Myth # 114: You had to have two opposing teeth to join the army in early America, so you could tear off the end of the cartridge.

John Hill, Supervisor of Military Programs for Colonial Williamsburg, lays this one to rest. “I have heard many reenactors note the need for two opposing teeth as part of their musket-firing interpretations.  Such a requirement isn’t mentioned in any of the drill manuals of the period.  I don’t recall seeing anything requiring two opposing teeth in any of the recruitment documents or officers’ guides.  It seems possible that a toothless soldier could have partially torn the musket cartridge in advance and then “gummed” it open or maybe even torn it open by hand. Tearing the cartridge in advance is seen as a safety hazard today, but I doubt if it would have been in the 18^th century.” Perhaps this started as a joke in the reenactment community and was taken seriously by some. 

Do Civil War sites hear this one too?

Another (minor) consideration: As far as dental health was concerned, things were not as bad as people are led to believe. There was much less sugar in the diet in the 17th and 18th centuries, largely because sugar was a luxury item and very expensive. Less sugar = fewer cavities = fewer rotten teeth.

Myth # 108: People slept sitting up for health reasons . . . which is why beds were shorter back then.

First refer to Myth #8 about short beds.

This week, we’ll deal with the sitting up part. This myth (which, I blush to disclose, I remember spreading back in the ’70s), often cites bad air as the reason for the belief that sleeping sitting up was healthier than lying down. Supposedly, bad air was heavier than fresh air, so sleeping with your head elevated kept your nose that much farther above the bad air.

Robin Kipps, supervisor of the Pasteur & Galt Apothecary in Williamsburg and an expert in early American medical issues, spent hours searching through volumes of 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century medical books before reporting, “There isn’t any evidence that [they thought] bad air was heavier or that they slept with their heads raised due to bad air. There is evidence that people slept with their heads elevated for medical reasons. If patients had an upper respiratory condition such as asthma or were recovering from a specific type of surgery, it was suggested that they sleep with their head elevated. Note it is not sitting up sleeping, it merely says with head raised.” Sharon Cotner, senior medical history interpreter at the Apothecary who has studied medical history for thirty years, found published medical information of the period suggested that “under normal conditions, people should sleep on their side, with knees bent and head raised. Not sitting up.”

Myth # 103: Anesthesia did not exist during the Civil War.

The National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, MD, tries to debunk the widespread medical myth that anesthesia did not exist during the Civil War.

Gaseous ether and chloroform were both widely available and their therapeutic impact was well known in both Union and Confederate medical services. (Both had been used since the 1840s.) Major surgery was carried out using these anesthetics if they were available. It is estimated that greater than 90% of all major surgery was carried out with anesthetics.  See http://www.civilwarmed.org/articles/myth_busters/

But neither ether nor chloroform was available before the 1840s, so Revolutionary War-era medical practices did not include the use of anesthetics.

Other medical misconceptions from the pre-anesthesia era abound. Ben Swenson, a historian and re-enactor who worked at Yorktown, VA, says visitors often approached him with incorrect assumptions. Something “we heard all the time that was patently false was that they would get soldiers rip roaring drunk before amputating an arm or a leg. There are actually a couple of misconceptions here. First, despite popular belief, they did not just take a hacksaw to peoples’ limbs. It was actually quite an intricate procedure involving skin and muscle knives, muscle retractors, saws, cauterizing irons, etc. And the alcohol thing is Hollywood history. Alcohol dilates the blood vessels and they knew that. They would not have wanted their patient to bleed to death. Besides, being drunk doesn’t dull the pain, it only changes your reaction to it. So no alcohol. And no again, they didn’t give someone a bullet to bite on…when someone cuts into you, you scream, and that bullet goes down the gullet. A stick would probably have been used to keep someone from biting his tongue off.”

So the absence of anesthesia is a myth if it’s said to pertain to the Civil War, but true during the Revolutionary War. 

Myth #4 Revisited: When men smoked, they often shared the same white clay pipe. For sanitary reasons, they would break off the tip before passing on the pipe.

