THE PAIN BEGAN in her solar plexus: a sharp stab that knocked the wind out of her. After the first savage thrust, the pain radiated up her spine, between her shoulders, out along her arms, into her neck and lower jaw, and finally across both cheeks to her forehead. The terrible assault transformed each breath into an agonizing groan. Charity sat immobilized and suffocated, drawing just enough air to keep from losing consciousness.1
When the attack passed, the words came flooding back. Charity put pen to paper, sending off a slew of letters to seek a diagnosis and cure for this new affliction. Her friends wrote back with the information she sought. The doctors they consulted called the pain by various names: spasmodic neuralgia, walking breast pang, angina pectoris, and simply heart disease.2 All agreed that the condition would prove fatal, but perhaps not straight away. Sally Field reported that her own mother had suffered from chest pains similar to Charity’s for several years. During her long sickness, she derived great comfort from being bled. By the end, scars covered her arms from wrist to elbow, but Sally felt certain the treatment had prolonged her life.3 Charity, who had been bled many times before, up to a pint of blood at a time, was bound to agree.4
Charity had deep familiarity with sickness and its treatment by the summer of 1839, when she endured her first episode of heart disease. She was likely afflicted from birth by the endemic tuberculosis that killed her mother, her sisters Ruth and Anna, and her brothers Cyrus and Peter. Charity described herself as a “great sufferer by Asthma,” a reference to her frequent shortness of breath, which suggests the diminished lung capacity associated with tuberculosis.5 She also repeatedly fell sick from the epidemic diseases that ravaged the nation. The great yellow fever epidemic of 1802, which spread as far north as Boston, may have been the cause of one severe illness. In a letter to her sister-in-law Sally, Charity described feeling “intense pain in my head, with successive fits of heat + cold.”6 On the other hand, the symptoms may have been caused by typhoid fever, which some in Massachusetts referred to as “fall fever” because of its regularity during that season.7 Charity hoped that the move to Vermont in 1807 would situate her in a healthier environment—a common rationale behind nineteenth-century migrations.8 But from the beginning of her life with Sylvia, “sickness made long and frequent visits to their dwelling.”9
In fall 1824, Charity had a health crisis that began with a “nirvous pain in the left-side of my head and ear.” After three days the pain spread throughout the left side of Charity’s face, which became “completely paralized, no motion remain’d in any part of it.” For six weeks, pain, paralysis, and fever left her unable to read or write a word. She had to bind her left eye shut to protect it from the light. The doctor diagnosed a “liver complaint” and recommended bleeding. (It was more likely Bell’s palsy, which is sometimes caused by a virus).10 After eight weeks, Charity felt mostly recovered, although her face still felt “greatly different from the former state.”11
Sylvia’s health was little better than Charity’s. She was a lifelong victim of headaches. Entries recording “severe pain in my head” filled the pages of her diary.12 All sorts of irritations catalyzed Sylvia’s headaches, and even a superficial affliction could be a trigger. “Discover a pimple on my nose,” Sylvia noted in her diary one spring day; two days later she noted ruefully, “the pimple on my nose causes some pain in my head.”13 Her headaches often produced insomnia.14 At times, nausea, light sensitivity, and noise sensitivity accompanied the pain, suggesting that Sylvia was prone to migraines.15 Once she complained she was “almost blind” with “strong symptoms of severe headache.”16 Many of Sylvia’s correspondents noted her susceptibility to “sick headaches.”17 She also experienced frequent disorders related to her mouth such as toothaches, gum biles, sore throat, “ague in [the] face,” and “swollen” face.18
As the women grew older, both faced the onset of menopause and the increasing debility of old age. When Charity went through the “change in nature” during the mid-1820s, she struggled with frequent headaches.19 The prescription of her nephew Dr. Samuel Shaw (husband to William Cullen Bryant’s sister Sarah) was the same as the recommendations for treating her heart disease and Bell’s palsy: bleeding. In particular, her nephew recommended using leeches to let blood from the side of Charity’s head, on the theory that menopause had produced “too great a congestion, there was too great a flow, or pressure of blood in the head.” If Charity was not willing to have her head leeched, she could try having the blood taken from her arm. This treatment, Shaw advised, should be followed by taking four grains of “blue mercurial pill” every night until salivation occurred, as well as a moderate dose of Epsom salts in the mornings. Charity should not fear if the treatment produced a “purging of blood” from her uterus. Lastly, the doctor recommended a prescription for “Balsam of Pine,” including spirit of turpentine, gum Arabic, oil of cloves, and sugar to sweeten the mix. “Take a table spoonful for a dose before eating, three times a day.” Charity left no record of whether she followed these directions.20
Shaw’s abundant prescriptions for treating Charity’s menopause were perfectly in keeping with the medical logic of the age of “heroic medicine.” The virulent endemic and epidemic diseases that produced startlingly high mortality rates throughout the nineteenth century demanded equally powerful treatments with visible effects. Bleeding, which often caused the temperatures of feverish patients to break, was used to treat an endless list of ailments, including malaria, fractures, consumption, burns, puerperal fever, and menopause. Bleeding exemplified the logic of heroic medicine. The treatments available to medical practitioners were few in number and blunt instruments, but doctors felt the need to offer some intervention beyond passive acceptance and prayers for salvation.21
