Eleanor Sullivan's Blog, page 6

How to Write an Historical Mystery

Writing an historical mystery is easy. Just start with a time and place, add a few interesting characters and culprits, inject a murder, toss in a few clues, and add a twist at the end. Voila, you have an historical mystery!

How hard could it be?

Answer: Very. Not only must you create a compelling, tension-filled mystery, you must build an accurate story world.

Contemporary mysteries require research, too, of course. Murder details must be accurate. The weapon's action must correspond the the victim's wounds, for example. So you need to know about firearms–how far does a bullet from a nine-millemeter or a revolver go? Can a bullet hit someone under water? (The answer is no.) How long would it take to die from a drug overdose? And how would you know if it was accidental or murder? From TV we know that COD is cause of death and TOD is time of death. Neither expressions would be used in historicals in the 19th century.

How do you build an accurate story world?

Here are some suggestions:

        Begin with primary sources such as letters, diaries, and photographs. Here's an example of a letter I found in the Ohio Memory Project, a division of the Ohio Historical Society. Fortunately, the letters were transcribed. See some photos in the Ohio Historical Society collection. Next search for legitimate research sources. I found a dissertation by an Ohio State student  chronicling the life of the Separatists, beginning with their experiences in Germany in the early 1800s. Then I found a book by Kathleen Fernandez titled "A Singular People: Images of Zoar".

        Travel to the site, if possible. I made several trips to Zoar, Ohio, discovering a research library where I was allowed to copy materials including several masters' thesis on the community. Take lots of photos. You can see a few of these in the photo album on my website. My files contain 500+ images from the Ohio Historical Society as well as my own. I use them constantly as I write-what did the stove look like? How did a woman dress? Where's the door into Adelaide's cabin?

        Create a map of the location if you can. Then, as you write, you'll be able to imagine your characters as they move about.  Here's my map of Zoar, accurate for 1830. 

        Follow up with studying the work and lives of inhabitants. For example, I needed to learn about herbal medicines, midwifery, cabinet making, and blacksmithing along with food preparation, kitchen gardens, and harvesting.

There will be no end to the research you can do so be careful not to be so caught up in it that you forget to write your story!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Come back next week and I'll share with you some of my favorite historical mystery writers. 

 

 

A Puritan Thanksgiving

M E Kemp relives Puritan life

This week I've invited M. E. KEMP, who writes an historical mystery series featuring two nosy Puritans as detectives. Her latest book is Death of  a Dancing Master. She lives in Saratoga, NY.

       

Ninety years after the Pilgrim's feast of thanksgiving in 1620, the

Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony still celebrated the holiday

– only it might be in July or in May or in January depending upon what

occasion for which to be thankful. That might be for the end of King

Phillip's War or the arrival of a sloop bearing kegs of molasses. And

Thanksgiving didn't originate with the Pilgrims, either, but with

celebrations for various causes by the Church of England. In fact, Guy

Fawkes Day was a much more celebrated occasion on November 5th, the day

Fawkes tried to blow up the British parliament. In Boston it became a

rowdy holiday with the North End rivaling the South End, both Ends

parading around the streets carrying a "Guy," a straw dummy until they

finally met up and ended in a  huge brawl and a bonfire.

When the Puritans did decide it was time for a Thanksgiving it was a

veritable feast, with turkey to be sure, but also with beef, venison,

all kinds of water fowl, ham, shellfish and other bounties of the sea. 

( I confess I'm envious of those days when 6 foot lobsters washed up on

the beaches after a storm. Lobster was so plentiful it was considered

a trash-fish.  Now, that's the kind of trash food I could go for!) 

Pumpkins and apples played a large part in the feast, in forms besides

pies.  Both foods were dried for use over the winter.  And there was

drink – lots of hard liquor! Our ancestors were lushes.  Beer and hard

cider were every day drinks, with wine, brandy and rum; rum-punches

being a favorite of gatherings. Even the ministers imbibed unGodly

amounts of liquor at their ordination dinners. They welcomed new

ministers into the fold with every kind of liquor available. Tavern

bills show this to be the case.  Of course, you were expected to hold 

your drink–drunkenness was fined, preached against from the pulpit 

and perhaps even meant a spell in jail.