While attending a conference for museum professionals in Annapolis, MD, recently, I learned something new about broken pipe stems that requires an addition to Myth #4. I learned from Tony Lindauer, Anne Arundel County archaeologist, that men did sometimes break off the tip of the pipe stem, although certainly not for sanitary reasons. Tony explained that as the hot, tar-filled tobacco smoke is sucked up the stem, it cools a little, and when it gets to the moist mouth, it cools significantly and solidifies. Soon a deposit of tar builds up inside the pipe stem near the mouth, blocking the bore. So a smoker might, indeed, need to break off an inch or so of the clogged tip to continue smoking. I’ve modified Myth #4 accordingly, as follows:

      ”. . . and that’s why archaeologists find so many bits of broken pipe stems in so many excavations.” 

      Well, it certainly makes sense to us today, with our knowledge of germs and the spread of disease.  But early Americans didn’t know about germs, and so it would not have occurred to them that sharing the same pipe was unsanitary.  Yet this myth has survived for decades, probably since someone applied modern logic to understand why historical archaeologists were unearthing thousands of bits of broken pipe stems. 

       And the real reason? The long slender stems of white clay pipes are fragile, as anyone who has handled a reproduction carelessly can attest.  Why did they make them so long then? They needed to be long so that the heat from the burning tobacco in the bowl of the pipe would not be conducted as far as the lips. Our forefathers did share pipes–and drinking vessels for that matter–but no one broke off the end for sanitary reasons. But there was one reason that might have prompted a colonial smoker to break off a small piece of pipe stem. Maryland archaeologist Tony Lindauer explains that as the hot, tar-filled tobacco smoke is sucked up the stem, it cools a little, and when it gets to the moist mouth, it cools significantly and solidifies. Eventually a deposit of tar builds up inside the pipe stem near the mouth, blocking the bore. So a smoker might, indeed, need to break off an inch of the clogged tip to continue smoking, rather than get a new pipe.        

Myth # 85: Prostitutes were so common around Gen. Joseph Hooker’s army that they became known as “hookers.”

General Joseph Hooker

According to this myth, there were so many prostitutes working around Union General Joseph Hooker’s army that they became known as “Hooker’s Division” or “Hooker’s Brigade” or simply “hookers.” The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang calls this story “popular fiction.”

The fly in the ointment is that the term was in use before the Civil War. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word had its origins as early as 1567 when it meant petty thief or pickpocket. (Other definitions include a person who fastened his clothing with hooks, like the Amish, a two-masted Dutch finishing vessel, and a rugby player, but we’ll ignore those.)

In America this synonym for prostitute dates back at least as far as 1845. It probably evolved from the conventional sense of hook, to lure and take or rob, qualities associated with prostitutes. John Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms of 1859 defines a hooker as a strumpet and says it comes from the New York  neighborhood known as Corlear’s Hook, where there were lots of prostitutes. That’s probably another myth. 

Since “hooker” already meant prostitute by the time of the Civil War, it was an obvious joke to refer to the prostitutes around General Hooker’s army as Hooker’s Brigade.   

(An interesting aside: in French, the man who solicits patrons to come to a whorehouse is known as an accrocheur, or hooker, from the verb accrocher, to hook.) 

Myth # 77: Everyone died young.

This week we are fortunate to have a guest blogger, Katie Cannon, to debunk one of her pet-peeve myths. Katie has more than a dozen years of experience working in history museums, and has just completed a Master of Arts in Museum Studies through the University of Leicester. She is especially fond of living history, she says, having never quite grown out of playing dress-up.

You hear this one all over the place: “Everyone died young back in the old days,” or “You were lucky if you lived to age 40,” and so forth.

You can crunch some numbers and certainly come to this conclusion, but the big problem with this is infant mortality.  If you include the (generally high) infant mortality rate of early America, life expectancy plummets. However, if you calculate life expectancy past infancy and childhood, people in historic periods could expect to live to ages not that different from today.

