An Acquaintance with Darkness - Ann Rinaldi [97]
Back in those days, however, medicine was still half folklore, half magic, and half art. Medical training was acquired by the apprenticeship method. A young man followed a doctor around for several years and learned by watching and assisting.
It was different in England. Medical education required five years of study. Students had to take courses, attend lectures, do autopsies. So, many young men of means in America went abroad to study medicine, to London, Dublin, Edinburgh, or Glasgow.
Anatomy courses were the main reason for the establishment of medical schools. But both in England and in America there was a shortage of cadavers for dissection.
The acquiring of dead bodies for study goes back to the fifteenth century. Antonio Pollaiuolo (14311498) was the first painter to study the human body. Michelangelo (1475–1564) was able to do his paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in St. Peter's in Rome because he spent years studying the human body through dissection. Leonardo da Vinci (14521519) has been hailed as the best anatomist of his time and did many illustrations of the human body, besides being known as a painter and sculptor.
During the American Revolution more men died in hospitals than on the battlefield. Hospitals were where you went to die. By the 1850s medical schools had sprouted up all over America, but the quality of education was poor. And vying for the attention of the sick were the herbalists, those who practiced slave medicine and folk medicine, and those who peddled bottled "cures," as well as just plain quacks. There were also midwives, who did more than deliver babies, and who sometimes knew as much if not more than the local doctors in far-flung regions.
In my book The Blue Door, which takes place in 1841, I have Ben Videau giving his girls "blue pills" to ward off "hot fever." He rolls the pills himself from the decoctions supplied by a slave herbalist on the South Carolina island plantation. In The Second Bend in the River, which takes place in Ohio in the early years of the nineteenth century, I have a doctor visiting a young dying woman and bringing "Bateman's drops, Godfrey's cordial, Anderson's ague pills, and Hamilton's worm-destroying lozenges." Both incidents are accurate depictions, gleaned from research.
In 1847 the American Medical Association was born and some control was exerted over medical practice. The profession in America upheld new techniques, put new focus on anatomical knowledge, and soon the torch was passed from Europe to America in medical education.
From 1768 to 1876 about eight thousand dissections for medical science were done in medical schools in Pennsylvania alone. There was a constant search for bodies. Between 1820 and 1840 more than sixteen hundred medical students were in school in Vermont. Four hundred cadavers were needed for dissection. Only two bodies a year were made available legally.
The American Civil War highlighted our physicians' abysmal ignorance and, at the same time, taught them so much. Surgeons just off the battlefields, where they'd dealt with carnage unbelievable to mankind, knew what they had to learn, and they weren't about to shilly-shally anymore about learning it.
Washington, D.C., at the end of the Civil War had more problems than any other city in the North. Change was happening so fast nobody could keep up with it. The war was ending. Thousands upon thousands of "freedmen" (freed slaves) had gathered there since Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863. They were living in hovels, needing food, education, a new start. Photographs of the dead lying on the battlefield of Gettysburg were available to the public for the first time in the art galleries, the toll of dead was six hundred thousand in both the North and the South, African Americans were armed for the first time to fight for the North, women were entering new fields—nursing, writing, speechmaking. We even had an occasional woman