Our ancestors must have had stomachs of iron.  We can ourselves give

thanks that we don't have to drink concoctions like "Sparke's Special,"

which consisted of beer, rum, molasses and breadcrumbs.  Yuck!  Yet if

you survived the diseases of childhood, barring accident, you lived to

a ripe old age.   Well, you were probably well preserved by all that

liquor!

 

 

 

Finding the Garden of Eden

Like many settlers to America in the early 19th century, the Separatists came looking for the Garden of Eden. Europe, early settlers thought, was dirty, damaged, and corrupted. America, in contrast, was a wide, unspoiled land, a fresh new world. And so they came.

The Separatists were part of this migration to the new world. A fresh, new place, new life for all. They'd carve out a perfect, unspoiled world. And there they'd all strive to become perfect. Well, not all, only believers (according to their faith!)

Helped by Quakers in England and Philadelphia, the Separatists purchased more than 5000 acres in northern Ohio, sight unseen. In the fall of 1817 their leader, Joseph Bimeler (my distant grandfather) led a small group of the more able bodied people to their land. They hired three wagoners to transport their meager goods and the Separatists walked behind the wagons on foot. By late November they'd reached Sandyville, a wretched settlement of log huts in the woods. The wagoners left them there, and they walked the three miles to their land.

What they found appalled them.

Heavily wooded, hilly land, not very fertile, with the Tuscarawas River running diagonally through it. That first night they slept in the open under a large oak tree. The next day they built a tent-like hut of poles, covering them with leaves and earth. They lived in it until the first cabin was built. They continued building cabins as rapidly as possible through the winter. These were simple log cabins with thatch roofs and some, reinforced with tile roofs still stand today.

The only bright spot in the land was the level plains along the river that earlier Indians had cleared. Without that space for planting, it's unlikely they would have survived.

With cabins built and plantings done, they set out to create their own Garden of Eden in a square block in the center of the village. Twelve paths of righteousness marched toward the center where a giant Norway spruce stood tall surrounded by twelve junipers.  Christ and his disciples.  Intersecting cross paths—temptations—awaited the Separatists if they strayed.   

 

 This photo from the 19th century shows how well they tended the garden. It survives today, tended by volunteers and descendents of the early settlers.

 Did they really live a life of purity and perfection? The records defy this notion. Several "early" births suggest digresion, a letter in 1818 from a Quaker woman complaining about Bimeler, saying "he has them so infatuated they think he's another Moses," and Bimeler waited to sign over the title to the entire 5000 acres until he was on his death bed.

But, maybe, like the rest of us today, they tried their best. 

 

What Did the Separatists Believe?

Since the beginning of time, humans have tried to make sense of their world. Why did people sicken and die? What caused the crops to fail?

The Society of Separatists, who escaped to America in 1817, rejected the established church in their native Germany. For that, they were brutally punished. (See blog post "Who Were the Separatists?"). But then of course as soon as they came here and started setting up their own society, it soon became just as rigid and just as authoritarian and just as restrictive as the religion they had run away from.   

The Separatists believed that salvation was between an individual and God and that no intercession by the church was necessary. Thus, their meeting house, a log cabin, had plain plaster walls, no altar, or any symbols from their hated religion from home.

Zoar Meeting House

 

 

 

 

 

 

Each Sunday the Separatists would gather in the meeting house to sing hymns, pray silently, and listen to a discourse by Josef Bimeler, who was both their secular and religious leader. He delivered his discourses extemporaneously without notes or papers. And he continued for several hours! (I wonder if anyone had to leave to use the privvy?)

Here are some words from one of his discourses transcribed by a Separatist at the time he spoke them!

