Medicine, Real and Imaginary
Dr. Wilkins sorts real 1860s medicine from humbug, covering whiskey's listing in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia as Spiritus Frumenti, the Union army's whiskey-and-quinine ration, Surgeon General Hammond's war on calomel, and the night Barnaby took a big bite out of a traveling elixir peddler. Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new stories about his granny's horehound cough syrup, a midnight delivery to a mountain doctor that got paid with a promise of free surgery, and a cousin's disastrous whiskey cure for a copperhead bite. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg leads into a lesson on potash lye and coopers' oak, and then Wilkins debunks the snakebite-whiskey myth at the anvil.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Settle down, you overstuffed fur trunk. Quit rattling that chain against my window frame like a Baptist rattling the collection box. And stop breathing on the glass. I have seen sweeter breath come out of a Concord tannery drain.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen ground, then goes quiet
Wilkins: That's better. He'll sulk until supper, and then he'll forgive me, which is more than the county has ever done.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, invalids, malingerers, and every one of you who has ever swallowed a spoonful of something brown and called it a cure. You are listening to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I'm Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, stamper of coin, and twice the guest of the Merrimack County sheriff. Tonight's subject is close to my heart, my liver, and my wallet. We call it Medicine, Real and Imaginary. What did whiskey actually cure, and what did it only paint over with a smile? Put a blanket on your knees and a bucket by the bed. We're going in.
♪ Theme fades
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♦ Wax crackle, single drip into jar
Wilkins: Now then. Segment the first. Medicine in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-five.
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: Here's a fact that'll surprise the temperance ladies of Pittsfield, who pray for my soul every Thursday and gossip about it every Friday. Whiskey is an official drug of these United States. It's printed right in the United States Pharmacopoeia, the druggist's bible, under the Latin name Spiritus Frumenti, which means spirit of grain. Brandy sits beside it as Spiritus Vini Gallici, spirit of French wine, which tells you the French have even gotten into the Latin. So when a man in Concord calls me a criminal, I tell him I am a compounding pharmacist without the diploma, and the diploma is the only part of the job that never did anybody any good.
Wilkins: And whiskey does do some honest work in medicine, so let's give it credit. First, it is a fine solvent. Put a gentian root, a strip of cherry bark, or a handful of horehound in good spirit and the alcohol pulls the bitter virtue right out of the plant. That's all a tincture is. The spirit also keeps the medicine from rotting on the shelf, which water never could. Every druggist's bottle from here to Boston is half whiskey wearing a Latin hat.
Wilkins: Second, consider the army. All through this late war the Union surgeons, down in the fever swamps of Virginia and the Carolina low country, poured each man a ration of whiskey with quinine stirred in, against the ague and the shaking fever. And the men swore by it. But I'll tell you plainly, as a man who respects a good lie but respects the truth more: it was the quinine that did the work. That's the bark of the cinchona tree from the mountains of Peru, bitter as a widow's opinion of her late husband. The whiskey only got the powder down a soldier's throat without him gagging it back up onto his boots. The quinine fought the fever and the whiskey fought the quinine, and the soldier lost both battles and won the war.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain clinks once
Wilkins: Now for the imaginary side of the ledger, and it's a long ledger. Have you ever heard of Hostetter's Celebrated Stomach Bitters, out of Pittsburgh? The bottles came to the regiments by the wagonload, sold as a tonic against camp fever, the bloody flux, and homesickness. That syrup runs forty-odd percent spirits, as strong as anything I've ever let out of my worm. Hostetter's Bitters is the only temperance drink in America that can knock a Union colonel off his horse. I've seen a Methodist deacon in Barnstead empty a bottle on a Sunday and then lecture me about my sins with tears in his eyes and a hiccup between every commandment.
Wilkins: Then there's the cold. Every teamster on the turnpike believes a dram warms a frozen man. Neighbors, it does not. Whiskey opens the little blood vessels in your skin, so you feel warm as toast, but all that heat is pouring straight out of you into the January air. You give a half-froze man a jar out on the Suncook ice and you've only sped him along. A dram for a frozen man is like a revenue man's promise: warm on the way in and fatal by morning. Wrap him in wool, set him by a fire, and save the jar for after he can feel his own fingers.
