Monroe's Early Medical Women: Counterfeiting and Quack Medicine
Regular readers will by now know Monroe, WI as the nation’s Lincoln-era headquarters for distributing NYC-sourced counterfeit bills. Between late 1857 and the summer of 1871 the “Bonelatta Gang” reigned over this undertaking, utilizing contacts with Salmon P. Chase (as in the namesake of Chase Manhattan Bank) to defraud the nation via the NYC publishing industry and with President Lincoln’s blessing.
The 19th century’s counterfeiting subculture was not an isolated criminal world; there were certain synergies with other illicit industries. For instance, street-walking prostitutes, who’d typically already made expenditures on fine clothing, would sometimes masquerade as middle-class women to “pass” counterfeit bills on trusting tradesmen or as change to johns. Conversely, career criminals often binged their criminal incomes in bordellos where neither they nor the madame were above “passing the queer”. Horse-theft— sometimes on a colossal scale— was also allied to counterfeiting because both undertakings relied on the same distribution networks and were cash-in-hand businesses.
Perhaps one of the most surprising synergies with the “queer note” trade was that of quack medicine. Wherever one found note-forgers, one also found men who claimed to have legitimate medical degrees which they did not in fact possess. Examples include Joseph Smith Jr’s land agent in Nauvoo, Illinois named “Dr.” Isaac Galland. According to Galland’s acquaintances in Iowa’s newspaper industry [Secret Combinations, Melonakos]:
Galland had been in jail in Mexico and driven out of Edgar County, Illinois for counterfeiting. It was said that what knowledge of medicine he possessed had been gained while in jail for counterfeiting.
Also part of the Mormon counterfeiting gang in Nauvoo was John C Bennett, an ally from the Kirtland Safety Society debacle, who Smith made mayor of “God’s Kingdom” in Illinois. The pair eventually had a falling out and Bennett made public denunciations against “the prophet”. Prior to this conflict however, Bennett became infamous by selling bogus medical degrees around the nation [commissioning another Mormon gang member Eber D. Howe to print the certificates] and falsely claiming to be a United States Army surgeon.
These medical charlatans were working at an opportune time, as Western medicine was only a few decades into shedding the influence of Hermeticism and attempting to re-define itself on a scientific basis. The confusion resulting from this process gave ample chance for older, belief-based treatments like hypnotism or medicines based on the “doctrine of signatures” idea to be repackaged as ‘scientific’ to the uneducated public. Practitioners of homeopathy were more than usually adept at getting their beliefs represented on the boards of supposedly science-orientated medical schools of the period.
Given the prostitution/counterfeiting/quack-medicine connection, readers will not be surprised to learn that no less than three of Monroe, Wisconsin hotel/whiskey saloon/??? operator Almira Humes’ female descendants became “homeopathic doctors”. In the 1860s daughter-in-law Dr. Ann Sherman Churchill (wife of Almira’s son Norman Churchill) legitimately got her homeopathic medical degree, as did two two grand-daughters in the 1880s, Dr. Helen Bingham and Dr. Ada Bingham (daughters of Caroline Churchill and Arabut Ludlow’s banking partner John Augustine Bingham).
Homeopathic medicine is a pseudo-scientific system of alternative medicine that emerged in Saxony in the 1790s— not long after faith in the first “big pharma”, the Pietist Medikamente Expedition in Halle (now part of Saxony-Anhalt), an international hermetic pharmaceutical concern, had collapsed leaving a lacuna in the market for painless treatments for rich people. Dr. Samuel Hahnemann was homeopathy’s founder and promoter and like most alchemists the focus of his education was actually on ancient Semitic languages, not medicine as moderns understand it. One simply had to read to the Hebrew, for example, of these magical medical texts (or believably claim to be able to read it) in order to hang out one’s shingle as a ‘doctor’.
Dr. Samuel Hahnemann
The essential principle of homeopathy is that “like treats like”— a twist on the ancient “doctrine of signatures” theory that has its roots in Ancient Greek medicine/magical thinking. Taking old hermetic magic-medical ideas and repackaging them slightly had been a mainstay of medicine around the world for millenia by the time Hahnemann entered the business.
