A Tribute to Mad Hatters & Others Who Just Struggled Along

Was the hatter mad or was it the world around him?

I recently had the opportunity to buy a trade card that was made way back in 1825.

Yeah – 200 years ago – (mic drop).

Forget about airplanes and automobiles – back in 1825 there were no such things as sewing machines, the telegraph, or even photographs. This acquisition predates my few Civil War era trade cards by over 40 years (see my recent blogpost, “The Unwelcomed Success of Dr. Curtis,” for a card from 1867 that most advertising trade card collectors would call an early trade card).

The Mad Hatter from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, 1865. (Courtesy of Internet Archive)

Truth is, I would have wanted this antique treasure even if it was only promoting the sale of broken wagon wheels, but the fact that it was the trade card of a hat manufacturer in the mid-1820s had a special allure for me because I know my Alice in Wonderland.

“MAD AS A HATTER”

The hat making profession was getting ridiculed even back in the 1820s. A preparation of mercury salts was used to soften the hairs on pelts of beavers, otters, and other woodland creatures for easy use in making the flared "bell" and "chimney" styles of hats worn by men in the early part of the century. Constantly dipping the pelts in the hot bath of mercury and nitric acid allowed the mercury solution to seep through skin pores and into the bloodstream and its noxious vapors were inhaled causing many hat makers to have physical trembling, speech problems, and emotional instability such as:

excessive timidity, diffidence, increasing shyness, loss of self-confidence, anxiety, and a desire to remain unobserved and unobtrusive. The victim also had a pathological fear of ridicule and often reacted with an explosive loss of temper when criticized. (H. A. Waldron, “Did the Mad Hatter have mercury poisoning?” British Medical Journal, Vol.287, DEC 1983, p.1961.) 

A brief interchange in an early play script demonstrates the widely understood association that hatters had with odd and even neurotic behavior back in 1829 when it appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine:

Man Wearing Beaver Hat. Daguerreotype, ca.1855. Hand-tinted on cheeks and chin to appear more lifelike. Courtesy of a private collector.

TICKLER (aside to SHEPHERD.) He's raving.   

SHEPHERD (to  TICKLER.) Dementit. [Demented]

ODOHERTY (to both.) Mad as a hatter. Hand me a segar.

In 1847 a British newspaper correspondent lambasted the hat worn by a member of Parliament, calling it “atrociously ugly” then placing the blame on the hat maker, precisely because he was a hat maker, of being mad:  

The hatter who originally conceived the design must have broke[n] out of a lunatic asylum, and was assuredly more mad than hatters usually are, though the craft are proverbial maniacs. (The Birmingham Journal [England], 27 November 1847, p.8; emphasis added)

Consumer demand for hats had been high for decades and was increasing as England moved towards the middle of the 19th century. Even though the demand for hats was met with real health problems and popular ridicule, many men and some women braved the unpleasantness of both and became gentlemen’s hatters.

JOHN CONQUEST 

Conquest – the name implied success in a dominant way. In Great Britain the word conjures up a history-changing triumph – the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 and its ruthless, successful leader, William the Conqueror. The surname may have its roots in that epic event and commander, but almost eight centuries had passed and no glories, fame, or fortune had been handed down to John Conquest.

He was born the son of a manual laborer in the quiet country village of Clophill, England, floating about 40 miles northwest of London. He was as common a man as common could be: just another Anglican by faith, with unremarkable brown hair and a pale complexion, and he stood 5 feet 6 inches tall, although wearing one of his hats may have made him feel taller. He was also illiterate, signing both of his marriage records with a mark that someone else had to surround with his name to make it official. The only thing that truly distinguished him from most of the countrymen who surrounded him was his occupation – he was a hatter.

It singled him out and, if his trade card reveals anything about the illiterate, diminutive hatter with a pasty complexion, it was that he wanted to make a strong impression – a commercial conquest.

 

Trade Card for J(ohn) Conquest & Co., ca.1825. Rapoza collection. Card dimensions: 3 5/8" x 3" (92.075 mm x 76.2 mm). The card is made from thick, quality paper stock but is flexible and neither as thick or rigid as trade cards from the second half of the century. The reverse side and sometimes the margins on the front side were sometimes used by the proprietor to create a receipt for the customer by writing down the transaction date, purchase price, and payment date; however, the reverse side of this card is blank; J. Conquest & Co. had very little time to record such sales before the partnership was dissolved.

It is a superb, dynamic example of the neoclassical artistic style in an elegant presentation of copperplate engraving and printing. Instead of the previously popular rococo style, which featured flamboyantly curving flourishes profusely garnished with floral and marine decorations, neoclassicism simplified design, using the classic architecture stylings of Rome and Greece, with symmetry and harmony in its presentation. John Conquest’s trade card was all that, arranged with a block paved floor and two classically fluted columns symmetrically flanking each side of the floor and firmly set on solid pedestals, all of which was then secured to a large foundation. Sound, solid, and safe – that was the underlying message about John Conquest’s business, but there was clearly more to catch the eye. The large eagle festooned with ribbon and banner, and boldly surmounted by the name, “J. CONQUEST & Co.”, was likely a duplication of the sign in front of his building that identified his shop; the great bird was literally spread-eagle, dominant in the scene and poised to soar above the hat making industry. There was nothing pale and diminutive in the entire design of the card.

Two of Conquest’s Regency hat styles were posted on the card’s two columns: the gentlemen’s popular bell-shaped Wellington and chimney-styled hat designs, well-formed from fur soaked and steamed in mercury nitrate. Gentlemen’s hats were more status symbol than functional protective headgear. In US dollar equivalents, a beaver hat could cost $10-$25 in a time when the common laborer, like John Conquest’s own father, was making only 10 to 25 cents a day. Although illiterate and of common stock, John Conquest understood the importance of catering to an upscale clientele and his card showed it.

Mr. Conquest also assured his card recipients that he could also resurrect old worn-out hats, relining them with silk. In the 1820s world of men’s hat fashions, silk was the new beaver; for over two centuries, the North American beaver population had been decimated, almost to the point of extinction, and the cost of beaver hats consequently inflated. Silk became an acceptable substitute, looking every bit as shiny and swell as the beaver hats. John Conquest was on the cutting edge of hat fashion, adding the newer and more cost-effective silk alternative next to the beaver hats in his hat showcase. New or refurbished, Conquest’s shop was the place to go.