Wilkins: And whiskey's not the worst of it. Not by a mile of bad road. There's calomel, mercury salt, and blue mass, which is mercury rolled into a pill. Country doctors throw them at every belly, fever, and bad mood. I have had patients come into my chair who'd been fed calomel for a season, with gums black and stinking, teeth swaying in the jaw like rotten fence posts in a spring thaw, and spit running down the chin in ropes a cow would be ashamed of. I didn't need forceps for those teeth. I could have pulled them with a sneeze. Calomel will cure your bowels, your fever, and your teeth, mostly by taking all three away from you.
Wilkins: Credit where it's due. Surgeon General Hammond of the Union army had the backbone to strike calomel off the army supply table in the spring of 'sixty-three. The old doctors howled like he'd spat in the Bible, and between that quarrel and his other enemies in Washington they court-martialed him out of his post. That's the reward for being right too early. And they say Mr. Lincoln himself took blue mass pills as a younger man, then quit them because the pills made him cross. Mr. Lincoln quit his blue mass because it made him cross, and any man who could hold the Union together but couldn't hold his temper on mercury tells you everything about the pill.
Wilkins: Then there's laudanum, opium dissolved in spirits, sold at every general store from Epsom to Gilmanton by the ounce, no questions asked. It does stop pain, I won't lie to you. It stops coughs and loose bowels too. But it hooks a man worse than a Suncook pickerel, and I know three good families on Catamount Hill who lost a grandmother to that brown bottle one sleepy spoonful at a time. Laudanum will cure your cough, your pain, your sorrow, and your ambition, and in that order.
Wilkins: And scurvy? Whiskey does nothing for it. Not one blessed thing. The old sailors and our own colonial grandfathers brewed spruce beer from the new green tips, and there's real virtue in the spruce that keeps your gums from going soft. Spruce beer tastes like you licked a Christmas tree in a Gilmanton barn, but at least your teeth stay in your head. A man with scurvy and a jug of white liquor is still a man with scurvy, only louder about it.
♪ Banjo bridge, quick and plucky
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and the Professor who came to call.
Wilkins: Every summer the medicine wagons roll up Route 28 from Concord: painted boxes on wheels, a banjo player on the tailgate, and a gentleman in a checked suit selling bottled lightning. Two summers back a fellow pulled up in front of Fort Wilkins calling himself Professor Thaddeus Quimby Pratt, Late of Albany and the Royal Courts of Europe, which is three lies in one breath and a record even for Albany. He was selling Pratt's Electro-Galvanic Bear Grease Elixir, guaranteed to cure baldness, the rheumatism, female complaint, deafness, and a weak constitution in the marital chamber. Wouldn't you know, he chose my yard to set up his show, ten feet from the chain of an actual bear.
♦ Barnaby grunts low, chain shifts
Wilkins: Now Barnaby isn't an educated animal, but he knows the smell of real bear grease, and he knows when a man is lying about it. The Professor's elixir was lard, turpentine, and oil of wintergreen, and to a bear that smells like an insult to his entire family. The Professor uncorked a bottle and waved it under the crowd's noses, and he backed up one step too many, which is the last step a lot of men take in this valley.
Wilkins: Barnaby didn't roar. Folks who don't know bears always think there's a roar. There's only a sort of wet, wheezing cough, and then four hundred pounds of black fur is moving faster than a mill wheel in April. He got that Professor by the seat of his checked trousers. The cloth gave way first with a sound like a bedsheet ripping, and then there was a second sound underneath it, lower, like a boot pulled out of deep mud, and that was the Professor. Barnaby came away with a mouthful of plaid and a fair portion of the Albany gentleman's left hindquarter, and he sat right down on his haunches and chewed it slowly while looking me in the eye, the way a deacon chews his Sunday roast while the preacher runs long.
Wilkins: The Professor screamed in a voice I didn't know a grown man owned, half a hymn and half a stuck shoat. He ran clear across the turnpike with his rear end exposed to the whole congregation of Pittsfield, bleeding down both legs into his good shoes, and dove into my horse trough like it was the River Jordan. He came out of that water pink and screaming. The Professor came to Fort Wilkins with a cure for everything and left without a cure for the one thing he'd need most, which was sitting down.
Wilkins: Now, I'm a doctor of sorts, so I fished him out, laid him belly-down across my anvil, poured clean spirit into the hole, and he bellowed so loud the Pittsfield Mills thought the noon whistle had come early. Then I stitched him with horsehair and a sail needle, eleven stitches, each one tighter than an Epsom miser's purse. I stitched his hindquarter with horsehair and charged him nothing, as he had already paid Barnaby in trade. That peddler's elixir was guaranteed to restore manly vigor, and I'll say this for it: he ran out of that yard faster than any man in Merrimack County. He drove off south that same afternoon, standing up in the wagon all the way to Chichester, and I've heard he sells in Vermont now, where the bears are smaller.
