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Now What?

21 Thursday Feb 2019

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How long does it take to write an historical biography? And when is it considered finished? Well, that depends….

In my case, it seems impossible that I started working on the biography of my great-grandfather, Dr. Harry G. Blaine, more than 20 years ago! I already had on hand the basic materials for the book: my great-grandfather’s diary, my grandfather’s biography of his father and a memoir of his growing up as the son of a doctor, and copies of some other family-related history. My grand delusion was that this would be just like writing a research paper for a college class. And I was one of those odd students who really enjoyed writing research papers!

It didn’t take long to shatter that delusion. Writing a full-length book was a lot more complicated than any research paper I had ever written. Over the intervening years, I collected more family documents that were hidden away in my cousins’ and sisters’ attics. I read numerous books and articles on various aspects of medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as family and cultural life and historical events in those times. My bibliography swelled to more than 40 sources!

Another struggle was how best to organize the book. I didn’t want it to be just a dry recitation of important dates and events in Dr. Blaine’s life. I wanted to create a story or series of stories that would educate the reader in addition to revealing more about Dr. Blaine and the legacy he left behind.

When I finally completed that first rough draft, it was a moment of victory. I had actually done it! I now had a framework on which to hang any additional material that might be relevant. Ironically, that was the hardest part. As I looked back through my reading and research notes, I kept finding more gems to include. Help! Where do I stop?

Finally one day I just put the book away for a while. Now the longer I ignore it, the harder it is to pick it back up! One side of my brain says, “Nobody’s going to be interested in that boring, old stuff anyway. Just throw it in a drawer and forget about it.” The other side of my brain says, “Don’t waste all that hard work! Finish it off and share it. Family members will read it even if no one else does.”

I’ll let you know which side wins.

A Teenager Teaching School?

03 Thursday May 2018

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Note: Here’s another topic that I ran across in the process of writing my great-grandfather’s biography that really doesn’t belong in the book. But I hope it will be an interesting read for anyone who is curious about what elementary schools were like in rural Ohio in the 1870s and who taught in them.

Before the days of fast food emporiums on every corner, there weren’t too many opportunities for a teenage farm boy in the 1870s to find a paying job. One option was available, however, that wouldn’t be possible for a teenage boy in the 21st century. And that was teaching school!

My great-grandfather, Harry G. Blaine, pexels-photo-265076.jpegtaught in a one-room schoolhouse in Northwest Ohio for the first time in the fall of 1875 when he was not quite 17 and had only completed our present-day equivalent of the 8th grade. His preparation consisted of eleven weeks of training at the Northwestern Normal School in Fostoria. Subjects included rhetoric, arithmetic, geography, grammar, orthography (spelling), penmanship, and drawing. Rhetoric proved to be his favorite subject; arithmetic, his least favorite. In fact, during the training, he was forced to transfer to the primary arithmetic class! At the end of the training, he was able to pass a test proving his competence in all the subjects. His moral character also had to meet certain standards in order to receive a certificate.

Harry’s first teaching assignment was a winter term of four months at the Dilnois School near Willard, Ohio. Nine pupils attended that first day. Imagine what the young teacher must have felt standing before them, with no experience and only minimal training in how to manage a classroom of students at all different levels of learning! Not surprisingly, he was embarrassed and timid, but after only a few days he began to enjoy teaching.

At the beginning of each week, Blaine walked from his home to the schoolhouse, a trip that took him an hour in good weather. The rest of the week he boarded at the home of one of his pupils. Daily sessions ran from approximately 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. every weekday, most Saturdays, and even some holidays like Thanksgiving. When the weather got very bad, he was allowed to use his own judgment and cancel school on those days.

Fortunately, Blaine had only a few problems with discipline, having to deal with what he described as “bad pupils.” One time he kept two students after school for over two hours to punish them for “neglected lessons.” Generally, his pupils were well-behaved, and he enjoyed their company.

Since there were no substitute teachers available to take over in emergencies, Harry had to teach through days when a  bad cold made him so hoarse he could hardly talk. At those time, he relied on his advanced students to take charge and make sure the younger students recited their lessons. Other times, he simply canceled classes until his health improved.