"As many of you know, I turned onto the broad road of destruction and remained there until God himself stopped me. I saw myself obliged to take another way, for I recognized that the road on which I had turned was the broad road, which would without a doubt lead me to ruin. Sought God but he kept Himself aloof from me. He acted as if He did not want to hear my anxious sigh and my urgent cry. And no wonder, for I had very much offended Him."

How had he sinned?

In uncovering my ancestry, I discovered one. Josef married his first wife, Barbara, in August of 1803. Their daughter was born in January, 1804. Do the math!

FYI, Barbara died before Josef brought his son, Peter, with him to America. Of the early-born daughter, we have no information.

Yet.

 

 

Do Ghosts Roam Zoar Today?

Walk with me now as I explore the streets of historic Zoar. Leaves scutter ahead of me as wind whips them into an eery frenzy that portends ill for daring observers. Nonetheless I persevere. I have only limited time to explore the village. Rumor has it ghosts roam the village. Let's see if we can spy any.

Just ahead sits the tinshop.

Tinsmiths fashioned sheets of tin into:

cups
plattters
pitchers
bowls
jugs
lanterns
ladles
scoops
pots
floor sifters
cookie cutters and more.

 I wonder if the ancient tinsmith is working today. Let's go in, shall we?

 

 

 

 

Looks like he's busy so let's move on.

We pass by the magazine.

Wonder what that was? I'll tell you. Each week on Monday afternoon at exactly 1300 hours (1 pm in our time), housewives lined up to receive the supplies for their household, carefully measured out so no one received more than she needed. After all, the Separatists were all equal with each other.

Let's go through the garden to the greenhouse. Separatists started seedling in the spring, stored valued plants in the winter, and raised citrus fruit year round, without knowing they were saving themselves from scurvy, a scourge in the early 1800s.

On the road outside the garden, I see the ghosts of Zoar past. Do you?

 

 

 

 

 

Interview with Historical Mystery Writer Priscilla Royal

This week it's my pleasure to interview historical mystery writer, Priscilla Royal, whose books feature the 13th century lives of English religious. Her books are some of my favorites!

1) "A Killing Season" is the 8th book in your Prioress Eleanor/Brother Thomas series. What inspired you to write about medieval England?

We see what we are taught to see, which is not always the same as reality. We think the medieval period was an era of violence, bigotry, religiosity, plagues, and ignorance. Those words might depict it—or perhaps they describe our own world best. It was also a time of thoughtful people, great literature, fine music and complex human relationships that often ran counter to conventional wisdom. The more I read about the era, the more it seemed to resemble our own time. Perhaps it has much to teach us. Why did I choose medievalEnglandin particular? The short answer is that I grew up inCanadaand got a lot of English history.

2) You must do a tremendous amount of research to capture the era so well in your writing. Tell us how you do it?

I have a large library and read a lot. I am not a professional historian, but the word amateur means "one who loves". I do love history and respect those who spend their lives studying the details. Since I have a fondness for the little known, often quirky, facts, I love finding the unexpected. The Order of Fontevraud, for example, was a double house of monks and nuns run by a woman in a world that said women were an inferior design and ought not to rule any man. When I find something like this, my curiosity sparks. I want to know why this was allowed and what it meant about the society. Of course, people haven't changed, only their language, symbols, and superficial fashions. When the unacceptable has a practical purpose, we will always find a way to justify it.

3) I think you said you had never been to the area inEnglandthat is the setting for your stories. How do you imagine it so accurately?

I don't fly. Writing historicals makes it easier to get around this. East Angliatoday is not East Angliaof 700 years ago. There was the Little Ice Age and subsequent climate changes. Coastlines, riverbeds, flora, fauna, the smell of the air, and general landscapes are quite different. Friends have provided details for me, especially in "Justice for the Damned" which takes place in Amesbury. I love the Weather Channel and Google Earth. People also post their vacation photos online which often provides vivid images of historical places. But the most important thing to remember is that we all experience our environments in the same way. I just finished a Finnish novel where the characters were miserably hot in summer. Hot in Helsinki? I also grew up in the 1950s above the 49th Parallel, saw the Northern Lights, understand long summer days and short winter ones, saw the night sky without the disruption of city lights, and experienced a world with almost untouched wildlife and forests. Yes, I have to spend more time researching, but I also use my own experience of a lost world to make another lost world real.

