weighed in a thirteen pounds. By age four, Anna was almost fifty inches high, and by age seven she had outgrown her mother. Soon after, she towered over her five-foot-six-inch father, and at seventeen she measured seven foot eleven and a half inches and weighed over four hundred pounds. Her shoes, clothing and bed had to be custom-made. Ordinary chairs would not hold her, so she simply sat on the kitchen floor at mealtime.

Anna was a bright student, though special measures had to be taken in the school to accommodate her gargantuan dimensions. She later attended the Normal School in Truro, with aspirations of becoming a teacher. Though massive in size, her gentle nature attracted children to her. By 1862, however, the famous impresario, Phineas T. Barnum, had succeeded in luring Anna to New York to become a part of his American Museum. Mr. and Mrs. Swan, determined to see their daughter treated with proper decorum and respect, accompanied her to New York. Anna's regimen at the museum included tutoring and music lessons, and she entertained her visitors by giving lectures, acting in plays and performing on the piano.
She was well paid by the day's standard, twenty-three dollars per week, in gold coinage.

Unfortunately, the museum burned down in 1865, costing Anna her money and belongings and almost taking her life. As she was unable to descend flame-weakened stairs, rescuers broke a hole in the wall of the building and lowered the giantess to the ground with a derrick. Anna then returned to Nova Scotia, but later she rejoined Barnum in a rebuilt American Museum. This museum also was destroyed by fire in 1868, and the discouraged Barnum went into semi-retirement.

Undeterred, Anna joined a group of entertainers who were touring the United States, and while attending a party in New Jersey, she met Captain Martin Van Buren Bates, the seven-foot-nine-inch “Kentucky Giant.” Bates had been a Confederate officer during the United States Civil War, and despite presenting an extra large target, he had managed successfully to disperse guerrilla raiders in his district without serious injury to himself. The genteel Southerner won Anna's heart during a shipboard romance while bound for Europe, and their engagement was announced before they docked.

When Queen Victoria got wind of this, she insisted the loving couple be married in London at the Royal Parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. This transpired on June 17, 1872. A Canadian pastor, the Reverend Rupert Cochrane, performed the ceremony, and though six foot three inches in height himself, he was dwarfed by the recipients of his blessings. The queen's gifts to the couple included Anna's wedding dress, which incorporated one hundred yards of satin and fifty yards of lace. She also presented the bride with a diamond cluster ring; large gold watches were given to both Anna and Martin. The chain on Anna's watch measured six feet in length. While the couple was in England, many of the country's most eminent physicians examined both of them. Dr. James Simpson of Edinburgh, a famed obstetrician and gynecologist and pioneer in the use of chloroform anaesthesia, declared Anna to be fit, with healthy organs, though proportionately enlarged to her great stature.