At least Samuel Shaw recommended only small bleedings for Charity’s meno-pause. Many contemporary doctors advocated letting blood until the patient fell into unconsciousness. Shaw was also cautious in his prescription of mercury, one of the most common, and fatal, medicines of the nineteenth century. During the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush prescribed patients ten grains a day of mercury. Many doctors recommended that patients take mercury past salivation, after which point patients’ teeth and sometimes their tongues, palates, and even jawbones could fall from their mouths. On the other hand, irregular compounding and lack of standard dosages made it possible that Shaw’s recommended dosage differed little from Rush’s.22
To remedy the range of ailments they suffered over their lifetimes, Sylvia and Charity made use of both the surgeries and chemicals prescribed by male practitioners of heroic medicine, like Samuel Shaw, as well as the wide range of herbal remedies that constituted a female vernacular healing tradition in North America.23 Willing to try anything that worked, the women mixed doses of mercury with cabbage poultices, brisk walks with bleedings. They cultivated a garden where they grew medicinal herbs such as hyssop, used as an expectorant for pulmonary disease; cayenne, a treatment for Sylvia’s sore mouth; thoroughwort, an emetic; catmint, used topically for respiratory complaints and to promote menstruation; rhubarb, a cathartic; and mustard seed, another topical remedy.24 They also collected medicinal wild plants, like sweet fern, which could be used as an expectorant or an astringent; burdock leaves, applied topically to remove pain; sweet flag root, to soothe the stomach; hemlock leaves, for rheumatism; prickly ash, for toothaches and external pain; and ginseng, for colds.25 And they purchased foreign herbs from the apothecary in Middlebury, including ipecacuanha, another emetic (and the derivative for ipecac); red and black pepper, used as stimulants; spikenard, to make poultices; and elecampane for asthma.26
The apothecary also supplied the women with the most popular chemical emetic of the age, mercury-based calomel. Since heroic medicine favored drugs that produced dramatic results, calomel was designed to cause patients to throw up with great force. As one doctor recalled, the vomit “did not come up in gentle puffs and gusts, but the action was cyclonic. If, perchance, the stomach was passed the expulsion would be by the rectum and anus, and this would be equal to a regular oil-well gusher.”27 Sylvia embraced this medical logic; when she took emetics she aimed to remove all matter from her digestive tract, and she felt disappointed with any halfway measures. “Take an emetic just before sunset,” she recorded during one sick spell; it “operates 9 times, but the load from my stomach not removd” she concluded with disappointment.28 On another occasion she noted with great satisfaction that a dose of emetic wine caused her to vomit fifteen times.29 Following their doctors’ recommendations, Charity and Sylvia often dosed with emetics over an extended period. After a week of heavy dosing in 1822, Sylvia found herself so unwell she was “unable to set up.” Still she continued the dosing, recording with grim determination that she had “puke[d] much in consequence of using solution of tartar.”30 On occasion, Sylvia felt distressed at having an emetic take “a different course” than intended.31 But she was not averse to taking cathartics with the intention of producing rectal expulsions. When really ill, both women combined cathartics and emetics to empty everything at once.32
The women also sampled many of the patent medicines of the age, which were advertised by their inventors as gentler remedies since they typically did not contain mercury.33 Charity took doses of Stoughton’s Elixir, designed to soothe rather than purge the gut.34 Lydia recommended Hungarian Balsam of Life for Charity’s asthma.35 The women used Kittredge grease to treat sprains.36 They tried Vienna pills, Blue pills, and Coits pills, an emetic manufactured by local Vermont practitioner Dr. Daniel Coit.37 Coit promised that his pills could treat “Yellow Fever, Bilious Fevers, Ague and Fever, Cholic pains, Flatulencies, Indigestion, Costiveness, Hypocondriacal and Hysteric complaints, Stranguary, Gravel, Rheumatism, and Gout.” Sylvia may also have been persuaded by Dr. Coit’s promise that the drug was “peculiarly serviceable in female disorders.”38
The women judged treatments as effective if they produced results, rarely differentiating between positive and negative outcomes. Sylvia favored emetics and cathartics despite the weight loss they caused. The frequent vomiting and fasting made it a struggle for Sylvia to reach even one hundred pounds in weight.39 “One fortnight since I have dine the least thing,” she recorded after a long spell of dosing. Fearing Sylvia would waste away, her brother brought over fresh fish and dried apples to lure her back to the table.40
The opium, laudanum, and morphine that Charity and Sylvia took on occasion also caused distress as well as relief.41 The women knew that opium and its derivatives disordered the mind. After she observed Charity taking opium during an 1838 visit to Massachusetts, Charity’s sister Silence wrote an admonitory letter to the women describing the ill effects the medicine had on a neighborhood woman. Silence’s neighbor Mrs. Packard, who “was in the habit of using opium,” had “become an idiot for she took so much that many times she did not appear to know what she was about.”42 Silence hoped that her sister, who vested so much identity in her intellect, would treat the drug with greater caution.