4) What did you do before writing historical mysteries?

I majored in World and Comparative Literature with the plan of teaching in college. To my horror, I found I have severe stage fright, not a good thing if one wants to teach. So I dropped out of graduate school and spent the next 30+ years working for the Social Security Administration in claims, appeals, disability, staff work, and some management. (A fine literary tradition: both Pushkin and Trollope were civil servants.) When I realized my career had ended, I chose to go back to my life passions of reading, writing, and the study of history. Publication was an unexpected delight.

5) What are you working on now?

Many know that Edward I expelled all Jewish families from Englandin 1292. As was true with the twentieth century Holocaust, however, there was a steady and escalating promulgation of anti-Semitic policies preceding that event. In 1275, he signed The Statute of the Jewry, which required everyone of Jewish faith to relocate to certain cities, called archa towns. He also ordered them to wear yellow badges, banned them from practicing usury, and said they must become merchants, farmers, craftsmen or soldiers. My next book deals with this event.

Thank you for your time and I'll look forward to reading the next one!

Treating the Insane: The Past is Stranger than Fiction

This week I've asked Randy Attwood, author of Crazy About You, to blog about how patients with mental illness were treated in bygone days.

Treating the Mentally Ill
 When Dante was writing The Divine Comedy, the insane were believed to be possessed and were burned at the stake. In The Divine Comedy the word "bizarre" first appeared to describe a madman.

When Galileo was proving that the Earth went around the Sun, the insane were given holy water to drink from a church bell. If that didn't work, they were burned at the stake. Want to guess how many times it worked?

About the time that Heidelberg and Cologne Universities were founded, Bethlehem Hospital in London became an institution for the insane. It was so poorly funded that its inmates were given licenses to go begging for food. The hospital was such an ungoverned mess that the way Bethlehem was pronounced, Bedlam, became a word for uncontrolled madness.

In the years Shakespeare was writing his plays, you could take your family on an outing for six-pence and view the madhouse chamber of horrors where the restrained violent, often egged on by visitors, would snap and snarl at you, or you could be entertained by inmates who believed they were Oliver Cromwell, Julius Caesar, and even the Virgin Mary. Great laughs.

In France, while Lavoisier was proving that air was a mixture of mostly oxygen and nitrogen, the inspector general of French hospitals reported that thousands of lunatics were locked up in prisons without anyone even thinking of administering the slightest remedy. The half-mad mingled with the totally deranged. Some were in chains. Some were free to roam. He called them the step-children of life.

While Harvey was developing his proof of circulation, the inmates at Bedlam were used as guinea pigs. At the end of each May they were all bled, then made to vomit weekly, then purged. The attendants (much less the inmates!) must have dreaded that time of the year.

Into the beginning of the 1800s, when John Dalton introduced the atomic theory into chemistry, the insane were treated with such loony cures as plasters of mashed up Spanish fly, or had the veins in the forehead cut so the head could be bled, removing the insane spirits, presumedly. Later, on an opposite theory, inmates were strapped in a chair called the gyrator that spun the inmate around so more blood would circulate to his head.

In the Soviet Union they tried prolonged sleep therapy on the insane. America used hydrotherapy, placing agitated patients in hot water for days so that blood flow increased to the body's largest organ, its skin, thus lowering respiration and blood pressure and creating a state of relaxation.

In the 1930s the increase of admissions of patients diagnosed as schizophrenic was so high it was theorized there must be a schizococcus germ that could pass on schizophrenia to an offspring.

