Medicine on Arizona's Frontier

IN SEPTEMBER 1851, the Sitgreaves Expedition surveyed along Arizonas 35th parallel to find a route from New Mexico to California. Among other firsts, U.S. Army Capt. Lorenzo Sitgreaves' report to the U.S. Congress included a scientific description of a rattlesnake bite, witnessed by the expedition's doctor, Samuel Woodhouse, firsthand. His hand, actually. Like many doctors who accompanied frontier expeditions, Woodhouse doubled as a naturalist, collecting new species. One "fine specimen" objected, striking him on the finger.

Woodhouse responded with an arsenal of cures: cutting and sucking, using a tourniquet and drinking or applying a succession of ammonia, colocynth (bitter apple), ipecac, opium, potassium iodide, iodine, peppermint water, flaxseed poultice, Seidlitz powder, magnesia calci and-the frontier favorite-as much whiskey as he could drink. He recovered from the bite, and even from the remedies, while dutifully recording every step. The drama's supporting player-the rattlesnake -was destined for the 5-year-old Smithsonian Institution, one of several museums that studied Western species the way our generation pored over moon rocks. Men who were drawn to the Territory to practice medicine had a thirst for adventureor other reasons for wanting to leave Eastern society. Dr. Charles Winter Woods, for example, who was of mixed racial backround, found acceptance in the copper camp of Jerome. Some doctors hoped to find gold and hung out their shingles while waiting for the big strike. Others, like Woodhouse, contracted with the military because they wanted to explore the new Territory in the interest of science.

Woodhouse's medical report recounted instances of influenza, fevers, cholera, dysentery, diarrhea (after soldiers resorted to eating their pack mules), colic, five arrow wounds and two head injuries (one man clubbed by Indians, another hit by a rock in a fracas among the expedition members). Once more, the doctor was among the patients, struck by an arrow in the thigh while warming himself by the campfire at dawn.

Woodhouse bled the men with headwounds, removed an arrowhead with tooth forceps and dispensed the various powders and tinctures an Army doctor carried along with his scalpels and bone saws. During the 1850s and 1860s, the relation of germs to illness was still theoretical, not yet replacing the belief that miasma-unhealthy air-caused disease. Aseptic surgery was a thing of the future. Bleeding and purging were standard treatments, and amputation the solution for shattered bones.

Although many physicians on the frontier were trained in the sciences or in battlefield treatments, practicing medicine in early Arizona often required improvisation and courage. Snakebites, arrow and bullet wounds, horrific mining accidents and devastating epidemics challenged doctors like Elliot Coues, an Army surgeon who once operated with his patient literally over a barrel while flies buzzed around.

Like Woodhouse, Coues collected specimens during his tenure in Arizona, but some never made it to the East. While accompanying a supply column bound from New Mexico to Prescott's Fort Whipple in 1864, Coues preserved his amphibian and reptilian detainees in a 5-gallon keg of alcohol. The soldiers loading the wagon where the keg was stored sniffed out its main ingredient and slyly drained it into their canteens over the longjourney, blithely unaware of the snakes, liz-ards, toads and other creepy-crawlies float-ing inside.

As quartermaster C.A. Curtis recalled, the “chronic bibulants” looked “decidedly pale about the gills when the head of the empty keg was smashed in and the pickled con-tents exposed to view.”

To his dismay, Coues was twice stationed at Fort Whipple. He pleaded with a men-tor: “Don't let me spend another fall or win-ter here, if you can help it...! The shiftless, loaferish life that an officer must spend on the frontier is fast making me forget what little of anything I ever did know.” Though most medical colleges offered only a year or two of instruction before issuing a diploma, the Army held its medical officers to the highest standards. To become a member of that elite corps, a candidate was required to know not only medicine but also Latin, Greek and other languages; algebra, trigo-nometry and calculus; mineralogy, conchology (the study of shells), botany and physics.

If he passed the Army's weeklong exam, he could compete for a commission as an officer. Congress doled these out in severely limited numbers after the Civil War. When Walter Reed faced the examining board in 1875, he was one of 500 candidates competing for 30 positions. Reed's posting to Tucson's malaria-ridden Fort Lowell spurred his interest in epidemics. At Fort Lowell he argued for a later reveille to minimize expo-sure to the miasmic morning air. His scientific reasoning was also taxed by such mysteries as the chronic diarrhea of one Private Kelly who, Reed finally deduced, was eating the washroom soap to avoid active duty.

In addition to overseeing sick call, Army surgeons were responsible for bookkeeping, maintaining the post garden, recording the daily weather and making sanitary inspec-tions. Coues added collecting and writing to these duties. He labored over a 2,500-page manuscript on Arizona's natural history, and then burned it after a colleague's lukewarm review. He went on to publish approximately a thousand articles, books and papers in his lifetime, including a treatise on arrow wounds, and became a nationally promi-nent ornithologist, scientist and historian. “Altogether too spicy for comfort,” said Coues about collecting in Arizona. Colleague and rival Dr. Edward Palmer (think of the lovely balloon flower, Penstemon palmeri) likely agreed. En route to Camp Lincoln (later named Fort Verde) to begin his post as acting assistant surgeon, Palmer's wagon went up in smoke during a skirmish with Apaches on Grief Hill. On another trip over the accursed hill, Palmer broke his leg. Later, he contracted malaria (treated by a local set-tler, since the doctor was indisposed). After further trials, Palmer left the Army, but he returned twice more to Arizona as a botanist; his 1876 collections weighed 10 tons, The Arizona Citizen reported.

Army doctors were sometimes more sol-diers than scientists. Irish-born Bernard J.

D. Irwin, an assistant surgeon, received the Medal of Honor for leading a handpicked detachment to assist Lt. George Bascom's ill-fated company at Apache Pass in 1861.