CHEAPSIDE TO PICCADILLY

John started his shop in big, busy Manchester, England, in 1825. It was much smaller than London (not even a twelfth of its size), but still the second-largest city in the country – ripe with potential for a new hatter whose powerful eagle signage looked ready to make the business take off. He would need all that enthusiasm and confidence because there were already 75 hat makers in Manchester in 1825 (not including the additional 14 shops that were making women's straw hats). With so many hatters in the city, the naming the naming of one of its many pubs the Jolly Hatters Tavern seemed quite logical. The address of John Conquest's new shop, 38 Piccadilly, put his business in the center of the city and just a half-mile away from the Jolly Hatters. His path to Piccadilly had been a long and challenging route strewn with life's obstacles and potholes to overcome.

Business opportunities were not dazzling in Clophill, so in his early twenties John made his way to London, already with a population well over a million people. In 1813 when he was 23, he lived deep in the city and married a country girl named  Ann Fearn who had grown up in another village about 20 miles west of his hometown; John signed the marriage record with an X for his mark, since he was unable to read and write. The young couple set up house on Little Somerset Street in downtown London where eleven months later, Ann gave birth to their first child, a daughter they named Mary Ann; her birth record listed her father as a hatter.

Their wedded bliss was interrupted in January 1815 when John was arrested for perpetrating some unspecified misdemeanor against his employer. He was convicted and sentenced to one month of hard labor, serving his sentence when his little daughter was six months old. Reunited with his little family, they increased in 1816 with the birth of their first son, George.

In the span of the next few years multiple tragedies struck the young Conquest family: wife Ann and daughter Mary Ann both passed away. Now 33 years old, widower John remarried to Ann Chipping in 1823; the marriage record shows he was still illiterate and he likely was for the rest of his life.

For ten years, at least since his first marriage in 1813, John had been working as a hatter in London’s Cheapside Street. The name is a modern corruption of “marketplace” and it was true to the original description; by 1825 it was possibly the busiest shopping district in the city, if not the world. Each day and well into the night, Cheapside was a hive of activity, with shops and sidewalk vendors; horses, wagons, carriages, and coaches; professional offices, residences, apartments, boarding houses; and people – lots of people. Hat makers, haberdashers, and shoe shops offered the newest fashions, ready to be accessorized by watch makers, jewelers, goldsmiths, and silver smiths. China and glass dealers, chair and cabinet makers, wallpaper stainers, and upholsters stood ready to furnish homes, and physicians and apothecaries were poised to help those among the Cheapside shoppers who didn’t feel so well. John Conquest name-dropped his former business location on his Manchester business card precisely because Cheapside was nationally known as the country’s most vibrant business district and he was one its alumni. His Manchester customers didn’t have to make the day-long trip to travel the 200 miles to London to shop in style – he was bringing London to them.

CONQUEST GOES DARK

John Conquest’s trade card, almost certainly created in 1825, presented a business and businessman that was ready to accomplish great things in Manchester.

The firm of John Conquest & Co. was established in Manchester late in 1825. His partners were the Robinson brothers, Isaac and William. Isaac was about the same age as John and William was a dozen years younger. The Robinson brothers were educated Quakers from Leeds, the sons of a shopkeeper and already working as silk hatters in Manchester at least through September 1825 before they agreed to the new partnership with John Conquest. On 29 September, Isaac and his wife also welcomed the birth of their first child, a son, and John’s wife arrived at Manchester very pregnant, shortly before delivering the first child of their marriage.

John had an older brother named William who was also a hatter. He had been with John through the Cheapside years and came with him to Manchester; however, he wasn’t included in the new partnership but chose instead to start his own business, “Wm. Conquest & Co. Hat Manufacturers,” just a half-mile from John’s new shop in Piccadilly. All four men hoped for success in their new ventures but all their dreams were doomed.

The new partnership fell apart almost before the ink was dry on the new trade card. Founded after September 1825, the partnership was formally dissolved on 11 March 1826:

Notice of Dissolution. The Manchester Guardian and British Volunteer, 25 March 1826, p.1.

Seven weeks later, Ann Conquest gave birth to their first child.

It’s easy to guess but hard to know just why the Conquest-Robinson partnership failed so quickly. On paper, John Conquest and the Robinson brothers had nothing in common. He was from a country village and they were from a big city; John’s father was a manual laborer but their father was a middle-class merchant. John was an Anglican and they were Quakers; they were educated and John was illiterate. Their differences could have been molded into shared strengths to help their partnership and business succeed, but all or some of it may have driven a wedge between them; however, the suddenness of their dissolution suggests that something else was quickly pulling them apart. It may have been mad hatter disease.

John Conquest and Isaac Robinson had both been making hats for years; William Conquest had probably been working alongside his brother in Cheapside, and William Robinson may have been helping his brother Isaac for a few years prior to the new partnership. Mercury poisoning can work fast, but in the case of these four men, it had plenty of time to change their minds and alter their personalities.

William Conquest had set out in his own hat making business in Manchester in 1825 but was declared bankrupt by December 1826. In 1828 he tried starting up again, this time with a partner and, perhaps significantly, focused on making only silk hats, probably due to the increasing demand for them, along with concern about the health effects of making beaver felt hats with mercury. Nonetheless, their partnership was dissolved in 1831. In 1834 he shows up one more time, having reopened his old shop briefly by himself. The last we see of him was ten years later, when a newspaper reporter called him “the old curiosity man,” being arrested and brought before the magistrate for stealing a bag of silver from the bar of the Commercial Inn, just a few blocks from his old hat shop.

William Robinson had a sadder fate, dying in August 1827; the youngest of the four hatters was only 24 at death. True, many illnesses and innumerable injuries could kill a hale and hearty young man, but mercury poisoning can damage the brain, lungs, and kidneys, so it could easily have been the cause or a significant contributor to the young hatter’s death.

