The Trouble with Tom

by Paul Collins

  E. B. Foote's notion, at least, sounded like it had a little more science to it. After all, hadn't galvanism shown that our bodies ran on electrical impulses?Intercourse was a veritable spinning dynamo, Foote announced, generating "frictional energy" between men and women. This was why lonely singles resorted to masturbation: it was precisely the same action, he noted, as rubbing a piece of flannel back and forth across a piece of amber to get a little static shock. Sadly, Foote never explains why masturbation wouldn't therefore shoot bolts of lightning from between your legs and make your hair stand on end.

  Some genteel Victorian readers might be forgiven for having their hair standing on end after reading Foote. Yet others would find it familiar reading indeed, for he admiringly quoted for pages at a time from none other than Orson Fowler. Phrenology was a key element to Foote's medical advice. He firmly believed that needless marriages—and all the unhappiness, and death in childbirth that attended them—were a plague upon womankind. So if a woman was going to have a man, she needed the right man. But how could you determine a proper match? Foote knew: "Does the reader ask how? I reply, by doing away with the present rotten system for legalizing marriage, and substituting therefore a Board of Phrenologists and Physiologsts in every county seat." Under Foote's plan, divorce would be made easy but marriage difficult, for the screening tests would result in such perfectly matched mates that divorces wouldn't happen much anyway. Assuming your mate had the right sort of skull—a bump to complement your every lump—then all that remained for marital happiness was one last step that was downright unheard of in Foote's time. "Every married man should confide to his wife the real condition of his finances," Foote lectured. "It is high time that men began to appear to the wives exactly what they are, pecunarily, morally, and socially."

  Common financial sense, perhaps. But was it Medical Common Sense? To Foote, it was indeed. Unhappy unemployed women meant nervous prostration and sedentary illness. And if the family finances were open, men couldn't sneak off to squander money on prostitutes: ergo, less syphilis. Their wives, apprised of the true tightness of funds, might not approve of debilitating cigars and steaks. You start to see at this point why Foote seemed to have a greater following among women readers than men. But change a fellow's insides, Foote thought, and you will change their outside conduct as well. "Gross minds beget gross ideas," he warned, "—[they] demand gross food and gross remedies." Fill them with healthy food and healthy remedies, and healthy thoughts might well follow.

  What exactly was healthy proved to be debatable. Amid sensible pronouncements on drinking plenty of water, getting lots of exercise and plenty of fresh air, there were thundering condemnations against condiments and the role they played in sex. Their spiciness incited immorality and thus contributed toward prostitution, you understand.

  Well, I'm certainly not feeling very randy. I do, however, feel the need to patronize a Kidde fire extinguisher, or maybe some of that foaming gel that they spray onto burning airplanes.

  "Water," I cough. 'Thank you."

  I regard my hot and sour soup as it is taken away almost uneaten. Perhaps I should have bothered reading the italicized description in the Chinese Mirch menu: A fiery creation. It is at moments like this that memories of my old elementary school report cards come back to haunt me. "Does Not Pay Attention." And: "Does Not Follow Instructions."

  I slump back into the squeaky bamboo chair, humiliated. Spices? My God, Foote's old headquarters are now a veritable den of Szechuan iniquity. He'd be scandalized. But then, a lot scandalized him. In addition to spicy food, the doctor did not approve of other habits as seemingly innocuous as children sleeping in the same bed as their parents. The reason—as with nearly everything in Foote—involved animal magnetism. The effect of putting a child and an adult in the same bed was like putting a new battery and a dead battery together. "Children, compared with adults, are electrically in a positive condition," he explained. Completing a circuit with an adult would literally drain them. "See to it," Foote warned parents, "that his nervous vitality is not absorbed by some diseased or aged relative." Or, for that matter, by a crazy doctor trying to catch his breath in a glass trumpet.

  Foote also rather cryptically forbids children from standing on their heads.