At the end of the term, he was paid a lump sum of $132, which was a goodly amount in those days. However, that’s not taking into account the $77 he had to spend for the training!

Obviously, much has changed in education since 1875. But I would hope that the care, concern, and individual attention that teachers in one-room schools showered upon their students made up, at least in part, for their limited knowledge and resources. By the end of the term, Harry could honestly say that he had prayed for his young charges every day.

The Why of Grave Robbing

26 Thursday Apr 2018

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In October 2016 I wrote a post about a grave robbery that my great-grandfather was implicated in. The subject fascinated me so much that I did some more digging (pun intended!) to find out more about why grave robberies became so common in the 1800s in the United States. And here’s what I found: it was a simple matter of supply vs. demand.

As the field of medicine in the early 1800s turned more to the study of actual human specimens rather than charts and illustrations, the need grew for fresh cadavers to dissect. But since it was still illegal to donate a body to science, the only way to obtain one was to rob a grave. Some medical colleges even kept a shovel and pick handy for their students to use and would accept fresh bodies, no questions asked, in lieu of tuition payment.pexels-photo-116909.jpeg

According to John Duffy, Massachusetts was the first state to pass a law in 1830 regarding donation of bodies to medical schools. Other states lagged behind, with similar laws not passed until in the late 1800s.

In his book The Physician, His Relation to the Law, Dr. Blaine noted that by 1883 New York, as well as a number of other states, allowed medical colleges to claim the bodies of those “dying in public hospitals, prisons, alms houses, asylums, morgues, and other public receptacles for deceased persons,” provided no one else claimed the bodies first. By 1894, 24 states declared dissection to be legal and allowed for bodies to be donated to medical schools, generally from the gallows.

Sates that lagged behind in passing similar laws often raised the ire of medical school officials. A report in the Chicago Tribune from March 24, 1890, quoted a school official from the University of Louisville as admitting to a grave robbery at the State Asylum for the Insane in Anchorage, Kentucky. As the official explained, “We must have bodies, and if the State won’t give them to us we must steal them…. You cannot make doctors without them, and the public must understand it” (as quoted in Larson).

The supply was simply not keeping up with the demand. And even though Dr. Blaine admitted in The Physician (obviously recalling his own sobering experience a number of years earlier) that “grave robbery is a revolting offense,” he also tried to make clear that a simple adjustment to the law in many states would entirely eliminate the need for robbing graves.

What Blaine and others failed to appreciate was that laws were only part of the solution. It took many years to shed the moral and social taint surrounding the donation of bodies. After all, weren’t the bodies used in medical colleges those of criminals or paupers or the insane–the scum of society? No upstanding citizen, even in death, would want to be associated with them! And for many, dissecting the body of a loved one after death was unthinkable, even irreligious!

Finally, in response to a variety of social pressures and a slow sea change in society’s perception of the value inherent in the donation of human remains, the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA) was passed in 1968 and refined in 1987. These acts, according to Raphael Hulkower, “made body donation a right, morally based on free choice and volunteerism.”

With demand being satisfied, the practice of digging up the dead for medical research passed into history.

Works Cited:

Blaine, Harry G. The Physician, His Relation to the Law. G. S. Earle & Co., 1897. Reprinted by Kessinger Legacy Reprints.

Duffy, John. From Humors to Medical Science: A History of American Medicine, 2nd ed. U of Illinois P, 1993.

Hulkower, Raphael. “From Sacrilege to Privilege: The Tale of Body Procurement for Anatomical Dissection in the United States.” The Einstein Journal of Biology and Medicine, 2011, pp. 23-26. Einstein.yu.edu/uploadedFiles/EJBM/27.1%20Hulkower.PDF

Larson, Erik. The Devil in the White City. Vintage Books, 2004.

A Rough Draft!