Less than two months after the partnership had fallen apart, Isaac lost his first-born son at just 10 months old. Again we don’t know why the infant died, but mercury present on Isaac’s clothing and body could easily have transferred as Father Isaac held his baby boy after each long day’s work. The small lung capacity of babies also increased their risk of inhaling any vapors emanating from such exposure. Isaac himself lived a long life, dying at 84, but after 1828 we no longer see him mentioned as a hatter, but rather as a tea dealer, a grocer, and a “retired hatter”.

Even if mercury poisoning didn’t kill any of the Conquests or Robinsons, it often played havoc on a hatter’s mental, emotional, and physical health. All three hatters in the ill-fated partnership were constantly exposed to mercury poisoning and perhaps one, two, or all three exhibited various symptoms that could easily have ruined their interrelationships or the business itself. Physical trembling could have frustrated their ability to make a fine quality hat; speech problems could have been frustrating in trying to deal with customers and suppliers and might have made them resistant to doing future commerce with that hat shop.

The dissolution notice specified that it was John Conquest who was leaving the partnership. The man with all the aspirations for success in Manchester, as displayed on his trade card, was breaking up the team and he was never again listed doing hat making as did his brother and his former partner, Isaac. It seems like John Conquest was the weakest link, even though his younger partner died just 15 months after the dissolution. You can almost hear the sighs of relief from the Robinson brothers when the phrase, “dissolved by mutual consent, so far as concerns John Conquest” was added.

John appears to have been the problem. Perhaps he was exhibiting some of the neurological dysfunctions brought on by mercury exposure. “Excessive timidity, shyness, and anxiety” are significant challenges for many in the workplace, but a complete “loss of self-confidence and a desire to remain unobserved” are more serious and troubling. John Conquest was suddenly, willfully leaving John Conquest & Co. – he was making himself invisible. Had he come to that decision because he had developed “a pathological fear of ridicule” and therefore couldn’t deal with complaints and accusations from his partners about mistakes they perceived he was making? Perhaps he even exhibited “the explosive loss of temper when criticized,” which could destroy any workplace or partnership. 

Worn Out. Both the unidentified gentleman and his hat appear to have had hard lives. Ambrotype, ca.1860s. (Courtesy of FamilyHistoryDaily.com .

What makes me feel that John Conquest may have suffered from some or all of these symptoms of mad hatter disease is how abruptly his partnership ended and how he completely disappeared from the public record for the last nine years of his life – he just vanished from public view. From the 1826 dissolution to his death in 1835, he had gone dark, appearing in surviving records only for the births of his two children in 1833 and 1834 and the death of the latter in 1835 (the first had died in infancy and the latter died at one year old). No records have been found showing that he continued to be employed. Perhaps he had stopped working altogether from the terrible effects of mercury poisoning. Had he become a mad hatter? Was that what brought the end of his career and eventually his life at age 45? We'll never know, but there is a high likelihood that he and his one-time partners, as well as family members were affected to some degree by the mercury solution that marinated their bodies and vapors that filled their lungs during and after hat making. 

John loved and lost – wives, children, his business, partners, and perhaps his own life. Some of the losses may have been due to the mercury he used to make beaver felt for the older style top hats. But his glorious trade card helps us feel his joy for life – the only remaining proof of his hopes, dreams, and ambitions. Whether or not his life was ruined by mercury, we should remember him for the positive messages his trade card tells us about him.

If I could travel back in time to meet John, I would want to compliment him about how wonderfully impressive his trade card was. Maybe, amid all the loss and dashed hopes, he would realize that he had triumphed with that card which has preserved his memory for 200 years – as it turned out, it was his ultimate conquest.

 

AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT: On 1 May 1826, just weeks after John Conquest’s business partnership had been dissolved, Ann Conquest gave birth to a daughter, their first child. They named her Mary Ann. It is possible for mercury poisoning to be transferred to a fetus during pregnancy and through breast milk, affecting the developing brain and nervous system, which could then potentially lead to neurological problems later in life, appearing even in adulthood; perhaps it impacted the mental health of Mary Ann Conquest.

In 1865, at 39 years old, she committed suicide by swallowing rat poison and possibly even infanticide. Before her suicide, she was asked if she had given anything to her month-old baby who had suddenly died, but she denied doing so. A newspaper reported that “the loss of her child, and the fact of her having told an untruth, weighed upon her mind and she appeared very much distressed.” She eventually confessed to her husband that their baby had died because of what she had done: the infant “was rather troublesome [so] she gave it a few drops of some mixture ...”  She then told a neighbor she had taken a dose of “vermin poison,” and died shortly thereafter. The coroner’s verdict was that she poisoned herself “during a fit of temporary insanity.”

Was her temporary insanity seeded by mercury poisoning during her fetal and infantile development? The answer to that will forever be buried deep in the depths of history’s mysteries.

ONE LAST NOTE:  And for those readers preparing to jump to Google Maps to see exactly where 38 Piccadilly and China Lane meet, there is now a Kentucky Fried Chicken on the corner; the location has come a long way from a magnificent spread eagle to a box of fried chicken.

The Happy Couple. Dressed in their finest to have one of those newfangled pictures taken. Ambrotype, ca.1860s. (Courtesy of FamilyHistoryDaily.com .

Lynn Massachusetts History - History of Medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century Medicine

High Noon in Old Texas: Ambushed by the Quarter-Inch Killer

Not everything is bigger in Texas.

AUTHOR’S PROLOGUE: A single letter came to my attention a year ago while I was engaged in a project of digitizing the Gandy Collection of family and business records and correspondence for Montgomery County, Texas, from the mid- and late-19th century. It was a personal letter, written in October 1859 by Sarah Elizabeth Davis to her sister, Amelia Jane Davis. What struck me as so especially poignant was Betty’s discussion of the season’s dangerous yellow fever epidemic, followed a paragraph later by her personal experience of being repeatedly bitten by mosquitoes and seeing it only as a miserable inconvenience. There was no way for her to know that some of those mosquitoes could be the vectors of yellow fever. I have researched the impact of the 1859 yellow fever epidemic on Betty, Montgomery, Texas, and the region, and would like to share it now with you.

