Book Review
Mark Twain and Medicine
“Any Mummery Will Cure”
by K. Patrick Ober
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 2003
“Any mummery will cure, if the patient’s faith is strong in it.”
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
INTRODUCTION
I have become a fan of Mark Twain, aka Samuel Langhorn Clemens, in recent years. So far my favorites of his writings have been Roughing It, which tells about his travels across America with his brother to Nevada Territory and beyond beginning in 1861, and his own favorite Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. I now have added a third favorite called Mark Twain and Medicine: “Any Mummery Will Cure,” based on Clemens’s experiences over his lifetime, but composed and annotated by Dr. K. Patrick Ober.
Even though Mark Twain lived and died over a hundred years ago, his wit and wisdom seem to span centuries and all sorts of scenes of life. His exploration of medical practices, as narrated in this book by a very modern endocrinologist offered much for this student of medicine and healing to consider on a recent read. Therein, Mr. Twain and his other medical student, Dr. Ober, share general insights into the worlds of alternative holistic medicine as well as hints about living in times of epidemics. Twain lived while a number of cholera outbreaks passed through. And, his experiences give clues about contagions then and now.
So, we have composed a review of Dr. Ober’s book on Professor Twain’s life experiences in and around medicine. It covers a couple pages and may be worthy of your own review. If you are a student of medicine or healing, this piece might even induce you to read more from the book or directly from its inspiration.
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REVIEW
Mark Twain seems to be almost everyone’s favorite poet and pundit, so to speak. In his day he was an authority as well as a jester, so he could get away with telling the bald truth to powerful interests. I sometimes think of Twain as America Personified — the Great Good American.
George Bernard Shaw once observed, that Samuel Langhorn Clemens “has to put things in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him believe he is joking.”
This book, written in 2003 by an endocrinologist in North Carolina, served a number of purposes for that writer. Ober obviously is a huge Mark Twain fan, seeming to have read everything the great man wrote. He digs into Twain’s own medical history as well as his family’s to re-tell many intimate tales of Clemens’s life which mingled with physicians and healers of many breeds. Finally, the author takes the opportunity to scan American medical history of the 19th century up to present times. Thereby, he uses Twain’s experience as a sounding board for his own opinions on the sad state of medicine of past eras in comparison with the present state of practice. Along the way, both Twain and Ober win some and lose some.
The book reads fairly easily as it uses little medical jargon. It is filled with wonderful stories and pithy quotes. Ober showes early on that Mr. Twain (1835–1910) was wont to get peeved with doctors as much as anyone else: “That doctor had half an idea that there is something the matter with my brain. . . . Doctors do know so little and they do charge so much for it.”
Ober recognizes that much of medicine in Twain’s day, as in ours, was involved with treating tissues and parts rather than human beings. That suggested to Mark, “A doctor needs to know nothing about the soul wrapped in those tissues.”
Ober believes that in 19th-century America, medicine was in its dark ages still using generalized theories and often leaving patients ill and in pain until Nature came to the rescue. Now, we have systematized medicine which often leaves people in disease and pain, and burdened with large bills. Thankfully, regardless of practitioners’ rationale for treatment, many tend to get better anyway.
The whole situation tends to support Hippocrates’s Rule of Thirds: “One third of patients get better, another third stays the same, and the last third worsen.” Some things change, and some stay the same after centuries or millennia.
One point of note in this time of the Covid Pandemic might put the present traumas in perspective. Cholera passed through America repeatedly in Twain’s times. This book gives a few paragraphs touching upon MT’s experiences, out of which he decided that, “The only thing more devastating than cholera’s death rate was the FEAR that came with every new outbreak.”
Today, things are much the same with our Pandemic. The sick FEAR illness, doctors and treatments sometimes with equal vigor.
Because of or despite their fears, Samuel Langhorn Clemens and his family tried all kinds of medicine and healing which passed them by. Besides standard allopathic medicine, the Clemens bunch used water cure, osteopathy, homeopathy, Christian Science, as well as mind cure and faith healing. The book briefly retells the story of the “faith doctor,” Mrs. Utterback, whom Mark’s birth family consulted in his earliest years.
“I like osteopathy. It is quicker and you don’t have to take any medicine.”
Most of the major sadnesses of Mark Twain’s life came with loss of family to disease and injury. His wife, Olivia Langdon, was bedridden for two years as a teenager after a fall despite all the great physicians of Elmira, New York. Eventually, she gained relief through osteopathic treatment and Twain thought for a time that osteopathy was almost a panacea. But, she continued to suffer various ills for much of her life. Two of the three Clemens’s daughters died in their 20s.
Twain had this to say to a friend about personal experience with osteopathy of his day: “There are establishments at 156 Fifth Avenue; 107 East 23d; and 136 Madison Avenue, corner 31st Street. I beg you to go in at one of those places and take the treatment for a month, whether there is anything the matter with you or not. It will set you up and make you gay. I wish you would take it two months. It will cost you but a trifle of time — 15 or 20 minutes two or three times a week — 3 times is best.
“And when there is anything the matter with you, send for those people. You can’t possibly regret it. . . . They will take the lassitude and fatigue out of you and enable you to work double tides if you want to.
“I took the treatment daily during 2 months. I began again 3 days ago because I was not sleeping well and was seedy and needed freshening up for work. I am all right again, now.”
An even keener touchstone of healing came to Mark Twain when a youth from Dr Birch in Hannibal, MO days. “The doctor has to care about the patient. And the patient must have faith in the doctor.”
Since that truth was often not the fact, Mark Twain carried grievances against the medical monopoly of the day similar to ones which persist with many people in the present one: “The doctor’s insane system has not only been permitted to continue its follies for ages, but has been protected by the State and made a close monopoly — an infamous thing, a crime against a free-man’s proper right to choose his own assassin or his own method of defending his body against disease and death.”
Ober’s Mummery is a worthy and well-written book. But surely, Mr. Twain would have found reason to snipe at it if given a chance to read and review.
Many more reviews of books on medicine & healing are to be found at http://peoplemedicine.net/bookblog.html
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