Forty Years in the Wilderness of Pills and Powders / Cogitations and Confessions of an Aged Physician

by William A. Alcott

Consumptive people continue to live, whenever their lives are prolonged, as the consequence of what they do to promote their general health. One is roused to a little exercise, which somewhat improves his condition, and prolongs his days. Another is induced to pay an increased regard to temperature, and he lives on. Another abandons all medicine, and throws himself into the open arms of Nature, and thus prolongs, for a few months or a few years, his existence. If this is cure, then we may have all or nearly all of our consumptives cured, some of them a great many times over. Some few aged practitioners may be found to have cured, during the long years of their medical practice, more than five thousand persons of this description.

There is no higher or larger sense than this in which any individual has cured five thousand, or five hundred, or even fifty persons a year, of consumption. On this, a misguided, misinformed public may reply: Many, indeed, revive a little, as the lamp sometimes brightens up in its last moments; but this very revival or flickering only betokens a more speedy and certain dissolution.

On the other hand, predisposition to consumption no more renders it necessary that we should die of this disease in early life, at an average longevity of less than thirty years, than the loading and priming of a musket or piece of artillery renders it necessary that there should be an immediate or early explosion. Without an igniting spark there will be no discharge in a thousand years. In like manner, a person may be "loaded and primed" for consumption fifty years, if not even a hundred, without the least necessity of "going off," provided that the igniting spark can be kept away. Our power to protect life, both in the case of consumption and many more diseases, is in proportion to our power to withhold the igniting spark.

And herein it is that medical skill is needful in this dreadful disease, and ought to be frequently and largely invoked. If the estimate which has been made by Prof. Hooker, of Yale College, that one in five of the population of the northern United States die of consumption, is correct, then not less than two millions of the present inhabitants of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, are destined, as things now are, to die of this disease. What a thought! Can it be so?

Can it be that two millions of the ten millions now on the stage of action in the northern United States, are not only predisposed to droop and die, but are laid under a constitutional necessity of so doing? Must the igniting spark be applied? Must the disease be "touched off" with hot or impure air, by hard colds, by excitements of body and mind, and in a thousand and one other ways? People are not wholly ignorant on this great subject. Would they but do as well as they know, the fatal igniting spark would be much oftener and longer withheld; and, indeed, in many instances, would never prove the immediate cause of dissolution. The lamp of life would burn on—sometimes, it may be, rather feebly—till its oil was wholly exhausted, as it always ought. Man has no more occasion, as a matter of necessity, to die of consumption, than the lamp or the candle.

This, if true,—and is it not?—should be most welcome intelligence in a country where, at some seasons and in particular localities, one-fourth of all who die, perish of this disease. In March, 1856, twenty-one persons out of eighty who died in Boston in a single week, were reported as having died of consumption; and in June of the same year, the proportion was nearly as great. In Newton, a few miles from Boston, the proportion for the last ten years has been also about one in four.

But place the proportion for the whole northern United States, at one in five only, or even one in six. Yet even at this rate, the annual mortality for New York or New England, must be about twelve or fourteen thousand. Yet it seems to excite little if any surprise. But when or where has the cholera, the yellow fever, or the plague depopulated a country of three millions of people, for each succeeding year, at the rate of twelve thousand annually, or one hundred and twenty thousand every ten years?

One reason why the statements I have made, of the possible postponement of consumptive disease, should be most welcome intelligence, is found in the fact that they inspire with the hope of living. The ordinary expectation that those who inherit a consumptive tendency must die prematurely, has been fatal to thousands. Mankind, in more respects than one, tend to become what they are taken to be. If we take them to be early destined to the tomb, they go there almost inevitably. There is, I grant, one most fortunate drawback upon this tendency. Most people who have the truly consumptive character, are disposed to disbelieve it. They are generally "buoyant and hopeful," which, in some degree, neutralizes the effect of sombre faces, and grave and prognosticating jeremiades.

It will not be out of place to present the patient reader with an anecdote, which may or may not be true, but which I received as truth from the people of the neighborhood where the facts which it discloses are said to have occurred.

In the eastern part of Connecticut, not many years since, a young man lay on his bed, very feeble and greatly emaciated, almost gone, as everybody supposed but himself, with pulmonary consumption. And yet, up to that very hour, the thought that his disease was consumption, had never obtained a lodgment in his own mind for a moment. On the contrary, he was still fondly hoping that sooner or later he should recover.