14 Tuesday Nov 2017

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Fireworks

After all the delays, time-outs, excuses, life interruptions, lack of motivation, uncertainties, and a fierce addiction to historical research, I have somehow finally reached my goal of finishing a very rough draft of my great-grandfather’s biography! When I started this project over 20 years ago, I had no idea that it would take so long to accomplish even this first big step. But along the way, I have learned a great deal about my family’s history, the history of American medicine, and life in America at the turn of the 20th century. And that has made all the effort worthwhile.

Of course, this isn’t the end of the journey. As I said, what I have now is only a rough draft. I’m not even sure the chapters are in the right order. And it’s very possible I may need to add more content. If you read my previous post, you may remember that I was trying to decide whether or not to include chapters on the Toledo Medical College and the assassination of President Garfield. Well, I did include one on the latter, but not one on the former–yet. And as I read over what I have, there may be other obvious holes that need to be filled. But at least now I have a framework to hang everything on, and that will make all the writing from now on so much easier.

So wish me luck in this last push to the finish line! I’ll let you know when I get there.

 

What Is an Indirect Question?

28 Friday Apr 2017

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Question mark 3

We all remember learning in grade school about how to change a statement into a question by simply putting the verb before the subject. Example: Betty was late for her appointment. Was Betty late for her appointment? But then English, being the flexible language that it is, provides a number of variations of that basic pattern. Here are ones using helping verbs:

Betty went by bus to her appointment. Did Betty go by bus to her appointment?

Fernando speaks three languages. Does Fernando speak three languages?

Most of the time we have no problem with asking direct questions like these. The confusion comes sometimes when we forget to change the pattern for direct questions when we want to frame an indirect question. Say you are in the midst of a conversation and these words come out of your mouth: I was talking to Ron yesterday and asked him did he want to go to the game with us tonight. That last part is the correct form for a direct question, but what you actually want is an indirect question: I was talking to Ron yesterday and asked him if he wanted to go to the game with us tonight. You can probably get away with using that hybrid form in speech, but when you write you need to be a little more attentive and use the correct form for indirect questions.

Here are some other examples:

Direct: Is this item for sale?     Indirect: I’d like to know if this item is for sale.

Direct: What did she want to do?     Indirect: Frank wondered what she wanted to do.

Direct: Where has the time gone?     Indirect: I have no idea where the time went.

You’ve noticed, I’m sure, that with these indirect questions the subject and verb are in the same order as in a statement. And there is no question mark at the end. There are, however, other variations that combine indirect questions with direct questions, and so they do end with question marks.

Do you have any idea where the closest restaurant is?

Can you tell me whose jacket this is?

Does he remember when the last bus comes?

Are you going to ask someone if the next train stops here?

Hopefully, this brief explanation will be a reminder to look carefully at the construction of sentences that end with question marks or that have a question embedded in them. If you are a native speaker of English, you can usually tell if a sentence is correct just by the way it sounds–but be aware that patterns in speech are not always as formal as they need to be in writing.

As I may have said before, all the possible variations in English may drive students and English teachers to distraction, but they also increase its flexibility and allow for more nuances in meaning.

Feel free to respond with other examples of indirect questions that you have come across.

 

The Pandemic of 1918

14 Tuesday Feb 2017

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In the fall of 1918, American involvement in the Great War in Europe was at its peak. Ships filled with wounded troops returning from combat crowded the Eastern harbors. At least this time, recent advances in medical knowledge meant that more of the wounded were surviving–a much different scenario than had been experienced in the late Civil War. Using antibiotics, X-ray machines, improved surgical techniques, and other recent advances in medicine, doctors and nurses on the front worked valiantly to send more boys home alive.grim-reaper

But unbeknownst to the medical community, an even deadlier foe lurked in a number of locations around the world against which they had no defense. A new strain of influenza would soon make its appearance and wipe out an estimated 20 to 40 million people worldwide in less than a year. In the United States alone, “more than 25 percent…became sick, and some 675,000 Americans died during the pandemic” (History.com staff, 2010).

