The Trouble with Tom (18 page)

Just as literature was having its American Renaissance, the medical profession was experiencing explosive growth in the 1850s.A relatively uncommon and orthodox profession was invaded by middle-class students, becoming a warren of competing self-styled medical colleges, from those of conventional anatomists to the anti-intellectual rumblings of homeopathy. Arcane sects of Indian bonesetting and "chrono-thermalism" sprang up like mushrooms. One of the greatest iconoclasts was the botanical therapist Samuel Thomson, whose almost cultlike followers ceaselessly attacked conventional medicine as an elitist monopoly hiding behind obscure Latin terminology.
Their
medicine used plain English . . . and the enthusiastic therapeutic use of cayenne pepper.

Foote was fascinated, never dedicating himself entirely to any one movement, but brilliantly retrieving their most provocative aspects like a medical magpie. Moving to Saratoga Springs, a spa town beloved by hypochondriacs everywhere, Foote studied more and more deeply into the works of Orson Fowler—the very same man who, like his would-be author Paine, sought to remake the world anew. Fired up by the works of both, Foote set about writing down a manifesto, his own philosophy of health. And so it was that in 1858 his curious medical tract began to show up on bookseller shelves across the country.

Which brings us to our suicidal boarder on Fourth Avenue, Mr. J. Peters of Newark. Before he became a gunman, the hapless assassin was once a timid Hartford barber named August Woehler. In Foote's work this young man had eagerly read what he thought was his salvation. Nor had he been the only one to be struck by Foote's new book. For those who knew their history, the book's title had a strangely familiar ring.

Medical Common Sense.

Think of how many lives were altered at this address—lives whose unchanged course meant that you or I might not be here, or that someone else, nonexistent today, might be sitting in our place. Think of ailing men and women dragging themselves in, desperate for one last hope of a cure. Think of Manchurian Prawns, seasoned in crushed garlic.

"Hot and sour soup," I tell the waiter at Chinese Mirch.

Millions of books, pamphlets, and letters issued forth from this building. How many, I wonder, have ever made the trip back? I reach into my backpack, and pull out the ancient, faded chocolate brown volume.
Murray Hill Publishing, 120 Lexington Avenue,
it informs me. Perhaps this is the first to make the journey home. One thinks of a salmon swimming back upstream to spawn and die: but books spawn out in the world, among readers unseen and unknown to the publisher, and one never really knows when they are dead, or even how many progeny they left.

I set the prodigal book upon the table and start paging through it. "Rebels of the Year 1900 Against Old King Custom," reads one caption below a crude engraving of three smiling liberated ladies of the future. Yes, they are liberated!—and not just from King George. No, they have been liberated from King Tom, King Dick, and King Harry—from their husbands—and thus from bad marriages, from unwanted pregnancies, and from unequal pay.
Medical Common
Sense
was an extraordinarily ambitious book, covering every ailment from yeast infections to stomach cancer, but Foote's 1858 book also went on to take a stand no less unthinkable to many Americans than Paine's own
Common Sense
had been:

BUSINESS AVOCATIONS SHOULD BE OPEN TO FEMALES.

One prolific cause of unhappy marriages, is the limited sphere allowed females in which to exercise their ingenuity and talents for self-maintenance . . . Much has already been written concerning the poor pay females receive in the limited branches of industry which social despotism allows them to pursue, and I shall not here dwell on the subject. I will only advise, nay, urge ladies to crowd themselves into all business pursuits for which they are physically qualified . . . that they may become less dependent upon their legal protectors, and be enabled to live lives of "single blessedness" rather than unite themselves to disagreeable masses of masculine blood and bones . . .

But what if you had already married one of these disagreeable masses of man-flesh? Not to worry: men had their uses. In a section on "The Philosophy of Intercourse," Foote explains that, thanks to animal magnetism, the opposite sexes quite literally kept each other charged up.

This wasn't the first time that the healthy presence of the opposite sex had such a vogue in a medical treatise. A strange little octavo volume titled
Hernippus Redivivus
appeared in London in 1743: it related how two patients had achieved the ages of
115
and 155, respectively. Their secret? Gasping in the breath of young boys and girls—especially the girls. Vital fluid permeated their lungs, it claimed, and the author had himself procured it from "servant girls, and liquefied in glass instruments curved like trumpets . . . Life may be easily prolonged over a hundred years, for this vapour of breath collected from maidens in trumpets, when distilled, becomes an elixir of life." Unfortunately for the many doctors who got giddy with excitement over his book—one physician even moved into a girl's boarding school, to stay close to the best air in town—
Hermippus Redivivus
was an immense and splendid hoax.

