Calomel and Pluto Water for Carrie Hardy: Dark, Chthonic "Cures"

Related to the ongoing serialization of Ypsilanti high school math teacher Carrie Hardy's 1919 diary.

Readers of tomorrow's diary excerpt from Carrie Hardy will note the onset of a terrible illness that debilitates her for much of the summer, to the point that Carrie is nearly frantic about losing her job and wonders, "What will become of me?" Unmarried, she had no safety net--and although her colleagues covered her classes for her, that could only have gone on for so long.

But that's in the future. The key point is that at the outset of her illness, Carrie is prescribed arguably the worst medicine ever--and one of the commonest in the past couple of centuries. Calomel.

Calomel is a toxic mercury compound and was used in the school of "heroic" medicine. Heroic medicine has been defined as "a given cure was proportional to the fear of the disease." The "heroic" applies to the patient--violent purgatives, bloodletting, emetics--all these rough treatments belong to heroic medicine. As does calomel.

Calomel was thought to be a purgative because it caused heavy salivation and had a laxative effect. It also loosened teeth, caused oral ulcers, caused hair loss, sometimes [warning!: graphic photo] facial deformities, and unbeknownst to the physicians of the time, heavy metal poisoning (Louisa May Alcott is only one of many who are thought to have died of the effects of calomel).

You will note that after Carrie takes calomel, she enters a long period of debility. I wish you could see her handwriting in her diary. It goes from smooth and confident to frail and trembly, as if she suffered from Parkinson's (tremors are one possible side effect of calomel use). You do have to ask--was she sick with an undiagnosed disease? Or was she suffering from mercury poisoning?

Readers will note she also takes "Pluto Water," a salty mineral water with a strong laxative effect. Pluto Water was popular into the 40s (Wikipedia notes that Sanford on the old TV sitcom Sanford and Son often referred to it, and that Louis Armstrong used it).

A modern analog to the age of heroic medicine are the modern regimens of cancer drugs and treatments, which also extract an almost unbearable amount of pain and suffering from the patient they cure. In the age of heroic medicine, every treatment was similarly drastic--one of the reasons that led to the rise of much more appealing patent medicines and nostrums--though we'll save that tale for another day.

Carrie, hang in there--and please, dear, do stop taking that hideous calomel!