Dr. Leonard Wood, another Medal of Honor recipient, carried dispatches through hostile territory during the Apache cam-paign of 1886, riding 70 miles in one night, then walking more than 30 miles the next day. For weeks he commanded an infantry company pursuing Geronimo's band. (He later ran for president, losing his 1920 bid for the Republican nomination to Warren Harding.) The alternative to Army surgeons-often the only doctors for hundreds of miles-was self-treatment with patent medicines (ranging from harmless sugar-water to addictive concoctions containing alcohol, opium or heroin) or dubious “granny cures.” Consider this one, recorded by Territorial historian Sharlot Hall: “For asthma, take rat-tlesnake grease, 5 drops for adults.” Other folk remedies included cockroach tea for lockjaw, poultices of fresh manure for pneumonia and frogs mashed in butter for tonsillitis. With home remedies so grim, it's no wonder people undertook desperate rides over long distances to fetch the post doctor.

Doctors recorded horrifying living conditions in frontier Arizona, from flimsy shacks and poor food to boredom relieved by brawls.

“Usually a boy was sent for the doctor before the fight began because he would inevitably be needed. Once he arrived too late and a double burial took place,” said William T. Corbusier, whose father was surgeon at Camp Date Creek, near Prescott, and Fort Grant in the southeastern corner of the state. He was referring to a contest between two men tied together with only their knife hands free. The elder Corbusier, William Henry, also acted as doctor for the Rio Verde Indian Agency near Fort Verde in central Arizona. He studied native languages and often chose to work with the tribe's medicine men. A woman accused of practicing witchcraft on a dying

man came to Dr. Corbusier's door seeking protection. The man's friends intended to stone her to death. Corbusier asked to see the sick man and treated him for dysentery. Both man and "witch" survived.

In 1870, the care of Arizona Territory's 10,000 citizens fell to 11 military surgeons and 22 civilian doctors, though only five of the civilians practiced full time. Many of them combined medicine with mining, ranching or other occupations, and they could be a contrary bunch. For example, Dr. Edward Phelps, a U.S. marshal, was recognized for his heroic efforts during an 1870 smallpox epidemic in Tucson. He disappeared into Mexico months later with $12,000 in U.S. government funds. He never returned, which prompted rumors that he was murdered after flaunting his stolen bankroll.

Dr. John C. Handy, the first chancellor of University of Arizona in 1886, was an admired physician, despite his stormy personality. He challenged all doctors relocating to Tucson to present a diploma before setting up practice. He unsuccessfully sued the city when it stopped him from piping sewage from his house to the street. And, while serving at Fort Apache in 1879, he reportedly shot and killed the post trader over a woman. In a karmic twist of fate 22 years later, Handy was fatally wounded in a gun duel with the lawyer handling his wife's divorce.

Tucson's best doctors gathered at Handy's deathbed, waiting for Tombstone's "gunshot surgeon," George Goodfellow. Though operating on abdominal bullet wounds was almost unheard of in the 1800s, Goodfellow believed a patient destined to die slowly was better off with surgery, no matter how risky. He raced to Tucson by rail, taking the engine's throttle himself, but he arrived too late to save Handy.

Goodfellow stressed the importance of operating within the first hour after an abdominal gunshot wound, pointing out that "the toys with which our festive or obstreperous citizens delight themselves"

were deadlier than the smaller-caliber guns favored in the East. His willingness to forge new territory-and write about it -changed attitudes toward surgery. He pioneered the perineal prostatectomy (a technique for removing the prostate gland) and spinal anesthesia. After observing that silk kerchiefs often protected gunfighters from harm, he penned "Notes on the Impenetrability of Silk to Bullets."

Goodfellow also joined the war of words over Arizona's Gila monster. After experimenting with some very-short-lived chickens, Tucson's Dr. Handy pronounced the Gila monster's bite deadly. Dr. Edgar Mearns, stationed at Fort Verde, believed it wasn't, though he found the lizard's breath nauseating. Henry Yarrow, of the Smithsonian, backed Mearns, insisting bite victims died not from poison but from "the Arizona whiskey used in treatment." Goodfellow kept a dozen Gila monsters for scientific observation, and after surviving a bite on the hand in 1892, he too concluded (wrongly, of course) that the lizard was nonpoisonous.

This dashing surgeon and friend to the famous Earp brothers inspired the fictional Doc Peets in Alfred Henry Lewis's Wolfville tales. However, no character in a Western novel matched the real Dr. Goodfellow's boldness and flair. After a lynch mob stormed a Tombstone jail and hanged John Heith, the mastermind behind the December 1883 Bisbee Massacre, Dr. Goodfellow's expert testimony led the jury to find that Heith "came to his death from emphysema of the lungs-a disease common to high altitudes-which might have been caused by strangulation."

Below Heith's body, swinging from a telegraph pole on Tough Nut Street, the lynch mob attached a sign that read "ADVANCE ARIZONA." With the possibility of statehood on the horizon, Territorial citizens hoped to end Arizona's reputation of lawlessness.

Indeed, the close of the 19th century brought many changes to frontier medicine: stiffer certification requirements for doctors, legislation banning fraudulent patent medicines and traveling quacks, improved municipal sanitation, new hospitals, X-rays and vaccines.

But Arizona's frontier doctors didn't hang up their saddlebags without leaving a legacy behind. Some, like Woodhouse and his namesake toad (Bufo woodhousei), and Coues, whose name identifies the small whitetail deer of the Southwest, are immortalized in field guides. Others, like Mearns and Corbusier, contributed to the understanding of Arizona's native cultures. And many are remembered best in stories-apocryphal, amusing, heroic-told by grateful patients and communities, or preserved forever on library shelves.

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