The Nazis tested methods of mass murder first on mental patients before they applied them to other undesirable populations. At the start of the Third Reich there were 200,000 patients in mental hospitals. At the end of the Third Reich there were 20,000. An interesting twist in early Nazi civilization is that it was deemed humanitarian to euthanize incurable mental patients, but not Jews. Jews were considered subhuman and so not worthy of euthanization.

One attempted treatment for schizophrenia, as well as depression and psychosis, was — what many people regarded as a kind of euthanasia — the lobotomy. Its main American proponent, Dr. Walter Freeman, would make driving trips across America to stop at state hospitals and perform the procedure he had simplified to the point he felt that a sterile field wasn't even necessary. First you anesthetized the patient with electro-shock, rolled back his eyelid, place the tip of instrument, a leucotome, which was a modified ice pick, against his tear duct (which is 98 percent sterile) and drove it through his eye socket with a hammer whack, shoved it into the brain and wiggled it around. Forty-thousand people were lobotomized between 1945 and 1955 in America. In 1949, the Portuguese doctor who first did lobotomies was the co-winner of the Nobel prize for medicine and was cited for discovering the value of freeing the brain from the disturbing effects of its pre-frontal lobes.

So…who were the crazy people??

 

Who Were the Separatists?

Bimeler cabin

Fear of the authorities runs deep for the people who called themselves Separatists. And no wonder.

King Frederick II came to the throne in 1806 in Wurttemberg, Germany and promptly abolished the constitution, taxed the inhabitants mercilessly, forced them to fight in unwinnable wars, and heaped cruel punishments on dissenters.

All the while, the Lutheran church kept silent. And, in 19th century Germany, the church and the state were one. That is, all schools and churches were Lutheran; public schools free of religion didn't exist.

So when a small group of believers declined to send their children to school, refused to fight for the king, and held religious services in their homes, they were punished. How? Let me count the ways!

They were forcibly taken to church services.
Their children were taken away and placed in orphanages.
Their property was confiscated and they were thrown out into the street.
They were imprisoned in dungeons, flogged, and forced to work at hard labor.

Finally, in 1817 Joseph Bimeler (my distant grandfather), with the help of Quakers in England and Philadelphia, led 300 courageous believers across the Atlantic to the New World. They called themselves the Society of Separatists because they'd separated from the Lutheran church (no offense to today's Lutherans!) and named their village Zoar for the place where Lot found sanctuary just as they did in America. Shortly after arriving in the then-wilderness, they realized that many of the women and older people couldn't survive on their own so they decided to become communal, combining and sharing their assets from that day forward.

In a few short years these hard-working settlers had tamed the wilderness into productive agricultural farmland, built homes and established businesses—a flour mill, saw mill, wool factory, iron furnaces, tannery, foundry, garden, hotel, and livery. For themselves, they built a sewing house, weaving house, bakery, cobbler shop, blacksmith shop, cabinet shop, dairy, barns, and store. When they completed the seven miles of the Ohio Canal that came through their land, they paid off their mortgage with the proceeds.

Their success was due in large part to their early period of celibacy that freed the women (who outnumbered men two to one) to work alongside the men. After marriage was again allowed and children were born, once more they needed the women's help in the fields and shops. Later, to free the women from childrearing, they established dormitories to house the children, who lived in them from the age of three until fourteen when they left to become apprentices to whatever work they were assigned. The children never returned home again.

Thus, the Society prospered, selling their goods up and down the Ohio Canal, and attracting wealthy visitors from nearby Canton and Cleveland to their hotel and traders to their Canal Inn. But their very success was also their downfall, bringing the outside world into their sheltered community.

Later, the civil war divided the settlers. The younger men, like other German immigrants, fought for the Union, violating the community's pacifist beliefs. Then the railroad brought more visitors and the industrial revolution made their hand-made goods obsolete. Finally, in 1898, the Society disbanded, dividing the property among the remaining members. Zoar remains an active historical village today.