Known familiarly as the Spanish flu because Spain was one of the first countries to experience its devastation, this highly contagious disease hit young, healthy people particularly hard. New recruits swarming into crowded army camps around the U. S. proved a fertile field for the spread of the germ. At Camp Sherman in Ohio, for example, the flu wiped out almost 1200 men (Influenza epidemic, n.d.). And the movement of troops across Europe compounded the problem. One journalist stated that “more U.S. soldiers died from the 1918 flu than were killed in battle during the war” (History.com staff, 2010).

The Spanish flu was particularly virulent. Starting out as a mild case with the ordinary symptoms of flu, it would rapidly develop into a vicious type of bacterial pneumonia, leaving its victims gasping for breath and quickly causing death by suffocation. As noted in Billings’ article (1997), stories circulated of people becoming ill while walking to work and dying within hours. In another case, four women were playing cards late into the night, and by morning three of them were dead. In San Diego, children would jump rope to a new rhyme: “I had a little bird. Its name was Enza. I opened up the window. And in-flu-enza” (Billings, 1997).

As with modern versions of the flu, this one had no respect for social class or age or gender. In some places, whole towns came to a standstill. Schools, businesses, churches, and theaters closed.There was no mail delivery or garbage pick-up. People were required to wear masks and to refrain from shaking hands or gathering in crowds. Private homes and other buildings became temporary hospitals. Funeral parlors and grave diggers couldn’t keep up with the demand.

The shortage of doctors and nurses became particularly acute at the home front. Many medical personnel had already been pressed into service overseas, and those left in the U.S. were overwhelmed trying to care for both the wounded soldiers and the new influx of flu victims. In the small Midwest town of Willard, Ohio, Dr. Harry G. Blaine, my great-grandfather, was solicited by the Surgeon General to serve as an Army physician, but hastened to reassure his fellow citizens in Willard that he would not leave his current practice unless the need became urgent. He was one of only two physicians left in the town.

The situation could have been worse. Due to the war and all the restrictions it imposed on the public, the American people were already used to government regulations. “People allowed for strict measures and loss of freedom during the war as they submitted to the needs of the nation ahead of their personal needs” (Billings, 1997). Public health officials therefore had an easier time enforcing their rules during the epidemic. No vaccines were available to prevent this dreaded disease, but people readily obeyed imposed quarantines and restrictions on travel and thus helped to slow its spread.

The flu pandemic of 1918 paved the way for the development of the first licensed flu vaccine in the 1940s and encouraged the public to accept the role of medical science in preventing future pandemics.

References:

Billings, M. (1997). The influenza pandemic of 1918. Retrieved from         https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/

History.com/staff. (2010). 1918 flu pandemic. History.com. Retrieved from http://www.history.com/topics/1918-flu-pandemic

Influenza epidemic of 1918. (n.d.). Ohio History Central. Retrieved from http://www.Ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Influenza_Epidemic_of_1918

The Scourge of Smallpox

28 Monday Nov 2016

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hypodermic-needleIf you are age 70 or older, you may remember getting vaccinated for smallpox when you were a child. This disease that used to kill about a third of the people who contracted it and left scars on the rest is now only a faint memory, thanks to Dr. Edward Jenner from England, who developed the first vaccine back in 1796. It took, however, almost 200 years and a number of intense vaccination programs on every continent to finally declare the world free of smallpox.

Why did it take so long? A closer look at what happened in the United States will shed some light on the development of medicine in general during that time and its relationship with government.

Early attempts to control this very infectious disease involved a procedure called variolation. In this process a small amount of the pus from a person with an active case of smallpox was scratched into the arm of a well person. The well person sometimes developed similar symptoms of fever and rash but did not die from the disease. In contrast Jenner’s vaccine was created using the pus from a similar disease in cows, called cowpox.

Manufacturing this more effective vaccine in the United States finally took off in the 1870s. All a person needed was a heifer, a seed virus from a case of cowpox, the passing on of the virus to subsequent calves, and some ivory points to transfer the vaccine to humans. Although this vaccine was easy to manufacture, it was also difficult to regulate its purity. It took about 20 more years for the manufacturers to finally add glycerin to the vaccine to rid it of harmful bacteria. But by then the general public had developed a mistrust of the whole process–and a healthy dislike of government interference.

