Paul Minor

Delving Into Yester~Year

Local historian and writer Paul Miner takes items from The Republican’s Yester-Year column to develop an interesting, informative and often humorous article.

To the Editor: The Republican never shied from identifying or advertising what was vital across the county, and that included miraculous cures. “Electricity and the Vital Force” most certainly caught men’s attention in October

1889. Everyone knew what that meant. Dr. Henry Du Mont had the fix for languor, weakness, nervous debility, diseases “dependent upon” excesses, folly, vice, ignorance and vital exhaustion.

For one dollar, the gilt-page, leather-bound volume entitled “The Errors of Youth and Manhood” would arrive at the Danville Post Office and no one would know what was inside a nondescript confidential paper wrapper.

County men with a vital problem surely could spare that dollar for “The Elixir of Life and the True Essence of Manhood.” It was the only “Electro-Medico Physiology ever published.” It was “absolutely correct and perfect.” Assuming a prophet’s mantle, Du Mont proclaimed, “I Heard a Voice and it said, ‘Come and See.’”

A Paris doctor supposedly discovered a year earlier that “certain vital processes of the body develop putrefying substances in the tissues.” That must have absolutely terrified every man, and woman. Ayer’s Sarsaparilla rid the body of this plague.

The Reverend Collyer (possibly Unitarian Robert Collyer), reprinted from Prairie Farmer in 1883, discoursed on “How to be Young at Eighty.” He said young men arriving in the city from the countryside had much the same hearty constitution as he claimed to possess at 60. Yet, rather than wisely use their years, they would “overdraw the account.” Some were “so ambitious to get on” that they “use two days up in one and waste their vital powers.” Were those profligates aware of Du Mont’s book of errors? Surely, the quack advertised widely.

Collyer said they rode when they should walk and swallowed “a little something” such as clove or coffeeberry to renew themselves. Eventually “nature and the grace of God will shut down on them.”

On the other hand, those who “do differently keep a good digestion, stay young and buoyant, love good, sweet company, and are not ashamed to look their mothers and sisters in the eye or to kiss them.”

Personal industry was essential to success, readers learned in 1884. The “aimless, thriftless” worker ended up remorseful with “nothing to show for a life’s labor, but errors, distress and poverty; health and manhood gone.”

The loss of manhood threat likely scared more a few. I’ve seen the tactic more than once in the old newspapers.

“A sound body is essential for a sound mind,” Central Normal teacher Kate Huron declared in December 1881.

“Mind rubbing against mind” was essential for teachers, according to Enoch George Hogate at the March 1885 Hendricks County Sunday School Union meeting in Cartersburg.

I don’t know how many doctors practiced medicine in Hendricks County in July 1865 (there were about 57 in 1886), but there were enough to warrant the Union using nearly a page publishing Dr. William F. Harvey’s loquacious inaugural address before the Hendricks County Medical Society. The society was “a deliberative assembly of men of Science.” Harvey was a founding member of that august body when it organized with 14 members in April 1854. There was “no deliberative body of men on earth on whom devolves the consideration of matters of so great importance, as a body of Physicians.” Lincoln, dead but three months, was mentioned. Harvey strode into religious territory, as was wont in those times; then science and disease. And then epidemic.

“The vital statistics of the world show us that no class of persons is exempt from epidemic influence; that the rich and the poor are all alike stricken down by the destroyer, when he comes clothed with epidemic power.”

(Incidentally, the Chinese Consul in New York claimed in April 1885 that contagious disease was “seldom found” in that country.)

Harvey cautioned against frauds. “Wide wide is the gate (Ignorance) and broad is the way (Superstition), which leads down to the abyss of Charlatanry.”

The doctor bemoaned newspapers carrying “some obscene advertisement of some quack nostrum vender. This should not be the case in this country of boasted light, knowledge, and civilization.” Alas, quackery continues to this day. I do think some could benefit from Dr. Dye’s Celebrated Electro-Voltaic Belt and Electric Appliances for restoring “manly vigor.” I see guys every day who appear afflicted by possible “nervous debility, lost vitality and kindred troubles.”

Besides, some of those fellows could use a belt to keep their pants up.

Paul Miner Lizton