  Yet some of Foote's Common Sense was so far ahead of the world of 1858 that its work remains unfinished even today. Like Thoreau and Fowler, he shook his head over Americans killing themselves with overwork, all for luxuries that they didn't actually need in the first place. He berated readers for artificial lighting that was creating a generation of night owls living in sleep-deprived "nervous irritation," and for the tight lacing and impractical fashions that were hindering women's health and welfare. Tobacco was poisoning the nation, he warned, and "Fast eating, a universal habit with Anglo-Americans," was wreaking havoc on the public's diet.

  Indeed, meals were of a special concern to the doctor. He boasted of his three-year-old son Edward Jr.'s vegetarian diet, one that sounds pretty appealing after you read Daddy's stories of filthy abattoirs where worm-ridden livestock have tumors "that when laid open by the knife, purulent matter gushes out." Foote was also strongly against artificial colors and flavorings in food, and no wonder: in his era coal tar gas was used to create pineapple flavoring, and unregulated dyes flourished. When used externally in striped stockings, some dyes even created banded skin eruptions running up the legs. One can only imagine the ornamental patterns they wrought upon the guts of young children as they ate pretty green arsenite-of-copper lollipops and dazzling blue ferrocyanide hard candies. Foote's uncommon notions, it seemed, were pretty sensible after all.

  Consider this diligent doctor eagerly rereading Paine's works. Here was a man pondering a reformist Founding Father who took on nothing less than the greatest issues of the day: gods and kings. How could a Manhattan doctor possibly follow in footsteps like those?

  Consider this question as you sit on the toilet.

  Really. In fact, consider it as you sit on the hopper at Chinese Mirch, or at any number of other Manhattan restrooms. Should you have brought reading matter into the Chinese Mirch restroom with you, you'll have noticed that in today's paper there is an insert by Home Depot advertising American Standard toilets in the Champion line. We are informed:

  29 Golf Balls in One Flush!

  Now, while this is not a new ploy—rival manufacturer Koehler has rather pointedly flushed two pounds of cocktail sausages down their model—there is something appealing in the notion that, should the fancy grab you, you could pour a bucket of Tideists down a magic portal that whisks them out to the East River.

  But in the 1870s, this was deadly serious stuff. For a mid-century Victorian reformer, there were two obvious impediments to human happiness, two forces creating more misery, illness, and death than any other. The first was pregnancy. The second was the natural result of that fecundity: sewage. Fish inspectors surveying Britain in 1867 found, in that soot-blackened country, that as many rivers were poisoned by human sewage as by coal waste. America's cities were quickly finding themselves in an equally dire situation. Cities were becoming a stinking and fetid morass of their own wastes, breeding typhus, yellow fever, and dysentery. Victorians became justly fearful of the "miasma" around ponds, gutters, and cesspools, and ineffectually sprayed carbolic acid and swigged useless alcoholic patent medicines to no avail.

  So readers of Harper's magazine would have been delighted to find an ad like this one in 1871:

  The Wakefield

  EARTH CLOSET,

  IS by all means the best yet patented.

  Send to WAKEFIELD EARTH CLOSET CO., 36 Dey St., NY,

  for Descriptive pamphlet,

  or call and examine.

  And the principal of this company? Why, Dr. E. B. Foote.

  It is one of those happily juvenile accidents of history that while the greatest seller of water closets in Britain was one Thomas Crapper, the earth closet salesman at 36 Dey Street was named Asa Butts. Ah, where would t
he world be without its Butts and Crappers? Graced with far fewer restrooms, to be sure. Yet Butts had more to bring to the job than a melodious name: he was also known as the publisher of the progressive magazine Truth Seeker. To put this in modern terms: imagine finding the publisher of the Nation working the floor of an American Standard showroom.

  What would draw wild-eyed reformers to such a prosaic thing as selling commodes? For one thing, sewage was still—I use this phrase advisedly—up for grabs. Today we naturally equate toilets with running water; Victorians did not. Impractical early water closets had been tried out in Britain, including a "slop system" with a tipper tank collecting sink and rainwater until it filled up enough to tip down and flush out the entire house with a powerful cleansing roar. This seemed like a keen idea until you had rainy weather—not unknown in Britain—whereupon the tank filled up and clanged empty constantly, scaring the bejesus out of children as all the house's toilets roared in monstrous unison in the dead of night.

