January 2011

As a victim of tuberculosis in 1935, I can testify to the accuracy of Richard Cabot’s statement in “The Genealogy of Mass General” (October/November 1984) that before the discovery of isoniazed, tuberculosis was “curable in the rich, incurable in the poor, while in the moderately well-to-do the chances are proportionately intermediate.” Of thirteen of my roommates at the sanitarium, ten were dead in five years—some from faulty diagnosis, others from lack of care after leaving the hospital. Many an arrested lunger had to take jobs totally unsuitable in order to support themselves and their families. Poverty was the greatest cause of recidivism.

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.

I enjoyed Bernard Weisberger’s article “Epidemic” but can not resist commenting on a statement he made. He said that the mosquito Aedes aegypti has been eradicated from the Americas. Unfortunately this is not true; as a matter of fact, no mosquito has been eradicated from any of the earth’s continents. Insects are the most adaptable animal on the face of the earth. It is true that the numbers of Aedes aegypti have been reduced through local abatement efforts at source reduction (elimination of breeding habitat), larviciding, and ultralow-volume adulticide spray programs. In addition, the screening of living quarters has reduced human exposure to these man-biting mosquitoes. As the author stated, the mosquito gets the disease by biting an infected person, and after a one- to two-week incubation period the mosquito can then transmit the disease by its bite. In areas susceptible to yellow fever, it is the responsibility of local abatement programs to kill the mosquitoes before the incubation period has expired.

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.

The Boy Scouts of America, I am surprised to discover, is 75 this year, a wintry age for something so perpetually associated with the springtime of life. I never think of the Scouts without remembering my boyhood heroes of long ago, Theodore Roosevelt and Sir Robert Baden-Powell. One became president and the other a lord, but both remained, in many ways, boys all their days. And then, I remember that I am, in age, close on the heels of the Scouts; they were going on sixteen and I was twelve when I joined in 1926. I bought the Handbook for Boys (price, forty cents), with two Scouts signaling on the cover, learned the motto (“Be Prepared”), the sign, the salute, and the way to tie some dozen knots, and then I was sworn in as a tenderfoot, lowest of the low, in Troop 3, Beaver Patrol, in the basement of the Second Congregational Church in New London, Connecticut. Apparently it did not concern me that the very same year I had been confirmed in the Episcopal church a block away, but their Scout troop, in my boyish opinion, did not amount to much.

This is the first full issue of American Heritage 1 have presided over as publisher, and I’m happy to have a chance to say a few words at the beginning of it. I won’t be doing this often: the publisher’s job is not to address a magazine’s audience. It is, rather, to worry about the magazine’s viability in the same way the editor worries about its content. By viability I mean commercial viability—the magazine’s ability to survive and prosper in a very crowded marketplace. Our editor sees this publication as art, passion, intellect, and enlightenment—even as a public service of sorts; and the choice and slant of its stories is determined without regard for any special interests. I, on the other hand, see it as a selling job.

In McMinn County, Tennessee, in the early 1940s, the question was not if you farmed, but where you farmed. Athens, the county seat, lay between Knoxville and Chattanooga along U.S. Highway 11, which wound its way through eastern Tennessee. This was the meeting place for farmers from all the surrounding communities. Traveling along narrow roads planted with signs urging them to “See Rock City” and “Get Right with God,” they would gather on Saturdays beneath the courthouse elms to discuss politics and crops. There were barely seven thousand people in Athens, and many of its streets were still unpaved. The two “big” cities some fifty miles away had not yet begun their inevitable expansion, and the farmers’ lives were simple and essentially unaffected by what they would have called the “modern world.” Many of them were without electricity. The land, their families, religion, politics, and the war dominated their talk and thoughts. They learned about God from the family Bible and in tiny chapels along yellow-dust roads.

True Insight Epidemic Epidemic Three Cheers for Juries Booz? O.K.! Holmes on Anesthesia Well-Deserved Honors A Fearful Plagiarism Our Pleasure

To a casual passerby on East Fifty-seventh Street in Midtown Manhattan, No. 15 looks like any other small, wellkept building. On the main floor is an antique-silver shop. Above it on the third and fourth floors are windows with blinds pulled shut behind them, and across each window in gilt Gothic lettering there appears simply a name, Israel Sack, Inc. Although behind those upper-story windows is the oldest and most prestigious dealer in American antiques, nothing gives that information away. The name on the building is enough. People who are willing to pay $85,000 for a single chair or half a million dollars for a blockfront bureau know that the finest can be found there. Morrison Heckscher, Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum, describes Israel Sack, Inc., as the “most long-lived and best-known of the great American dealers.”

The Colorado farmer opened the barn door for me. There, hanging from a nail on the back wall, was an empty 35-mm reel. With that excitement peculiar to collectors, I asked if there were any films left. “I reckon so. Since maybe 60 years ago, when my daddy give up his road showin’.”

There were eight deeply rusted 35-mm film cans draped with cobwebs. I pried them open. The first films looked wonderful. Holding frames over a flashlight showed them to be—what else?—early Westerns. But the seventh can felt too light, as though the film might have disintegrated to brown powder. I carried it outdoors and opened it gingerly. There was no film—instead, glass lantern slides.