High Noon

A month of drought across Texas in August 1859 had baked the crops, greatly reducing their yields. People were anxious for better times. Houses, barns, and stores were little better than ovens on the landscape, made barely habitable by wide-open windows, handheld fans, and likely various forms of liquid refreshment.

Little changed as summer melted into fall. On September 15th, the hot, humid, sun-burned air continued to blanket the little town of Montgomery, 50 miles northwest of Houston; in other words, it was another typical Texas day. But it was also a day for celebration as the town welcomed it’s guest of honor, “the lion of the day, the hero of his country,” governor-elect Sam Houston.

Loud Cheering

A huge crowd, estimated at as many as 3,000 – more than the entire population of the town – thronged to the all-day festivities. It was the rare day like this that made all the heat, all the manual labor, and the many do-withouts of rural life bearable. It was likely a welcome diversion even for a woman like the pregnant Sarah Elizabeth Davis, who went by “Betty”; she busied herself daily with household chores in addition to her pregnancy and mothering her toddler. The celebration was a refreshing break indeed.

The air was full of sounds, sights, and smells to savor: cannons thundered tributes; the minister’s invocation lifted heavenward; the inevitably long-winded VIP speeches did their part to further warm the atmosphere; patriotic music of the brass band marched through the breeze; beckoning smells of the Texas-sized barbecue on a very long table set for 700 to be seated, and even a manned hot air balloon drifted up into the sky. Later, bright lamps were suspended over “the fair women and brave men” who danced into the night. In newspaper accounts of the celebration, no mention was made of a single mosquito; even an occasional minuscule blood-sucking puncture was a tolerable inconvenience in the mist of so much fun – it was just another fact of life in Texas and the least of their worries.

Low Moaning

Like many of the towns and villages in eastern and inland Texas, Montgomery was established close by water – several creeks along the west fork of the San Jacinto River. They were sources of water for drinking, cooking, farming, laundry, and sometimes waste disposal. Hot and humid Texas summers sometimes turned creeks into boggy swamps and the gasses emanating from them drifted under noses and into homes.

On October 10th, less than a month after the Sam Houston celebration, Betty wrote to her sister Jane in Mississippi, that with her husband away on business and her toddler sleeping, she was finally able to write the letter; she also gossiped about neighbors who were “splitting the blanket” (divorcing) and of another yellow fever epidemic breaking out nearby. In the hot season, outbreaks of yellow fever, nicknamed “Yellow Jack,” were always alarming news.

In that long season of hot, humid weather that dominates the Texas calendar, the bad-smelling air was the harbinger of sickness, the omen that people would soon die. The stink of rotting vegetation and other foulness often seemed to result in young and old getting suddenly, terribly sick. A healthy young man in one moment could become suddenly ill in the next with muscle aches, nausea, chills and a fever that could quickly push the mercury up the thermometer to dangerously high temperatures. The skin and eyes turned yellow, signifying liver failure which earned the disease its name, the yellow fever.  The body became death’s barometer: the deeper and more wide-spread the yellow, the sicker the person was becoming. Within as few as three days, they often began puking what was called “the black vomit” – dark blood hemorrhaging from the nose and stomach – a sure sign that the end was near. Before Sunday dinner, the person who had sat next to you at the dinner table during last week’s sabbath was suddenly gone and often – too often – someone else at this week’s dinner table was starting to turn yellow.

Texans got sick from other lethal epidemics throughout the 19th century, like cholera, measles, smallpox, and dengue fever, but for frequency, yellow fever outpaced them all. Epidemics broke out in almost every hot season between 1839 to 1867. Doctors and patent medicine makers promised cures for the disease, but they were just guessing. The doctor’s mercury injections and mustard baths did no more good than St. Nicholas Stomach Bitters. It was advertised heavily throughout Texas during the hot weather epidemic of 1859 by incongruously using the symbol of winter, Santa Claus, sitting next to a chimney, holding a bottle of the bitters in his hands, promising that “As a Tonic in Cases of Yellow and other Fevers, incidental to Tropical Climates, it is unsurpassed.” Some may have taken false comfort in the graphic suggestion of a cold weather cure. A heavy frost (also called a “white frost”) stopped further cases and spread of the disease. Mother Nature could end an epidemic, but Saint Nicholas was a fraud.

Quiet Buzzing

In her October letter to her sister, Betty wrote that two local friends were away when yellow fever cases began showing up on the river (she didn’t specify which one), and they would therefore probably stay away until about Christmas. It was a common response to the earliest reports of confirmed cases of yellow fever – many would travel far away to protect themselves from the disease; residents of Galveston and Houston often ran away from the city to the interior when new cases were emerging in the coastal cities; Betty’s friends were doing the same thing, waiting until a heavy frost ensured the end of the epidemic.

The only effective defense to prevent the fever’s spread was quarantine, isolating the infected from the healthy. She explained further,

There is some excitement in town about yellow fever. Two persons have died with it[;] one a white man the other a negro belonging to Dr. Price[;] both had been exposed to it at Cypress City where it is now raging – The Town Authorities have been yesterday and today passing some [quarantine] regulations to keep any more cases from coming here -

Betty and her husband, Nathaniel Hart Davis, a lawyer and Montgomery’s first mayor (in 1848) would have been well aware of the yellow fever epidemic that had devastated the town of Cincinnati, Texas, in 1853. That small country town was only 44 miles to the northeast of Montgomery and it lost a quarter of its population, about 150 people, to the disease. Betty wrote to her sister that the 1859 epidemic was “now raging” in Cypress City, 33 miles to the south of her Montgomery home, and two men exposed to the yellow fever in Cypress City had come to Montgomery and died there. One report stated that 33 of the 54 residents of Cypress City were sick with Yellow Jack and there were three deaths within the last few days of the report: “The conditions of the place [are] truly deplorable.” Betty bravely told her sister that she didn’t “apprehend any danger unless some of the citizens here were to [catch] it that had not been exposed to it [elsewhere].” She was hoping that the new town quarantine regulations would prevent it from coming any closer to her house and family.