  Eventually water closets evolved into the familiar tank-and-chain model. But water is an imperfect medium for waste. For one thing, what water was to be found in cities was not very palatable to begin with. Some wells located near graveyards even had what was delicately termed "a churchyard taste" to their water, and discharging massive amounts of fecal matter into the groundwater and into rivers hardly helped. And the underwater decomposition of sewage is inefficient; it's an anaerobic process that works much more slowly than aerobic decomposition.

  So if water was the problem, why not remove the water? Earth closets were, not to put too fine a point upon things, a wooden box you squatted over. Equipped with a little beach shovel and a bucket of ashes and dirt to scatter over your pile—a primitive charcoal system—it both covered up the smell and speeded your waste's conversion into usable farm manure. But earth closets, in the early days, sometimes had the look of. . . well, a contraption.

  Foote's insight was that it was no good to sermonize people into doing the right thing: that only works briefly with most people, and permanently with the conscientious few. Most have to see why something is in their own interest, and it needs to be made convenient and attractive. And so the burnished mahogany Wake-field earth closets hawked by Dr. Foote were handsome, refined—rather like relieving oneself into a really nice piano. It featured an array of levers and spring-loaded slats to automatically cover everything up for you. And as they improved in design over the years, earth closets did indeed have their converts. In Britain, the Lancaster Grammar School found them splendid for schoolboys, as their old water closets had kept getting clogged up "by reason of marbles, Latin grammar covers, and other properties being thrown down them."

  I suppose earth closets had other healthful advantages too. Any number of Victorian sexual neuroses become understandable when you learn that one water commode mass-produced in Lancashire was named the Clencher.

  But August Woehler was a dissatisfied customer. A very dissatisfied customer. He wanted his life—his health, his love, his manhood—back from the doctor who had stolen it from him. Yet when Foote insisted to detectives that he hadn't recognized his assailant, the doctor was telling the truth. Foote had to be, because once his assailant was well enough, the fellow had gone back to the corner of Twenty-eighth and Lexington every night since, and nearly every day. And there he lurked, holding his injured hand, watching the house. The doctor had gone about his business again, unaware that just yards away stood August Woehler: watching, waiting, deciding on the best moment to kill him.

  "I have been trying to throw it off mind, and not die a murderer, but when night comes on I can't help myself," agonized one unsent letter in Woehler's pocket. "The nearer I come to this house, the more I feel like committing the deed."

  He had come close—so close—that afternoon in Foote's examination room. "I was thinking how, in a few minutes, he would be shot in the bowels, and he would lie there, with his brains blown out. But things did not turn out that way," he admitted in another letter. "I might have shot him in the back," he mused, "but I did not want to do that, for it would have looked kind of mean."

  And so there, on a cold November night, this thoughtful wouldbe murderer and his careless would-be victim went about their separate business. The world would find out about the gunman's life soon enough; Foote's was already well-known. For while Paine's boldest assertion—that we had no need of kings—was laid forth from the outset of Common Sense, its medical namesake was more circumspect but no less stunning. Hidden in the back of Medical Common Sense is a short section marked "The Prevention of Conception." It contains perhaps the single most important sentence written by any American author of his time:

  "I shall be wiling to direct married people in this important matter, who apply in writing."

  Traveling through the West when it was still at its wildest, the writer George Macdonald kept finding that one man had apparently preceded him everywhere he went—and it didn't matter just how far into the wilderness he ventured. "I went into a shack where a wood chopper lived alone," he marveled. 'There was one room, one shelf, and two books on the shelf." One was an almanac; the other was by Edward Bliss Foote.

  It is hard to realize today how profound—or how profoundly forgotten—he impact of Dr. Foote's little book was. Medical Common Sense sold 250,000 copies, and an expanded 1870 version retitled Plain Home Talk went on to sell 500,00—(blockbuster numbers even today, and an absolutely immense run back then. The contraception advice alone would have saved many from death in childbirth, and changed the economic prospects of innumerable others. Publishers in New York, London, and Berlin sold editions in English and German, featuring endless permutations of size and content—excerpted pamphlets, weighty family editions covering all facets of health, and little easy-to-hide editions focused on sex.

