Ungovernable

by Therese Oneill

  By the early 1800s such ancient foolishness had been replaced by harder science. Humors? What nonsense. Your illness was obviously being caused by a particular organ having too much blood in it. Indigestion? Try leeches on the tummy. Problem solved! High blood pressure? Well, you can’t have high blood pressure if you’ve got no blood! If your patient turns a nice clean white color and passes out, you know you’ve drained away the problem.

  Bloodletting fleam. Like a can punch or bottle opener. But for people!

  Q: And how would I go about doing this horrible thing I’m not going to do?

  A: Bloodletting for children wasn’t as intense as it was for adults. It was not recommended that a standard fleam (a sharp metal device designed to directly puncture a vein) be used. By the nineteenth century people were starting to suspect that draining too much blood wasn’t actually a cure. It just looked like one. Our “Physician of Philadelphia” explains that excessive bloodletting will just cause the patient to make even more blood to compensate, and we don’t want that.

  In fact, constant bleeding “proves only a palliative remedy, which sooner or later greatly enervates the body, deranges its functions, induces a premature old age, and calls for a more frequent resort to the operation.”

  Q: That’s fine. I’m probably not going to…

  A: Especially for children, it really was recommended you use something less invasive than ripping open a vein.

  Q: Phew. I was gonna say…

  A: So we’re going to need leeches to get the job done.

  Q:…“Where are the leeches?” is what I was going to say. Because we’re in hell now and I assumed there would be leeches.

  When not just any leech will do… Syme’s Drug.

  A: I will ignore your sarcasm and compliment the “can-do spirit” of the Victorian mother you’re displaying. According to The Home Book of Health, “In children, where it is so difficult to get blood from a vein, leeches furnish an excellent resource.” And what ailments do they treat? Just a partial list from the Philadelphia physician includes “various inflammatory diseases, as ophthalmia [inflammation of the eyes], sore throat, rheumatism, tooth-ache, inflammation of the bowels, and uterus; in measles and scarlet fever, in hooping-cough [sic], in head-ache, in bruises and in piles.”

  Q: So after all the time you’ve spent telling me my kid was going to get worms, now you say worms are good. Horrid, bloodsucking worms cure everything.

  A: Except for conditions caused by other worms.

  Q: How many worms cause “conditions”?

  A: Oh gosh. All the worms, nearly. Tapeworms, roundworms, and, most commonly, pinworms. These are all different worms that are consumed by the child in egg form, attach to the digestive tract, grow large, and make life miserable. Which is another reason it’s important to feed your child only boiled and flavorless food. Undercooked and unrefrigerated meat, even when relatively fresh, carries worm eggs, as do fruits and vegetables not treated with pesticides. And even if you somehow manage to avoid all that, well, you can’t change the fact that kids are grody little butt-pickers.

  Q: My child is not—

  A: Oh, stop. You know he is. And you were too. As Dr. Charles Townsend explains in an 1895 edition of Babyhood: The Mother’s Nursery Guide, when the child “scratches with its fingers about the back passage and gets the eggs under its finger nails,” he “easily passes them to its mouth and to its toys. In this way the eggs are swallowed by the child itself and by its companions who handle the toys. Food that is passed about by these children becomes a carrier of the infection.”

  A few common intestinal worms that want to live in your child.

  So there you have it. The child scratches the itchy bits (and let us take a moment to solemnly dwell upon the fact that toilet paper is not yet in common usage), then touches toys and doorknobs, jams her fingers in a sister’s mouth to reclaim a lost marble, and so forth. And the circle of vermin continues. Pinworms were the most common childhood infestation in the nineteenth century, not including lice, of course.

  Q: How do I de-worm my child? (I hate you for making me ask that.)

  A: (Then use modern pesticides on your garden, hippie.) First, you have to make sure the child actually has worms. Also called “thread worms” or “seat worms,” pinworms are small white worms that set up shop in the rectum, where there are endless soft creases and folds for them to live and breed in. When the child relaxes in sleep, the worms will often scooch out for some fresh air through the rectum, where a vigilant mother should be waiting to catch them. Or be checking every poop a child proffers for signs of same.

  Q: So… do I have to use the ricin oil, the beaver-butt squeezings, the booze, or the regular poisons for this one?

  A: Pretty much any and all are acceptable. Just as long as you administer them in the form of a clyster.

  Q: Clyster. And what fresh hell might that be?

  A: Clysters, also referred to politely as “injections,” were not exactly enemas. They could be, but they could also be so much more! A Dictionary of Medicine, Designed for Popular Use in 1854, defines a clyster as the process by which “substances are thrown into the rectum by mechanical means.” Not placed, not inserted, mind you, but “thrown,” hurled into that end zone as if by Brett Favre himself. In cases of worms, there were endless popular “vermicides,” from garlic to turpentine. “Gaseous” clysters—including tobacco-smoke enemas—were also in use until around midcentury, not only for worms but to relax constipation, induce labor, and control epilepsy.

  “Ma’am, please… I’m very tiny. Anything stronger than a drip and I’ll be shot across the room!”