In the 1890s, control of infectious diseases was still in the hands of local and state officials. Public health programs were starting to gain popularity in many communities, but according to Michael Willrich in Pox: An American History, “No public health measure inspired more ill will than compulsory vaccination” (91). And vaccination programs targeting school children were particularly unsuccessful in regions that still had no laws mandating school attendance.

Another difficulty lay with local doctors who often had limited formal medical training and sometimes misdiagnosed the skin rash of smallpox as measles or some similar disease, thereby allowing one or two isolated cases to explode into an epidemic that would ravage entire communities.

It took the power of the federal government to finally regulate the quality of the smallpox vaccine. Under the Biologics Control Act of 1902, manufacturers of the vaccine were now required to have a federal license and to agree to unannounced inspections of their facilities.

But even with a more reliable vaccine, programs of mandated vaccination of school children, especially during threatened outbreaks of the disease, still met with fierce opposition from parents and even some school officials. The first decade of the 20th century was a time of great change in American  society. With government assuming more and more power, some citizens saw their personal liberty draining away. Even J.W. Hodge, a homeopathic doctor, declared, “Compulsory vaccination ranks with human slavery and religious persecution as one of the most flagrant outrages upon the rights of the human race” (Willrich 254).

As smallpox epidemics continued to decimate whole communities, not only in the United States but around the world, a series of intense vaccination campaigns waged by the World Health Organization finally stopped the disease in its tracks. By 1952 North America had eradicated the disease, and the other continents followed. Finally, on May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly officially declared the world free of smallpox.

There may be no more smallpox, but the controversy over mandatory vaccinations is far from over. Questions still remain: Who has the power to make medical decisions for children? And when is the freedom of the individual to be limited for the good of all?

References consulted: (1) “History of Smallpox.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 30 Aug. 2016, http://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html. (2) Michael Willrich. Pox: An American History. The Penguin Press, 2011.

 

Hope for the Future

15 Tuesday Nov 2016

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As I was researching my great-grandfather’s religious history, I found again a speech Dr. Blaine presented on the Evolution of Ethics at the Ohio Universalist Convention in Attica in 1899. I had glossed over it before; the 19th century prose is unwieldy. But this time through a more careful reading, I found something that still speaks volumes to us more than a century later.

To set it in context, the 1880s and 1890s were called the Gilded Age in America. So many new inventions transformed all aspects of living and brought with them an unfailing faith in the forward progress of humankind. It is no wonder, then, that Dr. Blaine’s presentation echoed that same belief in the ability of the human race to continue evolving.

I’d like to share the conclusion to his speech. It’s a  little long and, as I warned, the writing style is stilted, but in the throes of our present turmoil, we need to hear again his reminder that our civilization has gone through great trials before and yet remains optimistic about the future.

Dr. Blaine: Throughout the history of man, progress toward moral/ethical behavior (justice, honor, virtue and fidelity) has always been upward. Despite wars, corruption, natural disasters, greed, poverty, and all the other ills of humanity, “the world of today marks the highest point of civilization ever achieved…. In the aggregate, never in its history has the human race had so much cause to be thankful for its creation, preservation, and all the blessings of life as at the present time. And despite all the woes and miseries which are indicated by pessimistic writers, I take my stand, that above the individualism there is humanity, which lives and develops as any organized being lives and develops; and in full confidence that all these evils, wrongs, privations and perturbations represent but a minimum of life–the turbulence of the breaking waves only–not the silent, vital, redeeming forces of the great ocean of humanity; that the world is not faithless, but believing; that most of the happenings of life are good; that we are moving forward….and that a higher evolved order of Ethics in which the collectivity of the race will be more distinctly manifested, and its individualism modified in the interest of all, is as certain to come as that the marvelous progress of the past centuries is an accomplished fact.”