Then Betty’s letter shifted to more pleasant topics, like the new spotted flannel material she bought to make her toddler some winter clothes and the calico and gingham dress she had bought for herself. She tried to keep her focus, but she had become so tired, she couldn’t even finish her sentence: “You must tell me if you get any nice dresses – I am getting sleepy.” Then she told her sister that what was really messing up her focus as she wrote was not sleepiness but mosquitoes:

The musketoes are worse than I ever saw them. I can hardly stay in the house for they bite me so. I don’t know what I am writing scarcely. I wish we could have a white frost to kill them for we will be annoyed with them until we do have frost.

This woman, wife, and mother lived during an epidemic outbreak in a town with terminal cases, nearby another town where it was “raging” and strangers were stopping at and passing through her town that may themselves have the disease. The chances that an infected aedes aegypti mosquito would land on Betty or her babies were, in deed, elevated – she and her family were certainly at risk. Two weeks after Betty finished the letter to her sister, three more deaths occurred in Montgomery and two more men were expected to die. By November 30th yellow fever deaths had totaled 15 in the town, including one of its doctors; he was a 36-year-old husband and father of four small children, which included a newborn. The future of the Davis family of Montgomery, Texas, could have been far different if just one of those mosquitoes that were driving Betty to distraction as she tried to write her letter had been the lethal kind.

But don’t worry, happy ending lovers. Betty had not inadvertently written her own eulogy. She and Nat and their toddler all survived the yellow fever epidemic of 1859 and she successfully delivered a healthy baby girl on December 30th, whom they named after her sister Jane. A thick frost had settled in on November 12th, the temperature having dropped from 80° to 25° Fahrenheit in less than 24 hours and a newspaper reported.

The wind continued all Saturday night, and Sunday morning found ice everywhere, ice in the prairie, and ice in the town, ice in the gutters and ice in the houses, ice in the kitchens and ice in the bedrooms, And cold? – guess it was cold! Cold enough to keep lazy people and invalids in bed half the morning; … cold enough to freeze the horns off from a Billy goat! And of course, cold enough to freeze Yellow Jack’s ears off. Runaways can come back now. The frost we have had has killed the fever if frost will do it. Last night we had another heavy frost. And to-day is bright and beautiful, but not brighter or more cheerful than the faces of our citizens, who are all rejoicing that the dark days are over.

In the decades to come, Texas outlaws would become infamous for being the bad boys of the Wild West – mean, unpredictable, and dangerous. All combined, Texas-based outlaws like James “Killer Miller,” Sam Bass, Doc Holliday, John Wesley Hardin, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid were said to have killed about 63 people. Amateurs. There was another killer in Texas – Yellow Jack – a deadly terror that killed an estimated 4,000 in Texas alone during the 19th century, without a single bullet being fired from a six-shooter. It was the meanest, most unpredictable, and most dangerous killer of them all – and it was just a quarter-inch long.

Definitely NOT the official flag of Texas; just the author goofing around.

AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT : By the way, if you’re enjoying my blog, the kindest favor you could do for me is to tell a friend about it. The blog has about 50 consistent readers at this point, which is wonderful, but now my goal is 100! Thanks very much for your continued support.

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The Last Gasp Miracle

Starkey & Palen sold air to the terminally ill – it was Alsina Richards’ last hope.

She was desperate and scared.

Each breath she took felt like it was stolen, scraping up nothing but bloody phlegm from an empty chest with nothing left to give. Cough pains sizzled across her lungs that long ago had filled softly and emptied effortlessly.

With every passing day, she became weaker. The once vibrant woman who did housework, helped her husband, visited friends, and went shopping had dissolved into a fragile, feeble weakling for whom each movement took far more out of her than any benefit she got back.

As the disease set in more aggressively, it seemed to be consuming her from the inside – she was becoming emaciated and skeleton-like, the type that people across the street pointed at, whispered about, and walked away from, quickly.

Her skin became paler, as if the very lifeblood was being drained from her body. In a way, it really was: when she coughed, there was blood spatter in her handkerchief. There was nothing left about her that suggested life, certainly not a future.

Weaker, paler, thinner, sicker. She knew she was dying.

Mrs. Alsina Richards was 33 years old and terminally sick with tuberculosis.

In her day, 1880, the disease was most often called “consumption” because of the hallmark symptom of emaciation. It was, far and away, the leading killer in the 19th century and unlike most diseases that attacked children and old people, it most often struck young adults, like Alsina.

  

Infection

Alsina Richards was just about as unassuming as any other young Victorian woman in rural America. Her most distinctive feature may have been her name – no one seemed to know how to spell it – she appears in records as Elzina, Alcina, Alsina, and Alsona. She lived with her parents at their small farm until she was married. In 1877, at 30 years old, she married Alphronso Richards, three years her junior. Like her parents, he was of modest means, pouring concrete for a living. A scant four months after their wedding, Alsina gave birth to a stillborn daughter; it was the only pregnancy she would ever have.

On 16 June 1880, Alphronso and Alsina were enumerated together for the first time in their own home in East Pepperell, northern Massachusetts; Nashua, New Hampshire was just over the border. Although some neighbors were found to be afflicted with such troubles as rheumatism, measles, and dyspepsia, Alsina was not among those listed as “sick or temporarily disabled” – but she knew there was something very, very wrong with her. About six months before the census she was trying to find a cure for sickness that had come over her so quickly, out of nowhere. It wasn’t a casual concern; it was a deep-seated fear of what was taking over deep in her lungs.

 

Stamped Starkey & Palen advertising envelope, cancelled PHILADELPHIA, PA, 17 DEC [1881], 2AM; addressed to Mrs. A. [Alsina] S. Richards, East Pepperell, Mass. (author's collection)

Consolation

Alsina wrote to several women whom she had read about in promotional materials for a lung remedy. She was curious and guardedly hopeful that the women really existed and whether they truly benefited from the remedy. These questions were the common concerns shared by other sick women all over America; even the manufacturer acknowledged that many cautiously wondered about the testimonials, just like Alsina: 

… they write to know if there really is any such person ... or is it only an advertising dodge? … the simple truth about [the remedy] would be the best credentials it could have; hence we were not tempted to invent testimonials, nor to steal genuine ones, nor to romance on any.