  When Foote inserted that fateful line "I shall be willing to direct married people in this important matter," he was opening a cultural floodgate. Trickles had been seeping in for years already, beginning with the first smuggled copies of Richard Carlile's Every Woman's Book. By 1830, New Yorkers could prevent the "social brutality of illegitimate pregnancy" with the vaginal sponges described in Robert Dale Owen's Moral Physiology, while Dr. Charles Knowlton's similar Fruits of Philosophy (1832) proved so popular that, even after Knowlton was convicted of obscenity in Massachusetts, a juror came up to him afterward and asked if he could buy a copy.

  But these guides were often published or pirated under the murkiest of circumstances, with pseudonyms and a "correspondence system" of different publishers in each city, and then distributed at railway stations and other locales fit for quick and anonymous transactions. In what must be the beginning of targeted spam, marital aid manufacturers and publishers would cleverly slip pamphlets for their goods under the doors of couples whose marriages had been announced in local newspapers. Books directed to married couples, at least, were less liable to be prosecuted; one, Frederick Hollick's Marriage Guide, went through an astonishing two hundred printings between 1850 and 1860.

  What made E. B. Foote different from his predecessors was his shamelessness. Foote was perhaps the first American sexual reformer to hide in plain sight. He gave you his addresses, his prices, and his products. And sex—though admittedly "his favorite subject—was only part of the continuum of his health services for everything from indigestion to consumption. He was not a dirty old man at the railway platform; he had nothing to hide; he was a physician.

  Business at the doctor's new Manhattan office boomed. Foote patent medicines like Magnetic Ointment and Dr. Foote's Eye Sharpener turned handsome profits. Meanwhile, Magnetic Anti-Bilious Pills were also hawked for impotency and-for your inevitable return visit after that first cure-for syphilitic sores and gonorrhea. Foote pamphlets claimed that his offices at 120 Lexington Avenue were flooded with letters from grateful patients: 'They are convincing. They are overwhelming! . . . There are cords of letters—actually cords—which the doctor has no time to look over." The New York T
imes carried Foote ads trumpeting OLD EYES MADE NEW WITHOUT SPECTACLES and COMFORT FOR THE RUPTURED, and the enticing CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION FOR THE MARRIED.

  His letters probably also included a fair number of attorney bills. As befitted a leading birth control publisher, Foote was also the inventor and manufacturer of his own line of condoms—made from the membranes of specially selected Rhine fish, and "flexible, and silky in texture, and a perfect conductor of electricity and magnetism"—and he also sold his own patented rubber diaphragms. For his inventive troubles, Foote found himself squarely in the sights of postal inspector Anthony Comstock. As Comstock's moral grandstanding and influence grew, so did Foote's problems. After Congress passed the so-called Comstock Law in 1873, which outlawed contraceptive advertising, Special Agent Comstock's very first act was to indict the man he considered the worst sexual menace in the country: Dr. Edward Bliss Foote.

  And yet it proved peculiarly difficult to peg Foote as some sort of nasty little pervert. Like a medical Walt Whitman, E. B. Foote saw nothing impure in human bodies. He sang the body electric. He also sang the "electro-magnetic preventive machine," a worthless birth control gizmo hawked for $15 by his mail-order business. But for a man denounced in early credit reports as "a splendid specimen of the genus humbug," Foote was an extraordinarily successful and respected entrepreneur. He even ran for Congress, albeit unsuccessllly—for, as one friend mused, Foote was in "every party that never carried an election." But the money kept flowing in, and when Comstock came after him, Foote could afford good lawyers: not only did he get off from his charges with a fine, he then went on to finance the legal defense of Susan B. Anthony and other persecuted colleagues. Foote was also helping finance, of all people, Comstock's own father. Apparently the old miscreant had been thrown out of the house, nearly penniless, by his morally zealous son.