E. B. Foote's notion, at least, sounded like it had a little more science to it. After all, hadn't galvanism shown that our bodies ran on electrical impulses?Intercourse was a veritable spinning dynamo, Foote announced, generating "frictional energy" between men and women. This was why lonely singles resorted to masturbation: it was precisely the same action, he noted, as rubbing a piece of flannel back and forth across a piece of amber to get a little static shock. Sadly, Foote never explains why masturbation wouldn't therefore shoot bolts of lightning from between your legs and make your hair stand on end.

Some genteel Victorian readers might be forgiven for having
their
hair standing on end after reading Foote. Yet others would find it familiar reading indeed, for he admiringly quoted for pages at a time from none other than Orson Fowler. Phrenology was a key element to Foote's medical advice. He firmly believed that needless marriages—and all the unhappiness, and death in childbirth that attended them—were a plague upon womankind. So if a woman was going to have a man, she needed the
right
man. But how could you determine a proper match? Foote knew: "Does the reader ask how? I reply, by doing away with the present rotten system for legalizing marriage, and substituting therefore
a Board of Phrenologists and Physiologsts in every county seat."
Under Foote's plan, divorce would be made easy but marriage difficult, for the screening tests would result in such perfectly matched mates that divorces wouldn't happen much anyway. Assuming your mate had the right sort of skull—a bump to complement your every lump—then all that remained for marital happiness was one last step that was downright unheard of in Foote's time. "Every married man should confide to his wife the real condition of his finances," Foote lectured. "It is high time that men began to appear to the wives exactly what they are, pecunarily, morally, and socially."

Common financial sense, perhaps. But was it
Medical Common Sense?
To Foote, it was indeed. Unhappy unemployed women meant nervous prostration and sedentary illness. And if the family finances were open, men couldn't sneak off to squander money on prostitutes: ergo, less syphilis. Their wives, apprised of the true tightness of funds, might not approve of debilitating cigars and steaks. You start to see at this point why Foote seemed to have a greater following among women readers than men. But change a fellow's insides, Foote thought, and you will change their outside conduct as well. "Gross minds beget gross ideas," he warned, "—[they] demand gross food and gross remedies." Fill them with healthy food and healthy remedies, and healthy thoughts might well follow.

What exactly was healthy proved to be debatable. Amid sensible pronouncements on drinking plenty of water, getting lots of exercise and plenty of fresh air, there were thundering condemnations against condiments and the role they played in sex. Their spiciness incited immorality and thus contributed toward prostitution, you understand.

Well,
I'm
certainly not feeling very randy. I do, however, feel the need to patronize a Kidde fire extinguisher, or maybe some of that foaming gel that they spray onto burning airplanes.

"Water," I cough. 'Thank you."

I regard my hot and sour soup as it is taken away almost uneaten. Perhaps I should have bothered reading the italicized description in the Chinese Mirch menu:
A fiery creation.
It is at moments like this that memories of my old elementary school report cards come back to haunt me. "Does Not Pay Attention." And: "Does Not Follow Instructions."

I slump back into the squeaky bamboo chair, humiliated. Spices? My God, Foote's old headquarters are now a veritable den of Szechuan iniquity. He'd be scandalized. But then, a lot scandalized him. In addition to spicy food, the doctor did not approve of other habits as seemingly innocuous as children sleeping in the same bed as their parents. The reason—as with nearly everything in Foote—involved animal magnetism. The effect of putting a child and an adult in the same bed was like putting a new battery and a dead battery together. "Children, compared with adults, are electrically in a positive condition," he explained. Completing a circuit with an adult would literally drain them. "See to it," Foote warned parents, "that his nervous vitality is not absorbed by some diseased or aged relative." Or, for that matter, by a crazy doctor trying to catch his breath in a glass trumpet.

Foote also rather cryptically forbids children from standing on their heads.