  Q: So, they literally blew smoke up people’s ass—

  A:—assuredly stubborn cases of nervous and digestive ailments, yes. By the mid-1800s doctors were starting to realize that tobacco smoke really only seemed to do any good when inhaled. Though initially, as noted in the 1840 edition of Pereira’s The Elements of Materia Medica, it was found to produce coughing fits in asthmatics.

  Q: You don’t say.

  A: But press through that discomfort! Further testing showed that with continued use, inhaling tobacco had a calming effect on edgy patients.

  Q:…

  A: Before you go judging, remember, one day your great-grandchildren will be astounded at your stupidity for thinking deodorant actually made you less stinky when you could have just gotten your sweat glands surgically altered to perfume the air with chicory, which will likely be the preferred scent of the time.

  Anyway, I haven’t told you the greatest danger (according to Victorians) of pinworms. Those wandering little hands do more damage than you know. As Martin Lamont warns us in 1861’s “Medical Adviser and Marriage Guide”:

  It is a deplorable fact, that young ladies, as well as youth of the opposite sex, are addicted to the habit of self-abuse to an alarming extent. This habit frequently has its origin in irritation of the genitals and lower bowels of children, from costiveness, or from pinworms… the frequent inclination to rub or scratch the adjacent parts lead to the practice of Self-Pollution.

  Q: Self-pollution? Like, masturbation? Worms all up in a poor kid’s business and that’s what they were worried about?

  A: There was a large and widely published school of health reformers in the mid to late nineteenth century who thought masturbation, always begun in childhood, caused nearly every disease. Children were to be taught that “self-abuse” was a “vice which exhausts the body, destroys the eye-sight, impairs digestion and circulation, deranges the brain and nervous system in an astonishingly short time, thereby impairing the mind, destroys the possibility of a healthy offspring, and stamps the face with its marks and signs as visibly as does the small-pox.” Licentiousness and prostitution had their root in this practice, of course, as well as death itself, according to Orson Squire Fowler, who announced, “Women… are dying by thousands, of consumption, of female complaints, of nervous or spinal affections, of general debility, and of other ostensible
complaints innumerable, and some of insanity, caused by this practice.”

  Q: Okay, you know what? You’re giving me a gaseous clyster right now with this nonsense. What foolishness! It’s totally natural for a child to explore his or her body.

  Anti-masturbation apparatus for little boys and girls.

  A: You keep thinking the Victorians regarded “natural” things as good. Remember, Original Sin pulses through the heart of even the most cuddlesome infant. Parents and physicians took great pains to stop a child’s “natural” exploration of her body.

  Q: How?

  A: In horrible ways. Serrated rings that encircled the penis. Little girls fitted with steel plating between their legs to protect their genitalia from their own hands. Tying the hands of a child to a bedpost while they slept. And these were the nonsurgical interventions. It’s the stuff of nightmares and I’d rather not dwell on it.

  Thankfully, by 1901, when Emma Frances Angell Drake wrote What a Young Wife Ought to Know, views on childhood masturbation seem to have progressed some, and there was less emphasis on shaming or physically restraining the child. In fact, Drake encouraged mothers to remember that even though the practice was evil, the practitioner was innocent. Says Drake, “Above all, do not treat your child, even if the habit is formed before you discover it, as if he were a criminal. He is unfortunate, and ignorant of the wrong or the danger he is in.”

  Q: Oh, those poor kids. Somehow this whole section makes me sadder than all the worm infestations and rat-poison medication combined.

  A: I know. There’s little comfort I can give you, except to remind you that this time passed. And in fact, some of the very children who were raised under the duress of sexual stigma would later be rouging their kneecaps and dancing the Charleston to speakeasy jazz! Until the Great Depression hit and the food went away. But then Hitler would really start up our economy again! All those men dead in war, though. Which made the survivors determined to live picture-perfect lives! Which stunted the emotional growth of the Baby Boomer generation. Which in turn gave us the freedom of the 1960s cultural revolution! Of course that led—

  Q: Stop. I get it. Our society is a wheel. Misery and contentment will continue to trade places for eternity in a never-ending cycle.

  A:… Uh… yeah. That’s what I was going for. Totally.

  Q: Just one last question. Why did the Victorians keep using dangerous medicines and subscribing to damaging theories that obviously didn’t work for so long?

  A: I will answer that if you can answer me this: How, in precise language, does swallowing two weeks’ worth of pills labeled “penicillin” make your cough go away? Can you tell me, here and now, without Googling? And if you can, what about that time your great-aunt took penicillin and more, but was so ill, she passed anyway? Was her medication a sham, or the disease simply too powerful?

  You see, the Victorians had no reason to believe their methods didn’t “work.”

  Sometimes they did work, and patients fully recovered. We would consider that mere correlation, knowing what we know, but the Victorians saw causation. Sometimes the patient was simply too sick and died despite the treatment (or sometimes, as we now know, because of it).