Alsina didn’t have money or time to waste on a bogus medicine, so she was determined to find out if she could really believe the testimonials that appeared for Starkey & Palen’s Compound Oxygen, an unusual product that was grabbing a lot of attention and gaining popularity. To protect the writers’ privacy, the manufacturer rarely included their names, but told readers that “Any one, upon application, will be furnished with the exact address of any … of these cases.” So Alsina had to write to the manufacturer to get the testimonial writers’ addresses, wait for the reply, then write and send letters to the testimonial writers and wait again, hoping they would reply … all while she got sicker and weaker.

The women’s responses to Alsina, dated from 15 February 1880 to 20 November 1881, assured her that they had, indeed, written them and were not distorted or rewritten by the medicine maker. Mrs. A. G. Fourquereau of San Marcos, Texas, began her postcard response to Alsina, “I take pleasure in stating that the testimonial … with my name attached, is genuine, and was sent to [the manufacturer] without solicitation from them.” In her postcard response, Julia Barnes of Carmel, New York, wrote, “Yes, my letters … are just as I write them” and Mrs. E. L. Miller of Beecher City, Illinois, also told Alsina that her statements in the publication were true.

The correspondence of five postcards and two letters saved by Mrs. Alsina S. Richards; their dates range from 15 FEB 1880 - 20 NOV 1881. Their retention as a group implies that Alsina Richards valued them, used them as reference for her reply correspondence, and retained them for the last several years of her life due to the relationships built, even though the remedy was unsuccessful in bringing about her recovery, or perhaps she stuffed them away and forgot about them in the face of the increasingly difficult symptoms of consumption that were overwhelming her. (author's collection)

Each response Alsina received was handwritten, further making them seem very much like personal notes from good friends and all of them asked their new friend Alsina to write back. Sallie R. Fisher of Irvington, Illinois, wrote to Alsina like a dear friend and fellow sufferer, full of empathy:

Your card was received last night. I hasten to reply, I know just how you feel in regard to hearing of others being cured. I thought if I could know of one [who] had benefited as low as I was … it would revive my spirits, [emphasis added]

Sallie had written to another testimonial giver, just like Alsina had done with her; and so the correspondence read like chain mail, the women who were writing to reassure Alsina had once upon a time been in Alsina’s situation, writing to someone else who suffered from a lung disease. Alsina valued the correspondence, keeping five postcards and two letters from the women who responded to her pleas for help. The personal notes validated the printed testimonials, allowing Alsina to trust the promotional stories of the ladies’ harrowing ordeals, use of the remedy, and consequent restoration of health. Several personal descriptions of women who were suffering from consumption must have resonated with Alsina – they really did know just how she felt:

Julia Barnes told her, “I used to think last Winter, oh, if I could only stop coughing one day.” Vienna Douglas of Huntsville, Alabama, knew she had consumption; her testimonial in one of the promotional booklets must have been what triggered Alsina to write to her to verify her existence and her story:

I … was hollow-chested, with deep-seated pain in my lungs and great difficulty breathing. That dread disease, consumption, had been coming on me for more than fifteen years. [I] was so reduced [in strength] that I was unable to attend to my household duties – hardly able to go from room to room – with the expectation of myself and family and friends that I would not live many months. [emphasis in original]

Similarly, another consumption testimonial by the apparently wealthy Texan, Mrs. Anna Givhan Fourquereau, (described as the wife of a “gentleman of elegant nature” in the 1880 census), was the likely reason that Alsina wrote to her,

She had been coughing for two years, with occasional hemorrhage. .. having fever all the time, expectorating profusely, so much so that she could not sleep at night, having night sweats, and reduced so in flesh and strength that she could barely leave her bed. [emphasis in original]

What Alsina did not know was that despite endorsing Starkey & Palen’s Compound Oxygen as “the most wonderful remedy in the world for sick lungs,” Mrs. Fourquereau died at 37, just a little more than a year after responding to her. Consumption was no respecter of wealth or social status. The only protection from the disease would have to be a medical miracle.

Sensation

Alsina Richards had learned about these ladies from the promotional materials of the Starkey & Palen Company of Philadelphia, the makers of Compound Oxygen, the product that all the women she heard back from were swearing performed miracles on their medical miseries. Despite the fact that naysayers from the medical fraternity called magnetized oxygen compounds “the quintessence of bosh,” the fairly new product was in high demand by the time Alsina Richardson was in desperate need of a miracle.

Emaciated by the consumption, Sallie Fisher and Julia Barnes happily regained weight after using Compound Oxygen; Sallie went up to 172 pounds and Julia to 150; plus, she noted, the pain in her lower left lung left her after just a half hour after her first treatment with the Oxygen, “and I have not felt it since.” Vienna Douglass called the stuff her “life preserver.” By using it regularly, she was once again able to walk to and from town “and is in a great many respects vastly superior to a dead woman.” [emphasis added. Although this phrase was clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek, it reads as one of the strangest endorsements in my forty-plus years of research on 19th century medicines!]

As was the case with many patent medicine success stories, Compound Oxygen was not the invention of those who made it a big seller. It was invented by a Dr. Harrison J. Hartwell of Philadelphia in 1867, but he transferred his entire interest in the business to George R. Starkey, A.M., M.D., in 1870. By that time, others in New York City, Chicago, and Omaha were advertising their own therapeutic products also named Compound Oxygen, but only the version sold by Dr. Starkey was successfully promoted and sold across the country.

Prior to building their oxygen empire, Starkey and Palen had been non-practicing physicians. George Rogers Starkey had been teaching in a homeopathic medicine school until poor health forced him to stop, and Gilbert Ezekiel Palen worked as a chemist in a tannery before the two men became partners in the Compound Oxygen venture. The principles of using air medicinally fit perfectly into Dr. Starkey’s homeopathic mindset; homeopathy favored only the smallest, most diluted doses of medicine until it seemed to many like there was nothing there – just like air.