In Massachusetts in 1850, an infant at birth could expect to live 38-40 years. Pretty bleak, right? But, if that same infant survived to age 20, he could expect to live another 40 years, to age 60. Quite an improvement! Compare that to the Center for Disease Control statistics for 1998, in which a person’s life expectancy at birth was 76, and at age 20 was 77, hardly any difference because we’ve managed to sharply decrease mortality in infants and children.  And remember, “life expectancy” does not mean everyone suddenly drops dead at that age. There are plenty of people today who live past 77, just as there were plenty in 1850 who lived past 60.

Here, for example, are the ages at death of the first 10 presidents of the United States, from oldest to youngest: 90, 85, 83, 80, 79, 78, 73, 71, 68, 67.  Most of them were older than the life expectancy in 1998!  And, since those are all men, here are the ages of their wives at death (John Tyler married twice, so there are 11 women accounted for): 89, 81, 77, 74, 71, 69, 62, 61, 52, 36, 34.  Almost half made it into their seventies at least; of those under 70, five died from disease (including 2 strokes) and one from the complications of childbirth.  True, in general they were not as long-lived as their husbands, but it’s still a far cry from the bleak “dead-at-forty” report you may have heard.  

The big killer, as you may have noticed, was disease. The age of antibiotics changed many things, and today far more infants are expected to reach adulthood, so the average life expectancy has indeed gone up. But, old folks were not an endangered species in early America! 

Sources:
U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/statab/lt98internet.PDF

Myth # 68: Shakespeare Didn’t Write Shakespeare

Okay, so I know this isn’t an American history myth and I probably shouldn’t be dealing with it in this blog, but the topic was so current (because of the new movie “Anonymous”) and so relevant to other myths (because the inspired rant against the perpetuation of myths like this in this week’s NY Times Magazine), I had to go with it.

You simply must read the short article by Stephen Marche, a Shakespeare expert, former professor, and prolific writer who is horrified at the myth perpetrated by the movie “Anonymous.” For those who haven’t heard of it, the movie is about the “real” author of Shakespeare’s plays, an English earl named Edward de Vere. This is a theory that has been bantered about for decades and, says Marche, “has roughly the same currency as the faked moon landing does among astronauts.” I think all of us who lament the hardiness of these history myths can sympathize with Stephen Marche . . . I know I do. Thank you, Mr. Marche, you are one of my heroes. And I’ll enjoy the movie all the more, thanks to the myth-busting details you provided!

Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare? Oh, please . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/wouldnt-it-be-cool-if-shakespeare-wasnt-shakespeare.html?pagewanted=all

MYTH # 61: People bathed once a year.

Other versions of this myth include: “Brides carried bouquets of flowers to cover up their body odor,” and “People bathed twice a year, in May and October.” All nonsense.

Personal habits are notoriously difficult to document—when was the last time you noted in your diary that you took a shower? If the verb “to bathe” means to sit in a large tub of hot water and wash, then Myth #61 might be considered true.  Almost no one bathed that way until the 20^th century when the miracle of indoor plumbing brought gallons of hot water directly into a tub with no more effort than it took to turn a tap. Before that, hot water required too much labor to allow even the upper classes to fill up a tub every day and soak in it. Men bathed in rivers and lakes as part of their swimming recreation, but women seldom did. Bathing in warm mineral springs and seaside resorts began to spread in the early 19th century, at first for the wealthy, but later for middle class people as well.

Just like today, habits varied. Some people washed daily and others did not. Some washed hands and face daily; others took sponge baths daily. Inventories and photographs commonly show a wash stand in bed chambers. And there are some written references to bathing. In the eighteenth century, William Byrd II wrote in his book, HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE (1741), that he was relieved to bathe after several days in the wilderness. Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia was writing about soldiers but his recommendations could have applied to any American when he said  that they should “wash his hands and face at least once every day, and his whole body twice or three times a week, especially in the summer.” 

