Epidemic

I am a fourth-generation Memphian and, as a child, heard some of the horrors described in “Epidemic” (October/November 1984).

For my paternal grandfather, as for so many, it was a very sad time. He had taken his family, including his recently married younger sister, from their Memphis home out to his father’s farm. My grandfather’s new brother-in-law was a doctor, and there was a great demand for his services. Like so many doctors, he remained in the city. Some time later word came to the farm that he was ill. Amelia, my grandfather’s sister, rushed to her husband’s side.

Some nights later a black man knocked on the door at the farm asking to speak to my grandfather. He was a former employee and knew all of the family. Like many blacks who had remained in Memphis, he had been drafted into digging huge trenches to dispose of the bodies stacked around the area. While throwing bodies into this common grave, he came upon my great-aunt Amelia and, a short time later, her husband, Dr. Dawson. He put them to one side. He then went to the man in charge and asked that they not be put into the common grave until my grandfather could be told. Telling my grandfather was another problem. The city was ringed by pickets to keep people out as well as in. Somehow this man had bypassed these outposts and had gotten to the farm, ten miles from the city.

After hearing his story, the family fed the man and put him up for the night. The next morning he joined my grandfather for a hasty buggy ride back to town. My grandfather had the bodies moved to a funeral home while he went to Elmwood Cemetery, where he bought a large family plot.

J. W. Scheibler
Atlanta, Ga.

Three Cheers for Juries

In his article “My Ancestor, the Wizard” in the August/September 1984 issue, Joseph Thorndike, Jr., does not mention that his ancestor’s trial was, like all the others, conducted as “juries of tryals” and that the reason Governor Phips finally gave up and “reprieved” the remaining prisoners is that the juries refused to convict.

There were two series of trials: the first from June 2 until September 17, 1692, and the second from January 3 until midMay 1693. There were about half a dozen quick convictions by juries in June 1692, due to the fact that the entire populace was swept up into the passion. On June 30 was the trial of Rebecca Nurse, to which Mr. Thorndike refers. When she was acquitted, the “afflicted” girls began writhing and screaming, and the court, headed by Stoughton, terrorized the jurors until they begged to reconsider their decision. The jury was then permitted to impeach the verdict.

Thus the trials continued, with the final conviction coming September 17, bringing the total to nineteen. About one hundred and fifty “witches” were left in the Salem jails, and this may have been a blessing, because when the trials resumed in January, there was an acquittal, then another acquittal, then a third, fourth, fifth, and so on. Governor Phips pressed on relentlessly against those accused, but the juries continued to acquit until forty-nine suspects had been freed (but there were three “confessions”). When the forty-ninth acquittal was delivered, Phips gave up and reprieved the hundred or so awaiting trial. Thus it was trial by jury that closed out that horror in quite quick time—while the Spanish Inquisition, without jury, continued from 1492 until the early 180Os. What if Stoughton or the Mathers had been the judges trying those cases? The juries in Salem that handed down convictions in 1692 were selected only from members of the Puritan Church; spectral evidence was permitted, there was of course the initial panic, and the court itself adopted a threatening attitude. The later juries were selected from a wider community base, spectral evidence was excluded, and the court was less threatening. The people, as evidenced in the jurors, controlled their passions much earlier than the Mathers did. More glory to trial by jury! Just about all liberty has been recognized by juries long before official legal codification occurs.

Godfrey D. Lehman
San Francisco, Calif.

Holmes on Anesthesia

A little over a month after William Morton first administered ether at Massachusetts General, as described in your October/November 1984 issue, the poetic and humanistic Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote him a letter:

“My Dear Sir,—Everybody wants to have a hand in the great discovery. All I will do is to give you a hint or two as to names, or the name, to be applied to the state produced, and to the agent.

“The state should, I think, be called anaesthesia. This signifies insensibility, more particularly (as used by Linnaeus and Cullen) to objects of touch. The adjective will be anaesthetic…

“I would have a name pretty soon, and consult some accomplished scholar… before fixing upon the terms which will be repeated by the tongues of every civilized race of mankind.”

If indeed the “accomplished scholar” was consulted, he did not come up with anything better, and there is little reason not to believe that Holmes’s coinage will be universally used until the end of time.

Gwilym B. Lewis, M. D.
Berkeley, Calif.

A Fearful Plagiarism

In “Mrs. Roosevelt Faces Fear” in the October/November 1984 issue, FDR is quoted as saying, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” FDR, as usual, failed to supply the credits.

Isn’t it Sir Francis Bacon who made this remark almost four hundred years ago? Of course, Sir Francis, too, may have been guilty of plagiarism.

Frederick Appleton
Bolton Landing, N. Y.

A quick check in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations shows that what Bacon said was, “Nothing is terrible except fear itself.” Montaigne expressed it this way: “The thing I fear most is fear.” And Thoreau wrote in his Journal. “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.” Perhaps all were basically rephrasing the biblical proverb that says, “Be not afraid of sudden fear.”