Dr. Starkey considered it strategically critical for the public to believe his remedy was just full of air; even the trademark he registered adamantly insisted in big, bold letters: “NOT A DRUG”. It was only oxygen and nitrogen infused in water, he explained, “the two elements which make up common or atmospheric air, in such proportion as to render it much richer in the vital or life-giving element”; then he somehow magnetized the air then infused it in water and bottled it. When inhaled, the Compound Oxygen supposedly stimulated the nerves, “giving energy to the body.” This magnetized air was said to be so energizing that a certain clairvoyant was unable to slip into a clairvoyant trance because she was too stimulated. Like coffee and cocaine, Compound Oxygen kept its users invigorated and all aflutter.

Trademark for Starkey & Palen's Compound Oxygen and Inhaler, No. 10,449; registered 17 JUL 1883

“The cases of consumption – confirmed phthisis – which the Compound Oxygen has cured can be counted by scores,“ Starkey & Palen’s literature promised, and Alsina’s postcard friends urged her to join their pilgrimage of converts to the miraculous compound:

“I hope you will not delay …” – Sallie R. Fisher

“Hoping you will give it a fair trial” – Grace Davis

“I hope you will get it and take it.” – Julia Barnes

“I do hope you will feel safe in using it as it is the onley [sic] thing that will restore the Lungs.” – Vienna T. Douglass

Every day was getting incrementally worse than the previous day for Alsina. As she exchanged letters and postcards about Starkey & Palen’s Compound Oxygen  and studied its literature, she was trying to make the wisest, most conscientious decision possible, but like so many others in her situation, she really just hoped for a miracle.

Decision

Dr. Starkey knew there were many, like Alsina, in poor health, desperate for a miracle in his bottles, so he tried to temper their wild-eyed expectations and even admitted that sometimes his product would not work:

Do not expect a miracle to be wrought in your case. Although some cases here reported are marvelous in the rapidity with which they have marched health-ward; still many of the most satisfactory and even brilliant cases have been slower paced.

… more than eighty percent of these victims could have been well people to-day had they made TIMELY USE of the Compound Oxygen. Note the emphasis laid upon the phrase, timely use. … Not in all cases would we recommend it, with the idea of holding out a promise of cure. [emphases added]

Dr. Starkey’s pragmatism and cautious confession about his remedy’s limitations might have been the sign of an honest medicine maker, but it also gave him plausible deniability if things didn’t work for a customer, even to the point of death.

Alsina was very sick but her postcard friends urged her to try the Compound Oxygen. It’s also possible that her own doctors had told her she had a chance if she took their own prescriptions to cure consumption, but she took the leap of faith and chose Starkey & Palen’s Oxygen Compound. It was her last gasp of hope.

Sick of sickness and scared of dying, Alsina Richards made the hefty $15 investment in a two-month supply of Compound Oxygen home treatment and hoped for her own miracle, despite Dr. Starkey’s public disclaimer.

Invention

At first Dr. Starkey made the oxygen treatment available for those visiting his Philadelphia office, but soon after buying out Dr. Hartwell's business, he realized the Compound Oxygen could go national if he also sold it as a kit for home treatment.

Compound Oxygen bottle (label missing). Embossed: STARKEY & PALEN / PHILADELPHIA, PA. (courtesy of b-toast online auction; see link)

Unlike most other medicine makers, his whole business focused on lung disease and his medicinal repertoire consisted only of his two lung remedies, Compound Oxygen and Oxygenaqua (a liquid form of the magnetized oxygen compound that could be swallowed rather than inhaled). Sure, he threw in claims that the magnetized oxygen products cured other parts of the body of other things – dyspepsia (indigestion), diabetes, headaches, sometimes paralysis, rheumatism, and kidney disease, and perhaps most obscurely, spermatorrhea (involuntarily ejaculation). “We have proved that a number of diseases which … have been assigned to the category of ‘incurables’ no longer belong there,” the Starkey & Palen literature crowed, but virtually all of their advertising focused on the benefits of the magnetized oxygen for diseased lungs.

Paper-covered wooden box that held one Oxygen Compound (cobalt blue glass) and one Oxygenaqua bottle (clear glass). About 1890. (Photo courtesy of Morphy Auctions, morphyauctions.com)

Dr. Starkey saw a nation full of potential customers with corset-constricted lungs and inescapable sickness forming in the stagnant, smoky air of factories and homes. He told the consumptives, asthmatics, and victims of pneumonia, bronchitis, or other lung diseases his Compound Oxygen was a three-pronged remedy that: (1) increased oxygen in the lungs; (2) purified the blood of poisons that collected there from disease and pollution; and (3) energized the nerves and nerve centers (he liked to compare the nervous system to a galvanic battery with electricity sparking through it), bringing vitality to the person.

When someone at home received their two-month supply, they received two boxes: a larger one containing a cobalt blue bottle of Compound Oxygen and a clear glass bottle (Dr. Starkey referred to it as “the white bottle”) with Oxygenaqua. A paper cover, illustrated with the two medicine bottles and either images of Drs. Starkey and Palen or a woman using the inhaler, was glued to the wooden box. The box was hinged for the bottles’ storage and reuse.

The smaller box was constructed in the same way and contained what looked like a little laboratory. There was a clear glass inhaler bottle with a rubber stopper and two rubber corks in the top, and a set of attachments: two glass elbow straws, two nasal tubes, a tiny bottle, a vial, and a few other glass fittings. The whole lot must have made the user feel something like a pharmacist, preparing the medicine for their own cure. The label covering the box showed the inhaler bottle sitting in a tin cup filled with hot water, per the directions – tin cup not included – the customer had to get their own. This inhaler kit only needed to be purchased once since it could be used over and over, so the Compound Oxygen was sold separately.