Yet some of Foote's
Common Sense
was so far ahead of the world of 1858 that its work remains unfinished even today. Like Thoreau and Fowler, he shook his head over Americans killing themselves with overwork, all for luxuries that they didn't actually need in the first place. He berated readers for artificial lighting that was creating a generation of night owls living in sleep-deprived "nervous irritation," and for the tight lacing and impractical fashions that were hindering women's health and welfare. Tobacco was poisoning the nation, he warned, and "Fast eating, a universal habit with Anglo-Americans," was wreaking havoc on the public's diet.

Indeed, meals were of a special concern to the doctor. He boasted of his three-year-old son Edward Jr.'s vegetarian diet, one that sounds pretty appealing after you read Daddy's stories of filthy abattoirs where worm-ridden livestock have tumors "that when laid open by the knife, purulent matter gushes out." Foote was also strongly against artificial colors and flavorings in food, and no wonder: in his era coal tar gas was used to create pineapple flavoring, and unregulated dyes flourished. When used externally in striped stockings, some dyes even created banded skin eruptions running up the legs. One can only imagine the ornamental patterns they wrought upon the guts of young children as they ate pretty green arsenite-of-copper lollipops and dazzling blue ferrocyanide hard candies. Foote's uncommon notions, it seemed, were pretty sensible after all.

Consider this diligent doctor eagerly rereading Paine's works. Here was a man pondering a reformist Founding Father who took on nothing less than the greatest issues of the day: gods and kings. How could a Manhattan doctor possibly follow in footsteps like those?

Consider this question as you sit on the toilet.

Really. In fact, consider it as you sit on the hopper at Chinese Mirch, or at any number of other Manhattan restrooms. Should you have brought reading matter into the Chinese Mirch restroom with you, you'll have noticed that in today's paper there is an insert by Home Depot advertising American Standard toilets in the Champion line. We are informed:

29 Golf Balls in One Flush!

Now, while this is not a new ploy—rival manufacturer Koehler has rather pointedly flushed two pounds of cocktail sausages down their model—there
is
something appealing in the notion that, should the fancy grab you, you could pour a bucket of Tideists down a magic portal that whisks them out to the East River.

But in the 1870s, this was deadly serious stuff. For a mid-century Victorian reformer, there were two obvious impediments to human happiness, two forces creating more misery, illness, and death than any other. The first was pregnancy. The second was the natural result of that fecundity: sewage. Fish inspectors surveying Britain in 1867 found, in that soot-blackened country, that as many rivers were poisoned by human sewage as by coal waste. America's cities were quickly finding themselves in an equally dire situation. Cities were becoming a stinking and fetid morass of their own wastes, breeding typhus, yellow fever, and dysentery. Victorians became justly fearful of the "miasma" around ponds, gutters, and cesspools, and ineffectually sprayed carbolic acid and swigged useless alcoholic patent medicines to no avail.

So readers of
Harper's
magazine would have been delighted to find an ad like this one in 1871:

The Wakefield
EARTH CLOSET,
IS by all means the
best
yet patented.
Send to WAKEFIELD EARTH CLOSET CO., 36 Dey St., NY,
for Descriptive pamphlet,
or call and examine.

And the principal of this company? Why, Dr. E. B. Foote.

It is one of those happily juvenile accidents of history that while the greatest seller of water closets in Britain was one Thomas Crapper, the earth closet salesman at 36 Dey Street was named Asa Butts. Ah, where would the world be without its Butts and Crappers? Graced with far fewer restrooms, to be sure. Yet Butts had more to bring to the job than a melodious name: he was also known as the publisher of the progressive magazine
Truth Seeker.
To put this in modern terms: imagine finding the publisher of the
Nation
working the floor of an American Standard showroom.

What would draw wild-eyed reformers to such a prosaic thing as selling commodes? For one thing, sewage was still—I use this phrase advisedly—up for grabs. Today we naturally equate toilets with running water; Victorians did not. Impractical early water closets had been tried out in Britain, including a "slop system" with a tipper tank collecting sink and rainwater until it filled up enough to tip down and flush out the entire house with a powerful cleansing roar. This seemed like a keen idea until you had rainy weather—not unknown in Britain—whereupon the tank filled up and clanged empty constantly, scaring the bejesus out of children as all the house's toilets roared in monstrous unison in the dead of night.