Even though the horrors of war and other manifestations of evil still surround us in the 21st century, we can continue to put our faith in that “great ocean of humanity” and look to the future with hope.

sunrise2

Resurrectionists

25 Tuesday Oct 2016

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It was an early fall night with a full moon hanging over the horizon. A medical student and his two helpers worked feverishly, their spades sinking easily into the freshly covered grave. A hard clunk signaled that they had found their mark. Digging more carefully, they uncovered the wooden coffin and pried open the lid. The young girl’s body, still serene in death, was carefully lifted out. Her silk dress was removed and the body transferred to a straw-filled trunk.

The trunk was then sent overnight by train to Toledo, Ohio, not far up the line. With luck, it would ultimately be delivered to the Toledo Medical College as payment for the medical student’s last months of training. In Ohio there was still no formal law on the books in 1886 that allowed for legal donations of cadavers for medical school laboratories, so some schools would accept a human cadaver for dissection in lieu of tuition. Desperate students sometimes resorted to grave robbery themselves or hired “resurrectionists” to do the work for them.

Luck ran out on this particular medical student. By the time the trunk had sat awhile on the train platform in Toledo, a noxious smell led to the opening of the trunk and the discovery of the body. Foul play was at first suspected, but on closer examination of the body, the truth of the situation was quickly ascertained. When the unsuspecting medical student arrived to claim the body, he was promptly arrested. And since the student had used my great-grandfather’s railroad pass, Dr. Harry Blaine was also arrested as an accomplice.

Both of them may have gotten off with a reprimand except for the hornet’s nest of indignation that the robbery stirred up in the tight-knit farm community. The young woman, only 17 when she died of tuberculosis, had been very popular, and her grief-stricken father was out for revenge, even calling for a posse to hang the men involved!

Fortunately, the order of law prevailed. The medical student was tried and sentenced to one year in the Ohio Penitentiary. After serving his sentence, he went on to finish his studies and served as a respected doctor in a nearby community for over thirty years. Dr. Blaine was finally cleared of all  charges and remained a prominent physician in the area until his death in 1930.

This macabre tale of grave robbery made national news at the time and is still resurrected occasionally, especially around Halloween, as a reminder of how far medical education has come.

Where to Put That Period

29 Thursday Sep 2016

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What’s a run-on sentence? If you’re like many people, you will answer, “It’s a sentence that just runs on and on.” In other words, it’s a sentence out of control: too long with too many words in it.mug-with-teacher-motto

Unfortunately, the term itself is misleading. Length is not the problem at all. We have the freedom in English to make a sentence as long or as short as we want as long as it follows certain conventions of structure.

A sentence can be as short as two words: Gerald died. Or it can be as long as several lines or even an entire paragraph: The day he was supposed to fly to England, the birthplace of his ancestors, Gerald died of a heart attack, an event both tragic and ironic according to his niece Carolyn, who had tried for so long to convince him to make the trip, and now his dream of a lifetime would never come true because he had waited too long to make up his mind.

Obviously, too many long, complex sentences grouped together would slow down anyone’s reading speed, so most writers vary their sentence length to make it more enjoyable for the reader. But part of the attraction of English as a language is the infinite variety of patterns which we can use to string words together.

And it’s that endless variety that makes it difficult to clearly define what constitutes a sentence. But here are a few attempts, using a minimum of grammatical terms: (1) A sentence in English is any group of words with a required subject and verb, to which can be added numerous structures that add meaning to the main statement; (2) A sentence is an utterance that makes sense by itself; and (3) As one of my colleagues put it, a period at the end of a sentence signals a place where your mind can rest before going on to the next idea.

So the next time you are tempted to put a period somewhere just because the sentence is beginning to look too long and you are afraid that it is running on and on, or you are so unsure about where a period should go that you just scatter a few commas here and there for looks, you need to stop and read out loud what you have written. Most of the time, your mind will tell you where one idea stops and another starts. Language has meaning, and our minds are trained to look for meaning in what we read. If your writing is not making sense when you read it aloud, then maybe the fault is not in the words, but in the punctuation–or lack of it. A period in the right place can make a huge difference!

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If you have another way of explaining where to put periods or if you have any questions about punctuation, feel free to comment. I’d enjoy hearing from you!