Today’s Pale, Tortured Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Eliza Sowers—a former paper mill worker who had recently seen her station in life improve when she was hired to be a maid and was asked for her hand in marriage—had tried everything to end her terribly timed pregnancy. She swallowed magnesia, and tansy, and pennyroyal. She was bled. She consumed cups of tea made from powdered roots. She drank down one and a half bottles of an unknown wine-colored “medicine” she got from a local doctor with the promise that it would “make her regular,” gagging on the liquid, which she said was “sharp to the taste.” When it didn’t work, she desperately did the whole routine again a few weeks later. At night, she begged her sister, with whom she shared a bed, to help her, but no matter what they did, she couldn’t, as they said at the time, “get to rights.”
When Eliza finally began to show, her new boss referred her to Henry Chauncey, a self-described “botanical physician” who assured the young woman and her boss that this situation could easily be remedied.
Chauncey secured Eliza a room in a boardinghouse far from her home and place of employment. Its main selling point was that it was known for not asking questions. Chauncey then gave Eliza a new round of tinctures and formulas to drink—a black-powder tea, ergot, savin oil—and left, assuring her that nature would take its course.
Unfortunately for Eliza, nothing changed except her level of suffering, which grew and grew until the woman in charge of the boardinghouse hunted down the “doctor” to fix the situation. Witnesses later would testify that when Chauncey reentered Eliza’s room, he carried something that “shined and looked like a knitting needle” to finish what he believed his “medicine” had started. Eliza’s piercing screams rattled the closed boardinghouse door, and almost immediately after, Chauncey left the boardinghouse again.
Eliza bled alone and heavily into the night and through the next day. And the next. And the next. Finally, after a week, a nervous Chauncey moved the girl’s pale, tortured body to a different boardinghouse—this one frequented by prostitutes. Regrettably for Chauncey, the landlady at this boardinghouse knew exactly what was happening, and the severity of the situation. After a night of watching Eliza moan in pain, and constantly replacing the hot bricks at her feet to keep her warm, the landlady called in Dr. James Rush, a well-known and respected doctor in Philadelphia. He would later testify that he knew at first glance that she was going to die.
“I found her with a livid face [and] wild staring eye,” he told the court at Chauncey’s trial, “Sighing, moaning and excla[iming] of agony; her abdomen was very much swollen, and hard and tender to the touch; her extremities cold and she was pulseless.”
Rush shared his ultimate conclusion with Chauncey: There was no saving her. Chauncey agreed, and together, they fed her six or seven glasses of wine, which would serve as the only treatment she received while Rush was there. Rush convinced Chauncey to move her to his house so she wouldn’t have to die in such disreputable lodgings, and he did. But the next day, either in transit or soon after arriving at Chauncey’s house, Eliza Sowers died. She was twenty-one years of age.
The Eliza Sowers case proved to be a turning point in how America viewed abortion – or at least how the American legal system would begin to view it. When Chauncey was initially being charged and held for murder, he attempted to get bail through a loophole regarding how the law defined murder. He demanded that he be released on bail on the grounds “that it was a defendant’s right in murder cases where ‘intent to take life’ was not present. But with intent absent, how could this be considered a murder case at all?”
The release was refused. It was plainly explained: “The death of the mother following criminal abortion is murder, not because the agent accomplishing the act intended to kill the female, but because, the act being unlawful in itself, he is held responsible for all its results.”
With this statement and its resulting act, abortion was being formally criminalized. When an autopsy was performed on Eliza, it was found that the cause of death was an infection “resulting from a laceration of the uterus caused by an instrumental abortion.” Chauncey was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.
Culled from: Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine
Adventures in Antiquing: Pond’s Extract
I’ve been doing a lot of antiquing lately, and I thought I’d share some of the treasures I’ve stumbled across. I adore this pamphlet for Pond’s Extract (circa 1904 or so) – it’s small, but I’d like to get it framed nevertheless. Graphics were better before!
On stories like this, please include the year. (It helps us situate it within a historical context.)
This took place in the 1830s or 40s. I just recently read the book from which this excerpt was taken.