But all was not perfect in this Garden of Eden. Why? Joseph Bimeler, who was both their secular and religious leader, kept tight control over the community, even retaining the deed to their entire property—more than 5000 acres—in his own name. A woman in Philadelphia was so incensed by his behavior that she warned her fellow Quakers about him. "Bimeler," she said, "has so infatuated them that they look on him as another Moses." So, as time passed, the Society soon became just as rigid and just as authoritarian and just as restrictive as the religion they had fled.

This is when my stories begin.

 

Medical Care in the 19th Century-Part Two

Blood letting machine

Last week I blogged about the illnesses that 19th century people suffered along with what they thought caused them to become sick. This week's blog will reveal the treatments they endured.

Because illness was believed to result in internal weakness (or sin) or that the external environment had invaded the body, aggressive treatment was designed to rid the body of its noxious incursions. Blood-letting, purging, and puking were the preferred treatments.

Blood letting, Purging, and Puking

Blood letting relieved excess blood and returned the flow to normal, it was thought. This was such an accepted belief that the reason women were believed to have fewer illnesses is because they bled regularly. To relieve pressure in the blood, the doctor lanced a blood vessel and often used glass cup to produce a vacuum to draw the blood out. Blood-sucking leeches might also be used. Often the patient would faint from the blood loss, assuring the patient and the doctor that the treatment was indeed successful.

The goal of purging was to evacuate the bowels, another way of ridding the body of unwelcome invaders. If a cathartic, using such body-damaging medicines as mercury (called calomel), wasn't successful, enemas would be given until the body had been flushed of all contaminants.

Puking was induced by several means. Ipecacuanha root (known today as ipecac) crushed into a powder or lobelia bark, also powdered, were administered in a tincture. If nothing else was available, warm salt water could induce vomiting. Again, every bit of disease must be eliminated from the body.

Medicines and Pain

Powerful medicines were believed to be necessary to combat powerful illnesses. Mercury again was a favorite. Producing dramatic effects, such as headaches, tremors, and loosened teeth, patients were certain that they were receiving potent care. Mercury poisoning was not unusual. In fact, Louisa May Alcott is believed to have died in 1888 of mercury poisoning from the mercury she'd received for a bout of typhoid in 1863.

Pain was another sign that the medicine was potent. Patients persisted in downing medicines even realizing they suffered from its ill effects. Thank goodness for opium! Opium, and its form in a tincture, laudanum, was commonly and legally available. Opium masked symptoms so patients felt grateful relief.

Opium and alcohol were also the basis of patented medicines, promoted to cure every ailment, including venereal diseases, tuberculosis, or "female complaints." It wasn't until 1906 when Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, forcing manufacturers of patent medicines to reveal their ingredients and discontinue false advertising claims, that the widespread use of patent medicines ceased.

Herbs and Homeopaths

Medical treatment in the unsettled parts of America (and most of the country was unsettled in the early 19th century) was especially arduous, albeit they were often spared the rigorous administrations of medical doctors (licensed as early as 1811 in Ohio). Care often fell to a local midwife who administered herbal substances. Recipes were handed down through families and communities and often helped. My character, Adelaide, is a midwife and herbalist in 1830s Ohio.

Homeopaths also treated 19th century patients. Homeopathy was promoted by a German physician, Samuel Hahnemann in the 18th century. Hahnemann observed that cinchona bark, used to treat malaria, induced symptoms of malaria. Thus, he surmised that inducing symptoms with highly diluted preparations would cause the patient's own vital force to expel the disease. He called this the law of similars. There is no scientific evidence that the treatment was effective. Again, patients were spared energetic medical treatments and may have recovered on their own. The leader of Zoar, Joseph Bimeler, who appears in my stories, was trained in homeopathy in Germany before emigrating to America.