It is interesting that German Central Europe, which lead the way in bringing science to the medical profession, was also the genesis of the most persistent and widely-accepted unscientific medical treatments, like homeopathy and psychoanalysis.
There were many quack medical practices current in the 19th century— some sanctified by the mainstream medical community and some not. Homeopathy is notable for the amount of acceptance it received despite the poverty of scientific evidence supporting its claims. For instance, in the 1860-1880 period, one could get a degree as a homeopathic physician from both the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Boston University Medical School! This wasn’t because medical men of the period didn’t understand the scientific method; it was because a lot of important people chose to believe in homeopathy’s ability to cure, including the British Royal family. Homeopathy was ‘upwardly moble’ quackery. Medical historian Irvine Loudon elucidates:
But a major change in irregular [medical] practice occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century when, as an orthodox practitioner remarked: ‘the old-fashioned quack with his farrago of receipts ... this class of practitioner is fast coming to a close.’ It [old medical quackery] was being replaced by ‘literate and educated empirics who read books.’ This remark signalled the emergence of a new form of unorthodox medicine, which formed the basis of what is today called CAM [complementary and alternative medicine, of which homeopathy is a branch].
The essence of the change was a rebellion against orthodox medical science as taught and practised in the teaching hospitals, and the introduction of a series of radically different but all-embracing beliefs on the nature and treatment of disease. The empirical quack continued in the background and still exists today, although in an attenuated form. But the new irregulars—the literate ‘book-reading’ practitioners—were usually educated men and often medically qualified.
Homeopathy was a type of faith-healing practiced by people who already had some money, e.g. enough to pay for a medical degree. Very early on in the United States, homeopathic practitioners organized themselves in the same way orthodox doctors created professional organizations. Homeopaths expelled more crude quacks from their ranks and were quick to publish materials which supported their world-view. They were sophisticated in the way they marketed themselves to the public. Even today criticism of homeopathy— despite the innate implausibility of its claims— can bring strong emotions from its supporters. (Who are quick to point out the many faults of orthodox Western medicine.) Interestingly, at the same time homeopathy flourished among the moneyed classes, so did interest in older forms of occult thinking, like Renaissance Hermeticism and fashionable (if sanitized) South East Asian philosophies: what I would call part of the “Picatrix” world-view.
Homeopathy found an eager audience among New Englanders, who then transmitted it to the American Midwest. The huge role that faith played in settling the United States, particularly the sometimes uneducated and anchorless faith of religious zealots, made frontier medicine a crucible for unscientific faith-based medical treatments.
Frontier medicine was also a favored ‘front’ for foreign espionage agents, including Lincoln’s henchman Henry Boernstein. Boernstein, a subject of Franz Joseph in Austria-Hungary, agitated with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud’s in-laws in Paris during the lead up to the 1848 Revolutions, before fleeing to the Middle West in 1849 to practice as a “water-cure doctor” in Highland, Illinois— a border town snuggled up to counterfeiting hot-spot St. Louis, Missouri. Boernstein never practiced any type of medicine in Europe.
The mysterious Heinrich Boernstein.
The “water-cure” method, also called “hydrotherapy”, was another fashionable, unscientific form of medical therapy that gained a foothold in the North Eastern USA and Europe. It was a form of alternative medicine that aimed to induce a curing “crisis” by exposing the patient to hot or cold water in different ways. Showmanship was always a big part of these cures.
Images showing hydrotherapy techniques which would have been practiced by Boernstein. Hydrotherapy was typically used to treat mental disorders— forcing out “impurities” with pure water: ideas firmly based in medicine’s hermetic underworld.
While State-side, Boernstein published inflammatory tracts designed to set Protestant and Catholic German-Americans against each other, particularly through attacking Jesuit institutions. (The Jesuits were adversaries of the Hapsburgs by the time of Franz Joseph’s reign.) Boernstein supported the fledgling Republican Party just like the Monroe Bonelattas, while running a hotel, several saloons, a brewery and a theater in St. Louis. His newspaper enterprise, Anzeiger des Westens, supported the late-career-resurgence of Missouri’s Lincoln-aligned Democrat, Thomas Hart Benton— which would have divided (hence weakened) the Democratic Party, which largely supported States’ Rights and slaveholding.