Starkey & Palen Inhaler kit; paper label over wood; hinged cover with locking mechanism on the front. Side panels: instructions for use of the inhaler. Back panel: nasal spray instructions; top panel: nasal tube instructions. (about 1880; author's collection)

The instructions for use were pretty basic but important to be followed exactly since any misstep by the junior pharmacist could mean their own demise. Water was to be poured into the inhaler bottle up to the line embossed on the glass, then the measured dose of Compound Oxygen was added, the chosen breathing attachments inserted into the rubber stopper, and the whole unit immersed in the tin cup full of hot water “as hot as a cook can bear her finger in it”. Then the pharmacist became the patient and inhaled the vapors created by the heated mixture of water, magnetized oxygen, and nitrogen - it operated on the same principle as a hookah pipe. Inhalation treatments were done twice a day and increased in one-minute increments every other day from a starting treatment of two minutes to a maximum of six minutes after several days. Each subsequent dose would be stronger because more Compound Oxygen would be poured in to replace the liquid that had been inhaled and otherwise evaporated.

Alsina followed every step precisely and she inhaled.

Over and over.

 

Starkey & Palen Inhaler kit. The clear glass bottle sits in a tin cup (not included with the kit) per the instructions and the box illustration. During actual use, the tin cup would contain very hot water into which the bottle (partially filled with the Compound Oxygen) would be immersed. The glass of the bottle is spattered with chemical residue, indicating extensive use of the inhaler at some point in time. Embossed around the bottle's shoulder: STARKEY & PALEN / PHILADELPHIA PA. The bottle also has an embossed line around the circumference, about half way down the bottle, above which reads: WATER LINE. The kit also contains 7 attachments: 2 glass nasal tubes (in box and on table foreground with white rubber tube attached); 2 glass elbow straws (in box and in bottle); 1 straight tube, corked (in box); 1 measuring tube (in foreground); 1 small vial (in foreground); about 1880. (author's collection)

Devastation

It wasn’t working – she continued to spiral towards her death and she knew it. Panicked, she wrote to Starkey and Palen. She told them how sick she was with consumption and apparently pleaded for

Letter Starkey & Palen to Mrs. A. S. Richards, East Pepperell, Mass., 13 DEC 1881. (author's collection.)

hope – perhaps there was something she was doing wrong or something else she could do. What she received in return, twelve days before Christmas, was the hardest letter she had ever had to read:

 

Philadelphia, Pa. 12 Mo 13 1881

Mrs A. S. Richards

Dear Madam,

Yours of 12-9 is received and its contents are carefully noted. We are sorry to be obliged to say that we cannot recommend the Compound Oxygen as being able to do anything more than to make you comfortable. You have indeed been a victim to wicked charlatanry. The disease has made too great progress to be checked.

We remain

Very Respectfully,

     Starkey & Palen

 

Starkey & Palen confirmed her worst fear – she was doomed – their medicine would not cure her. What “wicked charlatanry” she had been subjected to is not clear without seeing what Alsina had written to them. Perhaps she had explained that local doctors had wasted valuable time earlier in her illness, prescribing other medicines or instructions of no remedial value. Possibly, but unlikely, the phrase might have been referring to the zealous testimonial writers she corresponded with who overpromised a cure from the Compound Oxygen that never came. The somber letter was accompanied by two gratuitous pamphlets containing more information and advice that would never help her.

There is one more piece of correspondence in the Alsina Richards collection. One year after the heartbreaking response from Starkey & Palen, she received another letter  from them in response to her request for their charity. She apparently told them that she and her husband were financially on hard times and could not afford their medicine, which she had apparently continued to take because it provided some measure of relief even as the disease continued its destruction. Starkey & Palen responded, “From your representations of pecuniary disability we will send you a 2 [month] Home Treatment for the Ten Dollars.” [emphasis added; it implies that she requested they discount the cost to ten dollars and they were agreeing to her terms. Saving five bucks may not seem like a lot today, but $15 in 1882 would be $461 in 2024 USD and $10 back then would be $307 now; when’s the last time your pharmacist agreed to a $154 discount on your medicine?] Ironically, it came with another booklet, “Unsolicited Testimonials,” but the time for striking up a correspondence with them was past.

Small, envelope-sized pamphlets included in the Starkey & Palen correspondence to Mrs. A. S. Richards; "Unsolicited Testimonials" (left) was included with the 1881 letter; the other two (center & right) were included with the 1882 letter. (author's collection)

Alsina S. Richards died 22 January 1884 of pulmonary tuberculosis (the death certificate called it phthisis); she was buried in the Pepperell Cemetery and her husband joined her in death 22 years later – he also died of “pulmonary phthisis” after being afflicted with it for just eight months.

 

Conclusion

Alsina and other users of Starkey & Palen’s Compound Oxygen died sad, shortened lives despite their desperate hopes for recovery, but ironically, the medicine enjoyed healthy sales, growth in distribution, energetic advertising, and four more decades of life.  A few years after Alsina’s death, Starkey & Palen put out a series of four trade cards featuring four people from very different corners of life with Compound Oxygen the one ingredient that tied them together. There was one card of an accomplished businessman, apparently a railroad tycoon, who was taking a break during his busy day to take his inhalation treatment of the Compound Oxygen; a second card showed an old woman relaxing at home, happily taking her Compound Oxygen treatment as well, while her cat played with a ball of yarn on the floor; both of these older people were healthy, at ease, and capably managing their health by using the Starkey & Palen products. In contrast, the third card was a close-up of an athletic, muscular young man sailing his boat while holding up a bottle of Starkey & Palen’s Oxygenaqua, implying that just a sip of the stuff was easy treatment for a man on the ocean.

The last card would likely have been the one Alsina would have stared at the longest, comparing her own decrepit health to the subject of this fourth card: the young, wasp-waisted woman was promoting the Compound Oxygen along with the inhaler bottle on the table, ready for use. She was stunningly attractive, vivaciously healthy and self-assured, dressed in daring clothing, reclining seductively, and smiling coyly – it was the perfect “painted lady” portrait, worthy of hanging over the back bar of any saloon. The unquestionably healthy young lady seemed to be taunting consumption, tightly corseted and looking like she would be more comfortable in a dance hall than a sanatorium for consumptives. Oh, to be young, healthy, and full of life – but Alsina Richards was only able to dream of such things before she died at 37 years old, miserably sick for at least her last four years, robbed of life and joy. She never had a chance; there was no miracle for Alsina.

Adverising Trade Card for Starkey & Palen's Compound Oxygen (author's collection)

Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine