Whiskey as Medicine in the 1860s: Real Cures and Patent Humbug

Put a blanket on your knees and a bucket by the bed, neighbors, for we are going among the physic bottles. I write from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield, Merrimack County. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, stamper of coin, and twice the guest of the Merrimack County sheriff. My subject is close to my heart, my liver, and my wallet. What did whiskey truly cure, and what did it only paint over with a smile?

Whiskey in the Druggist's Bible

This will surprise the temperance ladies of Pittsfield, who pray for my soul every Thursday and gossip about it every Friday. Whiskey is an official drug of these United States. It is printed in the United States Pharmacopoeia, the druggist's bible, under the Latin name Spiritus Frumenti, or spirit of grain. Brandy sits beside it as Spiritus Vini Gallici, spirit of French wine, so the French have got into the Latin as well. When a Concord man calls me a criminal, I tell him I am a compounding pharmacist without the diploma, and the diploma is the only part of that trade that never did anybody any good.

Every man at his own apparatus should know the honest work spirit does. First, it is a fine solvent. Put a gentian root, a strip of cherry bark or a handful of horehound in good spirit, and the alcohol draws the bitter virtue out of the plant. That is all a tincture is. Second, the spirit keeps the medicine from rotting on the shelf, which water never could. Every druggist's bottle from here to Boston is half whiskey wearing a Latin hat.

Quinine, Calomel, and the Brown Bottle

All through the late war the Union surgeons, down in the fever swamps of Virginia and the Carolina low country, poured each man a ration of whiskey with quinine stirred in, against the ague and the shaking fever. The men swore by it. But it was the quinine that did the work. It comes from the bark of the cinchona tree in the mountains of Peru, and it is bitter as a widow's opinion of her late husband. The whiskey only got the powder down a soldier's throat without his gagging it onto his boots.

Now the imaginary side of the ledger, which is a long one. Hostetter's Celebrated Stomach Bitters, out of Pittsburgh, came to the regiments by the wagonload as a tonic against camp fever, the bloody flux and homesickness. It runs forty-odd percent spirits, as strong as anything I ever let out of my worm. It is the only temperance drink in America that can knock a Union colonel off his horse. I once watched a Methodist deacon in Barnstead empty a bottle on a Sunday and then lecture me on my sins, with a hiccup between every commandment.

Every teamster on the turnpike believes a dram warms a frozen man. It does not. Whiskey opens the little blood vessels in the skin, so he feels warm as toast while his heat pours out into the January air. A dram for a frozen man is like a revenue man's promise: warm on the way in and fatal by morning. Wrap him in wool, set him by a fire, and save the jar until he can feel his own fingers.

Worse still are calomel, which is a mercury salt, and blue mass, which is mercury rolled into a pill. I have had patients in my chair who were fed calomel for a season. Their gums were black and stinking, and their teeth swayed like rotten fence posts in a spring thaw. I could have pulled those teeth with a sneeze. Surgeon General Hammond had the backbone to strike calomel off the army supply table in the spring of 'sixty-three. The old doctors howled, and between that quarrel and his other enemies in Washington, they court-martialed him out of his post. That is the reward for being right too early. They say Mr. Lincoln himself took blue mass as a younger man and quit it because it made him cross.

Laudanum, which is opium dissolved in spirits, is sold by the ounce at every general store from Epsom to Gilmanton. It does stop pain, coughs and loose bowels, but it hooks a man worse than a Suncook pickerel. Three good families on Catamount Hill lost a grandmother to that brown bottle, one sleepy spoonful at a time. As for scurvy, whiskey does nothing for it. Our colonial grandfathers brewed spruce beer from the new green tips, and the spruce has real virtue that keeps the gums from going soft. A man with scurvy and a jug of white liquor is still a man with scurvy, only louder about it.

The Professor and the Bear

Every summer the medicine wagons roll up from Concord. Two summers back a fellow calling himself Professor Thaddeus Quimby Pratt, Late of Albany and the Royal Courts of Europe, set up his show in my yard. That was three lies in one breath. He was selling Pratt's Electro-Galvanic Bear Grease Elixir, guaranteed against baldness, rheumatism, deafness and a weak constitution in the marital chamber. He did all this ten feet from the chain of an actual bear.

Barnaby knows the smell of real bear grease, and the Professor's lard, turpentine and oil of wintergreen struck him as an insult to his whole family. The Professor backed up one step too many. There was no roar, only a wet, wheezing cough, and then four hundred pounds of black fur was moving faster than a mill wheel in April. Barnaby came away with a mouthful of plaid and a fair portion of the gentleman's left hindquarter. He sat down and chewed it slowly, looking me in the eye. The Professor ran across the turnpike and dove into my horse trough as if it were the River Jordan.

I fished him out, laid him belly-down across my anvil and poured clean spirit into the wound. Then I put in eleven stitches with horsehair and a sail needle. I charged him nothing, since he had already paid Barnaby in trade. He drove south standing up in his wagon all the way to Chichester. I hear he sells in Vermont now, where the bears are smaller.

Mountain Medicine from Wilkes County

Mr. Junior Vance came up from the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, to sit on my far stool, well clear of the bear. "Doc," said he, "liquor was the doctor, the druggist, and half the preacher." His granny kept a cough syrup on the top shelf of the pie safe: rock candy, horehound picked off the fence row, and a pint of the clearest white liquor in the county. One Easter she judged the whole choir croupy and dosed them before sunrise service, and she gave the altos seconds. They sang a half-step flat and twice as loud. That is real medicine and imaginary medicine in the same spoon. The horehound soothes the throat and the candy coats it, while the liquor only makes you not care about the cough. Her mustard plasters were honest enough. They draw the blood to the skin, though left on too long they raise a blister like a branding iron.

An old doctor beyond the Brushy Mountain ridge once sent for ten gallons for his "dispensary." Junior carried it to the back porch at midnight. In place of money, the doctor wrote on a feed-sack ticket a promise of one free operation of any kind, for life. Eleven years later Junior's appendix went bad. The doctor laughed, allowed that he owed him, and took it out on the kitchen table by lamplight. He kept it in a pint jar labeled Paid in Full. A doctor who takes his pay in whiskey is the only honest banker in the South.

Copper, Ferment, and the Cuts

The druggist's art and the distiller's art are blood brothers, so let me teach this as I would in my own shop. Crack your corn and cook it in water until it is thick as porridge. Yeast cannot eat corn starch, so the starch must first be turned to sugar by malt: barley or rye sprouted on a damp floor, dried and ground. Stir it in once the mash has cooled to where you can hold your hand in it, though not comfortably. The ferment hidden in the malt turns starch to sugar the way a pickpocket turns your wallet into his. Then cool it further and pitch your yeast. Keep it fed and keep it cool. Starved or overheated yeast gives off hydrogen sulfide, the rotten-egg gas, and the healthier your ferment, the less sin the copper must wash away.

The copper does most of that washing where hot vapour meets metal, in the helmet, the vapour pipe and the coils of the worm, more than in the pot. The sulfur binds to the bright copper and stays behind as a dark film. An honest still therefore has copper all the way up the vapour path. A copper pot with a tin cap is like a sermon with no ending.

The cuts matter above all, as an old Epsom man taught me. Bring the heat up slow and never walk away from a running still, for alcohol vapour catches like dry birch bark. Pour out the foreshots, every drop. The heads, sharp and solventy, go out too, or into a jar for cleaning tools. The hearts, sweet and clean, are your keeping spirit. The tails, smelling of wet dog and old regret, are set aside to run again. Apple and pear men, mark this: fruit mashed with its skins and pomace makes more of the poisonous wood-spirit, because the pectin breaks down into it. Cut wider and braver. I have seen a Barnstead man blind in one eye from a greedy cupful of heads.

The old story of proof says English soldiers poured spirit on gunpowder and put a spark to it. If it lit, that was proof it had not been watered. The spark catches at roughly fifty-seven parts in the hundred of pure alcohol. Mind too that distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, even in your own woodshed. What I set down here is for history, for tinctures and oils, and for honest demonstration.

Ashes, Oak Shavings, and the Snakebite Lie

Mr. Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro, called Rabbit, put this question to me: "My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Soak wood ashes in water and you get lye, the potash this state once sold to England by the shipload. Tip it into a boiling charge and you get foam rising like a mad dog's mouth and a soapy, scorched taste. It will not touch the wood-spirit, which leaves your liquor only one way: in the first jars, poured out. As for red oak, no cooper builds a liquor barrel from it. Its pores run clear through the wood like straws, while white oak's pores are plugged by what the botanists call tyloses. Oak shavings in the doubler lend colour, pucker and a woody flavour, as apples or peaches lend scent. That is flavouring, not doctoring. Rabbit's copper cent is stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.

Now the snakebite cure. Spirit does nothing to venom, in the bite or in the blood. Doctors in this very century have poured a quart or two into a bitten man, and some of those men died of the whiskey alone. Junior's cousin Dewey was bitten by a copperhead and drank a full quart on a stump. He tipped over cold, and the doctor said the liquor nearly finished him faster than the snake. A man who treats snakebite with a quart of whiskey has given the snake a partner. If you are bitten, sit still and keep calm. Keep the limb still and get to a real doctor as fast as somebody else can drive you, and let no tavern fool cut you open.

Whiskey can carry medicine, but it is seldom the medicine itself. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.