This 1887 woodcut of Boernstein’s Anzeiger des Westens building in St. Louis, MO shows what an extremely well-capitalized institution Boernstein built prior to his repatriating.
During the Civil War, Boernstein worked for Lincoln running concentration camps in Texas for Americans accused of siding with the seceding Southern States (which they had a constitutional right so to do). Having done Lincoln’s dirty work in Texas, Boernstein ran back to Vienna where Franz Joseph awarded him directorship of the Theater in der Josephstadt, one of the preeminent theatrical state mouthpieces in his empire. Regular readers will know Franz Joseph as the state supporter of global organized sex-trafficking— “The White Slave Trade—” whose wife had a curious prostitute fetish.
The synergy between medicine and the seedier side of publishing goes much farther back than the 1800s, however. During the “englightenment” era in Europe, when imperial houses like the Hapsburgs and Bourbons surreptitiously supported illegal presses that published anti-aristocrat and anti-church “enlightenment” literature, it was medical doctors who were disproportionately investors in these publishing undertakings, particularly Diderot’s infamous Encyclopédie. An important distribution network for this work was the Société typographique de Neuchâtel, a Swiss concern which published pornography and political reform materials and which ultimately received its funding from the Prussian Emperor Frederich II. [See The Business of the Enlightenment by Robert Darnton] Absolutist rulers wanted to use ‘enlightenment’ politics to undermine their foreign rivals and their domestic power-sharing partners: the church and native aristocracies. For hundreds of years the Western medical community has been at the forefront of “progressive politics”, imperialism and despotism.
[If readers are interested in how the Hapsburgs used pandemic scares to crush political dissent, please see my post Rainer Hapsburg: The ‘bicycling’ Archduke?]
Franz Joseph’s ‘man in St. Louis’ was part of an unsavory medical phenomenon which persisted for decades after he fled to Vienna’s theaters. Indeed Midwestern medicine remained a profitable avenue for medical charlatans for long after authorities had come to grips with domestic counterfeiters. In the 1880s one of the few places Sigmund Freud could publish his unscientific ‘research’ promoting the use of cocaine was via St. Louis’s leading medical publishing venue, The Saint Louis Medical and Surgical Journal. Freud wrote his professionally embarrassing paper Ueber Coca at the behest of Europe’s dominant cocaine supplier, the Merck pharmaceutical company, which contributed to Freud’s poor reputation among his educated contemporaries. Freud engaged in the cocaine business as part of his lucrative practice selling warmed-over hermetic therapies to “hysterical” women in Vienna’s rich Jewish community. Indeed in the 19th century Renaissance Hermeticism-inspired ‘cures’ found willing buyers the world over.
This impulse had its expression here in Monroe, WI too. From our earliest days, Monroe was home to a number of medical practitioners who modern people would comfortably label as “quacks”, but who were politically connected enough to be accepted into the mainstream medicine of their day despite powerful trends toward scientific medicine in the profession. Almira Humes’ grand-daughters were rich enough, and of the right moral disposition, to exploit this situation.
I’ve written previously how 19th century prostitutes were massive consumers of medicines because their profession exposed them to infections which even the scientifically-minded doctors of the time were unable to cure. As uneducated, poorly-protected and desperate patients, prostitutes were ideal and chronic consumers of both the ‘scientific’ and the quack medicine alike. Itinerant doctors like the Shallenberger Brothers were ideally placed to profit from this market, as were homeopathic practitioners, particularly women, who had intimate access to female patients in a way that contemporary men did not. Exploitation knows no gender.
Almira’s girls were not the only female medical practitioners in Monroe, we had an Englishwoman named Hannah C. Bennett who obtained her medical degree from the Women’s Medical College in Chicago in 1876. (Hannah’s maiden name was Russell, she married one Felix Bennett who came from Ohio at around the time the Ohio Miners were moving westward.) In addition, we had a “psychometrical physician” named Mrs. E. J. Hand who’d been in business since the 1850s. What a “psychometrical physician” meant at this time is unclear, psychometrics was in its infancy, but she probably took body measurements, attributed ailments to ‘imbalances’ and prescribed her own remedies.
Altogether, our town both enjoyed and suffered from a varied mix of medical businesswomen, not atypical of those present in other Midwestern communities of their day.