Surgery, Anesthetics, and Antiseptics

Surgery in the early 19th century was crudely done (usually by a barber), often unsuccessful (that is, the patient died), and excruciatingly painful. As the century progressed, however, use of anesthetics emerged to sedate the patient during the operation, carbolic acid was used as an antiseptic to prevent infection, and German surgeons used steam heat to sterilize instruments. Surgery continued to advance as the 20th century dawned.

In the end, the people who survived were sturdy stock. Many of us owe our good health to our robust ancestors.

Curious about next week's blog? That's when you'll learn about the early 19th century settlers who populate my stories.

Medical care in the 19th century-Part One

As a nurse for more than 25 years, I've seen my share of changes in medical care. From starched white uniforms, paper files, and long hospital stays to casual scrub suits, electronic records, and one-day surgeries, change has characterized the medical and nursing professions. But, as I began my quest to learn about 19th century medicine, nothing prepared me for the difference between then and now.

Let's start with what diseases were called. You might not recognize these today. According to a mortality schedule, the causes of death in Tuscarawas County, Ohio in 1850 included dropsy, flux, canker, apoplexy, spasms and my favorite, "no opening." Other than the last one (I can only guess at that!), here's what we call those diseases today:

Dropsy—edema, usually from cardiac failure
Flux—diarrhea caused by dysentery
Canker—inflammation caused by infection (remember, no antibiotics existed then)
 Apoplexy—unconsciousness caused by a stroke
 Consumption—tuberculosis
 Ague—malaria

So we've come a long way. Now we have diagnoses confirmed by symptoms, lab tests, x-rays, CT scans, and MRIs. We know what causes most diseases, how to prevent many (vaccines anyone?), and how to treat most others. We're not perfect. Cancer, heart disease, and strokes still kill.

But we think we're pretty smart. Just knowing the cause directs researchers to the cure. Back then people thought they knew what caused illness, too.

Internal Causes

The cause of disease, it was believed, was inside the person. Those who became ill were weak. Or unclean. Or they sinned and God brought on their illness to punish them. Remember Job of the Bible? God tested him. With that example in mind, religious folks admonished the sick to admit their sins and ask God for forgiveness. But what if they didn't get well? I guess God wasn't satisfied with their confession.

External Causes

The outdoors brought on many illnesses, according to 19th century Americans. The night air was filled with miasmas, poisonous, foul-smelling, dark-colored vapors that held malevolent power. Mists rose from the ground (or more likely, stagnant water) like wicked sprites to creep over the land and threaten the populace with their toxic fumes.

Nineteenth century Americans lived in fear of the miasmas. The solution was to keep inside with tightly-closed windows no matter how hot it was. (I wonder how many died of heat stroke instead.) Miasmas weren't everywhere, though. Some locales were known for them and travelers were admonished to take care to avoid any place where they saw fog.

What illness did they fear miasmas brought? Everything! Any illness after exposure to night air was thought caused by it.  What 19th century people didn't believe was that illness traveled from person to person. It rose up out of their surroundings instead.

But they were wrong.

Though not entirely. Germ theory evolved during the late 19th century but antisepsis to prevent diseases from germs lagged behind. Florence Nightingale, the founder of contemporary nursing, insisted on cleanliness, especially rigorous hand washing, when caring for the wounded during the Crimean War in 1854. Her patients improved but still it would be years until the medical community would be confined that they could prevent the spread of disease by something as simple as washing their hands. (This problem still exists today in modern hospitals where lack of adequate hand washing, among other safety problems, causes thousands of deaths each year, according to the Institute of Medicine.)

But don't be too quick to dismiss 19th century beliefs. Blame the victim is still true today. If he hadn't smoked, drank, overate,  etc., he wouldn't have cancer, cirrhosis, or heart disease. That's not entirely wrong but, remember, even people who never smoked, exercise, and eat healthy still die. There's no getting out of it.

You think what you've read so far is bad? This is the first part of a two-part blog on medical care in the 19th century. Come back next week to hear how they treated illness. Then you'll be exceedingly glad to be living in the 21st century!