Disease in Early Texas and Hazardous Remedies
Illness in frontier Texas was often fatal, but you might recover if you survived the medical treatment. Not only were medical facilities scarce to nonexistent, but the state of medical knowledge was primitive by modern standards.
The germ theory of disease and contagion was just being developed in Europe in the period 1850-1890. So the practice of hand washing between patients and operations was not considered necessary. In a large hospital in Vienna, Austria, in 1847, one doctor noticed that the death rate for women in childbirth was higher when attended by doctors than midwives. He also noticed that the doctors went directly from an autopsy to assist at a childbirth. When this doctor suggested hand washing as a sanitary measure, his contract was not renewed.
The ancient historical view was that disease was spontaneously generated in the body of the sick person. Some doctors in Europe and the Middle East began to see evidence in the period 1500 through 1835 that some diseases were caused by foreign bodies. But most of the medical treatments in America in the 1800s seemed to be based on the older theory. The medical treatments relied on moving body fluids from the ill person to outside the body, equivalent to purging the body of “evil spirits” or “bad humors.” One of the major treatments was bloodletting or bleeding. In this treatment, multiple pint quantities of blood were removed from the sick person by tapping a vein or by using leeches. This practice goes back to the Greeks, but was employed in a number of ancient cultures such as the Egyptians, Mayas and Aztecs. Bloodletting in America continued to be practiced into the early 1900s. In the same vein were the uses of emetics and purgatives or cathartics. An emetic causes a person to vomit; a purgative is a strong laxative. With treatment like these you were better off if you did not see a doctor.
The Spanish had a military surgeon and infirmary in Bexar (San Antonio) in 1805. Quite a number of the early Anglo immigrants were medical doctors trained in the U. S. or Europe. James Hewetson, the Irish-born empresario, was a medical doctor. Austin’s colony had three doctors on a board of health in San Felipe in 1831. Fifty-nine men who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence at Washington-on-the Brazos in 1836 were physicians. Six physicians died at the Alamo. The first civilian hospital in Texas was established at Galveston in 1851. Sam Houston had traveled to New Orleans in 1836 to treat the bullet wound that he received at the Battle of San Jacinto. Conditions in the City Hospital in Galveston were good: the mortality rate was about seven percent. In 1866, the City Hospital admitted 773 patients, of whom 70 percent were indigent or foreign-born.
The epidemic diseases such as smallpox and measles were endemic in the Spanish Missions in Texas in the 1700s. For people on the frontier, there was a plethora of other diseases: malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, influenza, pneumonia, cholera, dysentery, scurvy, venereal disease, and various digestive disorders and “fevers.” Deaths in child- birth and infancy were in the range of five to ten percent. Because of the hard living conditions, soldiers in the frontier forts were more prone to disease and disability.
Against this avalanche of medical conditions there was the state of medical knowledge at the time, such as bloodletting. People without access to a doctor depended on a sturdy constitution, medicinal teas, folk and family remedies and patent-medicine concoctions. So if you could survive the medical treatments available, you might survive the disease.
Herndon Williams is affiliated with the Bayside Historical Society and the Refugio
County Historical Commission. He can be reached at coastalbendchronicle@yahoo.com