Alcohol, a common ingredient in their medical recipes, could be a killer as well as a curative. The women frequently bathed their aching limbs in brandy, and Sylvia attributed the healing of her lame wrist to “British ale.”43 But they also witnessed friends and neighbors abuse alcohol to the point of death, not only via alcoholism but through accidental poisonings. “Hear of the death of Harriet Hagar 2nd daughter of Luther H and Mr Burgers by intoxication. Since I have heard [I’m] refraining from it,” Sylvia recorded after one tragic episode.44 When a young man who worked for the women informed Sylvia that he was going to remove his name from the temperance pledge, she warned “if he becomes a drunkard, as I assurd him he would in 10 years, that he would take a pistol + blow out his brains.”45 Judgmental in the extreme, Sylvia looked down on friends who overindulged in alcohol during social calls. When Mrs. Farmer became intoxicated on a visit to the women’s house and spilled her glass of brandy, Charity served the unfortunate woman camphor and water to sober her up.46 The women witnessed the deleterious effects of alcohol on the health of tipplers in the community, but they continued to rely on it as a medicine throughout their lives.47
Ultimately, the women took a catholic approach to medicine, best illustrated through the range of treatments that Charity endured during a prolonged and severe episode of arm pain, which she diagnosed as rheumatism. On the morning of Charity’s forty-fifth birthday, both women awoke with pain in their arms. At first Sylvia seemed the worse sufferer; Charity applied a poultice of burdock leaves and brandy to Sylvia’s right arm.48 Sylvia’s pain soon resolved. Charity’s arm, however, continued to distress her for months, during which time the women tried every treatment from native herbs to traditional drugs to surgeries.
To begin, Charity tried bathing—not her arm, but her feet.49 This gentle nostrum represented an innovative approach. For centuries Anglo-Americans had avoided bathing as dangerous, but in the early nineteenth century localized bathing, and later full immersion, came to be seen as a promising treatment for disease.50 Unfortunately, the water did not resolve Charity’s rheumatism. A couple months later the pain returned with more severity.51 Next, Sylvia tried bathing Charity’s arm directly with hot cloths.52 She followed that treatment with massage, still without success.53
Two months after the first flare-up, the women began experimenting with medicines. They began by trying “wickup,” an Algonquian name for fireweed, an herb often used to treat skin wounds.54 Like the bathing, Sylvia reported, this medicine had “no effect on Miss Bs arm.”55 A few days later, Charity and Sylvia tried wickup again, this time mixed with “spirits of wine burdock leaves + vinegar mullen leaves + red + black pepper + ginger, rum brandy salt + c + c a strengthening plaister.” The list combined native plants (burdock), nonnative plants (mullein), imported spices (red pepper), and alcohol, as well as a surgical approach, blistering. Again, all the treatments were “to no good effect.”56 The next day, Charity turned to a stronger surgical measure, inviting the local doctor to come and bleed her. She followed that heroic measure with a dose of calomel and jalup. Sylvia returned home to find Charity “much distressd.” The stress of the situation, perhaps, prompted Sylvia to feel a “severe pain in my head,” and both women went early to bed.57 After this treatment, Charity felt moderately recovered for a few days.
But in less than a week the pain returned. Sylvia tried a range of new remedies, including topical applications of mustard seed, cold water, and hemlock.58 A good friend brought over special spa water to treat the arm.59 Finally Charity sought out a second opinion from Dr. J. A. Allen, who prescribed “salts of ammonia gumguacum,” “swathing the arm,” and “electricity.”60 Dr. Allen was one of many antebellum doctors experimenting with the use of electricity as a cure for ailments including “gravel, dysentery, agues in the breast, local inflammations, tumors, cramps, fevers, hystericks, cholic, palsy, dropsy, lock-jaw, ocular diseases” and “any complaints, to which females only are subject.”61 Allen even taught classes on the medical applications of electricity in nearby Brattleboro.62 Sylvia did not record whether Charity submitted to electric treatment, but her diary in the following months listed an ever-expanding catalog of topical applications, including prickly ash, cider brandy, flax seed, scabish leaves, wheat bread, catmint leaves, sweet oil, brimstone, castile soap, horseradish leaves (placed on the soles of Charity’s feet), and salmon oil.63 Sylvia recorded with grim disappointment that the last treatment, recommended by their neighbor Mrs. Hagar, “fails like every other medicine.”64 A game patient, Charity showed willingness to try just about any treatment available.
Perhaps the women’s most unusual healing practice was their habit of rocking each other in an adult-sized cradle constructed for them by brother-in-law Asaph Hayward. Made of pine boards painted olive green, narrow at the base and wider at the lip, with a backboard to rest one’s head, the wooden cradle stretched over five feet long, sufficiently large for many adults of the village. They kept the cradle in the main room of the house, before the hearth. Sylvia used rests in the cradle to treat her toothaches and headaches. Sometimes she even worked in the cradle while Charity rocked her.65
Charity and Sylvia also approved some rather unusual aspects of heroic medicine. When a doctor trepanned Sylvia’s sickly nephew, drilling a hole into his skull, she enthusiastically recorded the consequences: “Sister E’s … little boy able to walk about who has been trepand and eleven pieces of bone taken out of his head. How great are the mercies of Him, who spares our lives.”66 Charity expressed similar support for another practice on the outer reaches of medicine, autopsy. Most Americans disapproved of human dissection as desecrating and atheistic.67 Sylvia shared this opinion, complaining of one doctor that he spoke “very thoughtlessly on cutting up the dead.”68 But Charity wrote to her brother Peter with fascination about an autopsy conducted in Weybridge in 1820. When a young woman took sick and died suddenly, the doctor “not being fully satisfied with respect to her disorder open’d her head and found a small bladder of water in the center of the brain and pronounc’d it to be the dropsy.”69 Eager to share this medical knowledge with her doctor brother, Charity seemed unworried about the ethics of defacing the young woman’s corpse.
The women’s support for heroic medicine did have limits. Their frequent encounters with the era’s doctors were bound to produce occasional negative reactions. Sylvia complained about cavalier doctors who ended up “killing their patients” rather than curing them.70 This was a common refrain of the time. Vesta Guild disparaged the “strolling quacks” who came through town dispensing patent medicines.71 After suffering through calomel treatment for a tubercular carbuncle that developed on her neck, Lydia Richards expressed grave doubt about treatments that “might perhaps be thought to be as bad as the disease.”72 Her later letters to Charity took a more passive approach to sickness, focusing on the afterlife rather than the possibility of a terrestrial cure. “If your body is destin’d to decay and soon drop into the grave,” Lydia wrote to Charity a few years after her calomel treatment, “may you be enabled by faith to look beyond this dreary prison to a glorious immortality in the mansion of eternal day.”73
Critiques of heroic medicine gave rise to a range of health reform movements in the mid-nineteenth century, including hydropathy and homeopathy. Reformers looked to diet, cold water, and fresh air as substitutes for mercury and bleeding.74 Charity’s nephew Cyrus Bryant, descended from three generations of medical practitioners (Abiel Howard, Philip Bryant, and Peter Bryant), and at least two generations of consumptives (Silence Howard Bryant, Peter Bryant), became a subscriber to homeopathy in his later years. “As I grow older,” he confessed in a letter to his aunt, “I must say I have less confidence in the efficacy of drugs than I formerly had—if people could or would study more into the nature + peculiarities of their own constitutions, be more cautious in their diet + make a free use of the bath, I think health might be preserved & life might be sustained” better than through “allopathy.”75
Sylvia and Charity sampled the new regimes as they had the old. “[I] think Spare diet better than medium,” Sylvia commented in her diary in 1835, a statement undercut by her appreciative account of the cream, sausage, and mince pie she ate for dinner the following week.76 On a trip to Massachusetts in 1838, a Mitchell cousin offered the women graham loaf, the new whole meal bread invented by health reformer Sylvester Graham.77 They tried bathing, herbal treatments, and abstinence from alcohol. Late in life, they even gave up drinking tea, which William Cullen Bryant complained they had formerly “indulged immoderately.”78 On a visit to the women in 1843, Cullen brought them homeopathic medicines, which he believed proved healing for Sylvia.79
Since many of Charity and Sylvia’s healing practices necessitated mutual caretaking, episodes of sickness served as a context in which the women expressed physical love and mutual devotion. Charity wrote one of her earliest love poems for Sylvia when the younger woman fell ill from a fever, “Oh! might my bosom prove / thy pillow and the cure of her I love,” the poem entreated.80 Sylvia’s most affectionate diary entries about Charity followed accounts of being nursed by her. “How much I owe to my beloved friend which spares no pains when I am sick,” Sylvia recorded gratefully after Charity helped her through the effects of an emetic. Charity’s care led Sylvia to recommit to the relationship, “O may we live in such a manner here that our affection for each other may increase thro’ the boundless ages of Eternity.”81 The women’s lifelong battles with ill health tested the integrity of their mutual devotion. From the chalice of sickness their bond emerged burnished and bright.
The women demonstrated their love through actions as well as words. Charity plastered, bathed, soothed, and dosed Sylvia.82 She rose before dawn to do Sylvia’s housework before the latter awoke, then returned to the bedroom and treated her sick friend with herbs.83 Despite her distaste for the kitchen, Charity even cooked Sylvia chicken soup.84 For her part, Sylvia bathed Charity, massaged her aching limbs, made her tea, and prepared her meals. For nearly a year when Charity’s rheumatic arm was at its worst, Sylvia dressed Charity every single morning. On April 1, 1821, Charity came downstairs in clothes and joked that she had “made an April fool” of Sylvia.85
In truth, the women’s mutual physical care was no laughing matter. Charity wrote to her brother Peter that she attributed her very survival to Sylvia’s nursing. Her “kind attentions have doubtless under Providence prolong’d my thread of existence,” Charity testified, still searching perhaps for Peter’s approval.86 Over the decades, the healing touch formed an intimate bond between Charity and Sylvia. It may even have possessed an erotic dimension. Sometimes treatments led directly to the women taking “rest” together.87 Sylvia differentiated these lie-downs from their evenings’ sleep, perhaps leaving a cryptic reference to erotic encounters.88
Sickness licensed bodily expressions of love between Charity and Sylvia, shifting touch from the realm of the sexual to the realm of nurture. There was an irony to this sanction, since according to the medical thought of the day the women’s unusual attachment to each other was a likely cause of their ill health. Nineteenth-century doctors, both traditionalists and reformers, warned emphatically of the dangers posed by masturbation—a term they extended to the mutual manual stimulation between women that constituted a common element of lesbian erotic practice.89 Anti-masturbation activists, among them Sylvester Graham, believed that the excessive expression of sexual energies resulted in debilitating enervation. Even married couples, they recommended should avoid having intercourse more than once a month or so. Masturbation, often indulged in immoderately by youths, was a cause of epilepsy, consumption, idiocy, and death.90
According to the medical logic of the time, Charity and Sylvia’s relationship also caused ill health by taking the place of the normal sexual relations that, in moderation, were necessary for health. Popular home health guides like William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, consulted by the women, pronounced that “old maids” incurred grievous physical harm from lack of sex with men. Domestic Medicine identified female “celibacy” as a leading cause of cancer, especially among women who were prone to excessive “religious melancholy,” such as nuns.91 While Buchan was correct to note the increased rate of breast cancers (one of the most easily diagnosed cancers in the nineteenth century) within convents, contrary to contemporary medical theories these cancers were correlated with nuns’ increased incidence of menstruation compared to sexually active women who experienced multiple pregnancies, rather than their unsexed nature or “suppressed evacuations.”92
William Whitty Hall, author of another home health guide, expanded the list of dangers that lack of intercourse posed to women: “Two-thirds of the suicides among women are unmarried, two-thirds of the inmates of lunatics are single women,” Hall warned. “There is a multitude of human ailments peculiar to women which originate in celibacy; the universally observed eccentricities of old maids are a direct result of their celibate condition.”93 The message was clear, whether a lack of sex with men or a surfeit of sex with each other was most to blame, Charity and Sylvia’s ill health owed much to their choice of each other as partners.
The women’s concern that their relationship was a cause of their ill health, which Sylvia expressed in her diary, was buttressed by their religious belief that God punished the wicked through physical sufferings. Charity and Sylvia took the providential view that illness was a holy instrument used to chastise and direct believers along the righteous path. Sylvia berated herself when she failed to acknowledge God’s direction behind her ill health. “Feel sick + have no realizing sense of the spiritual meaning of this holy ordinance,” she wrote with deep remorse.94 “We give ourselves the wounds we feel, we drink the poisonous gall,” she acknowledged.95 Sylvia connected her physical symptoms directly to her sinfulness. “I am sick with Hd a-h [headache] on account of sin,” she berated herself in the pages of her diary.96 Her frequent cranial and oral distress connected to her guilty mind and mouth. In her diary, Sylvia berated herself for thinking evil thoughts, as well as for being sharp-tongued and prone to mislead youth with pious speech that disguised a barren heart.97 She might also have associated her mouth, a potent instrument of physical intimacy, with sexual sinfulness. “Woe is me for I am a person of unclean lips,” Sylvia confessed on a day when she felt “sick with a cold.”98 Likewise, a powerful sermon that brought Sylvia to a new awareness of her fallen state plunged her into physical distress, “retire early with a severe pain in my head find no rest untill after Midnight. With awfull reflections of meeting those at the bar of Christ which my wicked example has ruined.”99
More consumed with guilt than Charity, Sylvia even assumed spiritual responsibility for Charity’s health woes. When Charity awoke ill one morning, Sylvia confessed to her diary “Miss Bryant most sick, sick of so perfidious a friend.” She attributed Charity’s sufferings to her own fallen state, admitting “not a day passes but I in tho’t word or deed commit sins of the deepest dye.”100 The religious logic structuring this odd claim originated in Puritan covenant theory. According to New England’s founders, God entered into contracts with a community, whom he rewarded and punished as a whole for their observation or abrogation of his laws.101 Thus God might visit his wrath on the household, which included Charity, for the “sins of the deepest dye” committed by another of its members.
Sylvia’s fear that her sins had brought sickness on the household would hardly have surprised Charity, who also subscribed to a covenant theory of disease. When outbreaks of measles and diphtheria swept Weybridge in the spring of 1813, Charity identified God’s agency behind the epidemics, writing to her brother Peter that “when the destroying Anger will sheath His sword is known only to Him who has given Him his commission.”102 God had sent death among the people of Weybridge to punish them for falling off the path of righteousness. By the same logic, he sent sickness to Charity and Sylvia’s home to express his displeasure with the sins committed there.
Yet God was not without mercy. Despite the frequent sickness that he visited on Charity and Sylvia, over and again he restored the women to health. He was the true physician capable of healing all woes. “There is balm in Gilead,” Sylvia reflected, “turn our backs [and] apply [to] some other Physician + we perish.”103 God’s mercies on her household, Sylvia believed, were undeserved. She remained a dreadful sinner to the end, never able to overcome her besettings. She could not even express proper thanks to God for his healing grace.104 But God in his great goodness forgave her and Charity, and permitted the women to continue on together in their own little dwelling for many long decades. “Oh! how thankfull ought I to be to that kind Providence who has preservd the Life of my friend,” Sylvia reflected in the pages of her diary. “Many a time when I almost despaird [He] has returned her to me in safety.”105 The sufferings they experienced over many decades of ill health brought the women closer to God; they were a gift as well as a punishment.
Charity and Sylvia’s long familiarity with ill health prepared the women to serve as healers to family, friends, and neighbors. Their knowledge of medicine acquired renown. The women developed their own recipes for common ailments, to complement the many recipes they adopted from medical manuals and doctor friends.106 Nephews and nieces in Vermont came to the women for treatment and to borrow from their medical stores. They bought pearlash (potassium carbonate) and tamarind to treat nephew Cyrus Bryant Drake’s frequent bronchial infections.107 They treated niece Emmeline Drake with peppercorns, hops, and vinegar when she came down with a headache during a visit. She spent the night and woke the next morning still under the weather. Determined to restore her to good health, the women applied “burdock leaves to her bowels + the soles of her feet,” and administered “eppicack + mustardseed balm + Hyson tea gruel rice” and “blue pills.” The next day, Sylvia recorded with satisfaction, Emmeline felt “a little better.”108 When Edwin Hayward came down with the mumps, the women dispensed tartar.109 Later, after a piece of timber fell on Edwin, Charity helped a doctor to bind the wound and then applied plasters herself in the days that followed.110 The women also went to tremendous lengths to heal their favorite niece Achsah Drake when she developed consumption during her early twenties, although neither medicines nor travel could save her.
Charity and Sylvia likewise volunteered their medical knowledge and care for many in the community. They dispensed prescriptions and medicines in person as well as through the mail.111 Caring for their apprentices’ health fell within the women’s maternal duties. When their assistant Martha grew sick, Charity and Sylvia called in the doctor to have her bled, then rocked her to sleep in the cradle.112 When their assistant Lucy Warner felt ill, Sylvia clucked affectionately “Miss B + I quite busy taking care of our invalid.”113 They were similarly solicitous to their neighbors. Their shop doubled as a medical office for landlord Sarah Hagar. “Mrs Hagar comes into the shop I give her a puke,” Sylvia recorded on a summer day, a decade after they moved into their house.114 When Sarah Hagar’s sister Miss Martin lay dying, Charity and Sylvia paid frequent visits to nurse her and comb her hair.115 After Martin’s death, Sylvia made a shroud and helped prepare her body for the grave.116
Charity and Sylvia also nursed their Bryant kin on visits to Massachusetts. After brother Peter died from consumption, Charity and Sylvia visited the family in Cummington and were distressed to find his daughter Sarah wasting away from the same disease. “Spend much time with Sarah endeavoring to remove her pain by outward application,” Sylvia recorded in her travel journal. When that did not work, the women tried an ingestible remedy. Sylvia recorded with gratitude a day later that “Sarah is better after the operation of an emetic.” This temporary relief, however, did not deceive Sylvia into feeling hopeful for her niece’s future. Sarah was “a lovely girl,” but Sylvia acknowledged, “a victim to disease + I fear death.”117 Sarah followed her father to the grave a few years later. Beloved by her siblings, she inspired her brother Cullen’s oft-anthologized elegy “The Death of the Flowers.”118
As much as Charity and Sylvia liked to dispense medical advice, they rarely listened to the admonitions of all who cared about them to stop working so hard. Despite their health woes, they could never afford to relax the regimen of labor that preserved their independence. To keep and maintain their own little dwelling, the women had to work both day and night at the expense of their well-being. “My Dear Cy tho fatigud sits up + cuts clothes untill 2 in the morning,” Sylvia commented tersely in her diary during the winter of 1822. The work made Charity sick, but still she toiled on.119 A month later, it was Sylvia who sat up until two in the morning working, making herself sick. “Bake sew + c active [until] two in the morning,” she recorded on February 11. A day later, her diary entry consisted of only four words: “cold + blustering most sick.”120 The women knew that overwork contributed to their ill health. “Sew too much feel most sick,” Sylvia wrote ruefully in her diary on a typical day.121 She made the same observation about Charity, “My Dear C most sick in consequence of too much application to business.”122 In addition, overwork made it more difficult for the women to recover from their bouts of illness. After a week of headaches, Charity seemed to be feeling a little better when a relentless day in the shop—eighteen customers placed orders for clothes—caused her to “almost sink under the pressure of business.”123 Still they toiled on.
From necessity, the women could accomplish great feats of industry even when sick. After an evening in which headache kept her awake for hours, Sylvia arose the next day feeling “very unwell,” but managed to “clean the buttery, cupboard, bed chamber, dining room + kitchen, make crackers + bake them,” as well as do the laundering, an onerous task that many early American women despised above all other housework.124 The women did not always succeed at working through ill health, but the economy of their lives demanded that they make the effort. “A severe pain in my head, try in vain to work,” Sylvia wrote with regret one Sunday. Neither ill health nor her knowledge that the day “ought to be kept holy” could keep Sylvia from trying to tackle the mountain of work that awaited. Still, unable to make the progress she wished, Sylvia noted that the next day she woke “at 3 in the morning” to make up for lost time.125
Frequent visits to family in Massachusetts also took their toll on the women’s health. From early on, Charity and Sylvia found the six-hundred-mile roundtrip from Weybridge to southern Massachusetts, much of which they traveled by foot, to be exhausting. Their 1811 journey left the two women so fatigued that Charity still felt unwell months later.126 The trips did not get any easier with age. Setting off in the summer of 1836, Sylvia remarked that “disease seems preparing our bodies for a different journey from what we have ever taken.”127 No wonder, then, that the women required an arsenal of medication to endure their final trip in 1838. On the first day the women left Weybridge, Charity came down with “a severe cold.” Day two Charity began dosing with thoroughwort and rhubarb. Day three she swallowed half a pill of opium. By day four she was restocking her opium supply at a village apothecary. At stores and in fields along the road south, the women collected camphor, Macaboy snuff, Richardson’s medicine, tamarind, sassafras, and wintergreen to medicate their ailing bodies.128 The 1838 journey exacted a great toll on sixty-one-year-old Charity and fifty-four-year-old Sylvia. Understanding that this trip might be their last, Charity and Sylvia paid careful visits to the graves of Sylvia’s father, Charity’s mother and father, and her beloved sister Anna. It had come time to say goodbye.129
Months after the women’s return to Vermont they received a letter bearing awful news. Charity’s cousin Vesta Guild had passed away. Her death came at the same moment that Charity suffered her first episode of heart disease. In fact, news of her death arrived in a letter from Roland Howard, Vesta’s brother, responding to a letter Charity had mailed Vesta seeking advice about her new symptoms. Roland wrote back, bemoaning the fact that Vesta’s hands “no longer possessed the power to break the seal” on Charity’s letter. On a recent visit to their relations the Mitchells, Vesta had been overcome by stomach pain and fever. Soon she grew delirious. Confined to the Mitchells’ house, she spent her final weeks “deranged.” Vesta died on September 13, 1839, severing Charity’s strongest tie to the region where she had been raised. Born eleven days apart, Vesta and Charity had moved through life in tandem. Both endured difficult youths, both lived as single women, both taught school and earned money by the needle, both gave their service to faith and family, and now, it seemed, both were bound for the grave.130
Many friends and relations passed away in the years that followed. Each letter from Massachusetts carried some new account of a cousin or acquaintance whose life had reached its end.131 Roland Howard followed his sister to the grave in 1844.132 In 1846, Lydia Richards (Snell) succumbed to the consumption that had haunted her for years, making her unable to stop from “losing my appetite, losing strength & losing flesh! notwithstanding all the medicine which I was taking.”133 Sister-in-law Sally Snell Bryant followed Lydia a year later. She had always been a hale and healthy woman, weathering the move to northern Illinois at age sixty-six without ill effect and even coming back east to make a visit when she was seventy-four. She was capable of riding well into old age, but her vitality proved her undoing when she took a fall from a horse at age seventy-eight and broke the neck of her hip socket. She died a few months later.134
The Revolutionary generation was passing into the dust. On a visit to her daughter’s lodgings in Boston in 1843, Charity’s oldest sister Silence, born in 1774, watched from the windows as a parade marched by to commemorate the erection of one of the first Revolutionary War monuments in the United States, an obelisk dedicated to the Battle of Bunker Hill.135 “A hundred and seven Revolutionary soldiers twelve of whom fought in the Battle of Bunker-Hill and three in the Battle of Lexington” joined the procession, Silence wrote in amazement to her younger sister, “the oldest was ninety seven.” Her own age weighed heavily on her shoulders, as she contemplated whether she might ever see her younger sister in this world again.136
The passing years and the women’s increasing debility seemed to render that desire a pipe dream, but the construction of a rail line to Vermont created an unexpected opportunity for seventy-seven-year-old Silence to visit in the late summer of 1851, accompanied by her daughter Carry. They found both Charity and Sylvia to be in “delicate health,” but Carry was pleased to discover that Charity’s faculties remained “uncommonly bright.” She expressed great curiosity “in everything that was going on.”137 True to form, Charity continued on with her work of cutting clothes. She kept up with the world by reading issues of The American and Foreign Christian Union, and by writing weekly letters to friends and family, who sent her news of the Swedish nightingale Jenny Lind’s American tour, of nephew Edwin Bryant’s fantastic success in the California real estate market, and of nephew Cullen’s most recent books of poetry and letters.138
Despite Charity’s frailty, Silence and Carry felt “cheerful” about her prospects as she stood waving in the cottage door on their parting day. Traveling along Weybridge’s main road, the women passed the town’s burying ground at the junction with the road to Middlebury. Carry took notice of its location, thinking “it might contain at some period the mortal remains of those who were dear to me.” But she busied herself with thoughts of buying gifts in Boston to send to her aging aunts, perhaps the music box Charity longed for and some brightly colored fabric for Sylvia to sew.139
Three weeks later, after the presents were bought but before they had been sent, a “telegraphic dispatch” arrived in Boston bearing news. The day before, on October 6, 1851, Aunt Charity had died in her chair from a paroxysm of the heart.140