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people visited public baths in towns and cities. Even a city as small as Richmond, Virginia, had one in 1832 and possibly earlier. There were several public baths in Richmond in operation until the last closed in 1950. John Zehmer of the Historic Richmond Foundation wrote in his new book, THE CHURCH HILL OLD & HISTORIC DISTRICTS, that the Branch baths served 60,000 bathers a year. “The cost [in the early 1900s] was five cents for adults and three cents for children. The bath was popular with judges, doctors, lawyers, and all classes of people because it was so much better than what was available at home. The development of indoor plumbing led to the closing of the public baths . . .”

Primitive “shower baths” came into play in the middle of the 19^th century for the well-to-do. This newspaper advertisement dates from 1847. 

Still, most early Americans took sponge baths, standing beside their washstand with its pitcher and bowl of water or in a small tin tub with a few inches of warm water, usually in their bedchamber. Servants or slaves, if one were wealthy enough to have them, brought buckets of water from the pump, heated it in kettles on the stove, and lugged it up the stairs to the shallow tub. Otherwise you did the chore yourself. Ladies often preferred to put the tub by a fireplace. Some people bathed in the kitchen, nearer the stove—less privacy but less carrying.  Many who were willing to wash their bodies while standing in a basin were unwilling or unable to immerse themselves fully in a large tub. 

Interestingly, bathing and washing didn’t necessarily include the use of soap, at least not until the 19th century. Kathleen Brown writes in her book Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America, p. 244, that the association of bathing with soap began in the 1830s, representing “a new fastidiousness about body odor that increased the labor required to achieve decency.” 

One thing’s for sure, people washed their hair less often than we do today. A women would have had to spend half her daylight hours sitting by the fire or in the sun to dry her long tresses. Hair styles reflected this reality. Until the 1920s when American women began cutting their hair short for the first time, most braided, knotted, or twisted up their long hair and wore it under a cap or bonnet. The invention of the electric hair dryer allowed a greater variety of styles.  

In the 1870s, the discovery of germs helped boost the idea of cleanliness in Europe and America. Modern indoor bathrooms with a sink, tub, and toilet in one room, gained popularity from the 1920s on. But even then, by 1940 (just before World War II), only half of American homes had this sort of modern bathroom.

Accuracy might best be served by saying that, while people bathed less frequently than most do today, they did not necessarily wash less frequently. 

Myth # 60: Women ate arsenic to lighten their complexions.

Unlike today when everyone wants a tan, women in previous centuries thought pale was prettier. Pale skin was a status symbol, since it showed that the woman did not have to labor outside in the fields like a peasant. But there is no evidence that women ate arsenic to lighten their skin. In fact, according to 18th-century apothecary specialist Robin Kipps, arsenic actually darkens the skin, so anyone trying this would have abandoned the effort quickly.

But some women did something  just as bad. Since the early 1500s, some upper class European women (think Queen Elizabeth I) used a skin lightener called ceruse. Made with white lead, ceruse was also used in making paint. This probably caused damage, perhaps even death, if the woman applied it to her face often enough. It was still available in France in the middle 1700s, but there is no evidence that American women ever used it. 

Myth # 59: Women had very tiny waists in “the olden days.”

In actuality, what makes waists appear smaller in paintings and photos is the illusion created by the dress styles, which in the 17th-18^th centuries involved farthingales or panniers (above), in the 19^th century involved wide crinolines or bustles (below), and in the 1940s involved padded shoulders. Long gowns with wide panniers or full skirts make the waist seem smaller in comparison, as does the triangular stomacher that narrows to a point just below the waist, like this one: 

Studies of costumes at the Smithsonian, Colonial Williamsburg, and other museums provide the evidence. Curator Linda Baumgarten’s measurements of 18th-century stays and gowns show waist sizes ranging from about twenty-one to thirty-six inches. Author Juanita Leisch’s personal collection of garments from the Civil War era shows a median waist of around 23-25 inches. Scarlett O’Hara and her 18” waist aside, few women except teenagers (like Scarlett, who is 16 when the novel opens) had unusually small waist measurements.