  We continue to use treatments that we don’t understand today. I doubt you’ve read the published research on the trials of drugs before you use them. You aren’t supposed to have to. You don’t have the time or expertise to master the mysteries of the human body, so you rely on people who’ve devoted their lives to the subject to interpret the evidence for you. If your disease turns out to be treatable, you’re rewarded for your faith. If not, the doctors will still do all they can, whether it be chemotherapy or, once upon a time, bloodletting and opiates.

  10

  The Successful Mother: Are You She?

  Beth Balmer, age three. The author attests: product and producer of superior mothers.

  As we conclude our brief overview of raising the perfect child, you are no doubt anxious to see if these methods will yield you the child of your dreams. If, as illustrated by the popular “The Two Paths” drawings of the late nineteenth century, your child will grow into a beloved elder, or a destitute deviant. To figure this, we must—

  Q: You stop right there, you twisted harpy. I bought this book in good faith. It says on the cover, “Guide to Raising Flawless Children,” and instead of anything I can use, I find page after page of various tortures, poisons, and sexism to inflict on my child. This is not a child-rearing book. This is a guided tour of the nine circles of hell.

  A: What were you expecting?

  Q: I don’t know! Secret recipes for sore throats! Little behavior modifiers left behind by time!

  A: I provided those. Caustic silver nitrate, and fastidious birching. I presumed you had already tried the less invasive options and found them wanting.

  Q: You know, even if I weed out the crazy, I don’t think I could use hardly anything you’ve taught me in this book.

  A: Why, do you suppose?

  Q: Because my kids aren’t Victorian! I can’t pretend we live in a world where children are burdens or showpieces. I’m not just dealing with someone that’s going to turn into a human. I’m dealing with a human the whole time.

  A: Human the whole time? That’s rather generous.

  Q: I don’t know. Even when they can’t feed themselves and are pooping everywhere, it’s not because they’re bad and need to be punished and scolded like stubborn donkeys—

  A: “Asses.”

  Q: Whatever—it’s just that they’re at that natural stage of development. And unlike the Victorians, I don’t think “natural” is necessarily evil. I mean, I’d rather my kid crayoned every wall in the house than be smacked around by a schoolmaster for whispering to her friend. I’d rather pay a two-thousand-dollar ER bill because he accidentally ate poison than pay five dollars to have some quack purposely feed it to him. And I can’t believe how much shame I was supposed to heap on them. Shame for being female, or not manly enough, for exploring their bodies, for asking the wrong questions. It’s like the goal of Victorian child-rearing was to create a porcelain doll that would one day turn into a porcelain person. And it might have worked, in fact—it might have even been necessary for that time and place. I get that a smaller, harder world needs stricter rules.

  But that’s not my kid’s world.

  A: Huh. Interesting.

  Q: Like that picture you put up there. There are more than two paths! My kids have so many different directions they can go in! Maybe choices were limited back then, but now there are so many. I’d rather teach them to govern themselves because they want a good life. And then make sure they’re strong and self-sufficient enough to follow it through no matter how rough it gets. You didn’t teach me much about that.

  A: Well… I illustrated the pitfalls of reading, eating pickles, and angering the Old Testament God.

  Q: You did, yes. Thank you.

  A: So you mean to tell me you think this advice, though perhaps useful in a world and time far away from ours, is insufficient for today? And that, as you would with any parenting manual, you must carefully pick the pieces of advice that apply to your own life and child? That in fact, even though you might suffer during the process, you alone know how to raise your kid best?

  Q: Don’t pretend you planned that from the start.

  A: Heaven forfend! Imagine writing a whole book with the goal of having the reader (who is far mouthier than she need be, might I add) reject the message! Insanity!

  Q: I’m going to go make my kid empty the dishwasher to earn some screen time. She’s been watching these weird YouTube clips that actually teach stuff.

  A: Tolerance for cross-dressing puppets?

  Q: Maybe. That’d be pretty cool. I’ll watch it with her and find out.

  The End

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out the Author

  THERESE ONEILL is the author of the New York Times bestseller Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage and Manners. She writes humor and rare-history articles for Mental Floss, The Week, The Atlantic, and Jezebel, among other publications, and lives with her husband and children near Portland, Oregon. She can be found online at writer thereseoneill.com.

  Also by Therese Oneill

  Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

  Bibliography

  Abbott, John S. C. The Mother at Home, or The Principles of Maternal Duty, Familiarly Illustrated. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855.

  Aldrich, Virgil C. “A Theory of Ball-Play.” Psychological Review 44 (1937): 395.

  American Dental Association and William Morton. Transactions of the American Dental Association. American Dental Association, 1896.

  Barker, Samuel. The Domestic Management of Infants and Children in Health and Sickness. London: Robert Hardwicke, 1875.

  Barnett, Henrietta. The Making of the Body: A Children’s Book on Anatomy and Physiology. London: Cassell, 1894.

  Beck, John. The Retrospect of Medicine. New York: W. A. Townsend Publishing, 1863.

  Benton, Caroline French. The Mother’s Book: A Handbook for the Physical, Mental and Moral Training of Children. New York: University Society, 1919.