♦ Barnaby grunts contentedly
Wilkins: You hear that? He's proud of himself. Don't encourage him.
Wilkins: And yes, neighbors, the sheriff came for me twice for selling spirits, and both times I told him the same thing I told the Professor's crowd: the only difference between my jar and the druggist's bottle is the Latin on the label and three dollars in the price. The sheriff came twice to arrest me for selling medicine, and both times went home with a better cough than he arrived with. A revenue man's nose is the most sensitive instrument the Treasury owns, and it still can't find a still in a room where the jar is sitting on his hat.
♪ Fiddle flourish
Wilkins: Tonight we have a man who knows something about mountain medicine, about country doctors who paid in strange coin, and about what liquor will and won't fix when you're forty miles from a town. He's come up from the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, and he talks faster than a Concord auctioneer with the ague. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Mr. Junior Vance.
Junior: Doc, I'm obliged. I'd shake your hand but that bear's been eyeing my fingers like they're breakfast sausages.
Wilkins: He's only curious. He's never tasted a Carolinian. Sit on the far stool and keep your hands in your lap. Junior, tonight we're talking about medicine. Was liquor a doctor in your hills?
Junior: Doc, liquor was the doctor, the druggist, and half the preacher. My granny kept a cough syrup on the top shelf of the pie safe: rock candy, horehound she picked off the fence row, and a pint of the clearest white liquor in Wilkes County. One spoon for a cough, two for croup, and three if you were fixing to go courting. One Easter she reckoned the whole church choir sounded croupy, so before sunrise service she lined 'em up and gave every one a spoonful. Then she figured the altos looked peaked and gave them seconds.
Wilkins: Ha! And how did the Lord's music fare?
Junior: The sopranos held up fine. But them altos sang a half-step flat and about twice as loud as anybody'd ever heard 'em, and Miss Edna Pruitt hit a note on 'He Arose' that made a mule bray clear across the holler. The preacher said it was the Holy Ghost. Granny said it was the horehound. I'll let you decide.
Wilkins: Your granny's choir sang loud enough to wake Lazarus, and from the sound of it Lazarus would have asked for a spoonful. Now Junior, the horehound in that syrup does soothe a throat, and the candy coats it. The liquor mostly just makes you not care about the cough. That's medicine and imaginary medicine in the same spoon.
Junior: That's about right. Granny also did mustard plasters for croup: mustard on a flannel, rubbed down first with a splash of liquor, and she rubbed it so hard that every time it rains my ribs still smell like a hot dog stand at a county fair.
Wilkins: I don't know what manner of dog you Carolinians stand up at a fair, and I'm not sure I want to know. But a mustard plaster draws the blood to the skin and the burn takes your mind off the chest. Keep it on too long, mind, and it raises a blister like a branding iron. Now, you knew doctors who took their pay in jars?
Junior: Yes sir. There was an old doctor up past the Brushy Mountain ridge, I won't say his name 'cause his grandchildren still go to church. He sent word down that he needed ten gallons for the dispensary. That's what he called it, the dispensary. I carried it up at midnight to his back porch, one lantern lit, and him standing there in a nightshirt and boots with a shotgun cradled like a baby. I asked where the money was. He took a pencil stub and wrote on a feed-sack ticket: Good for one free operation, any kind, for life. Signed it, and tipped his hat.
Wilkins: Junior, a doctor who takes his pay in whiskey is the only honest banker in the South. And did you ever cash in that note?
Junior: Eleven years later, Doc. My appendix went bad on me hauling hay. Felt like a mule had kicked me from the inside. They carried me up to his house and I'm laying on the kitchen table, sweating like a sinner, and I pull out that feed-sack ticket, all soft and greasy from riding in my wallet. He looks at it, laughs, and says, I reckon I owe you. He took that appendix out right there by lamplight with his wife holding the lamp and his hound under the table waiting for something to drop.
Wilkins: And did anything drop?
Junior: The hound got lucky with a bit of the bandage, but the appendix went in a pint jar with a label in his handwriting: Paid in Full. He kept it on his mantel next to his diploma, and he told folks it was the best-earned dollar he ever made.
Wilkins: I'd shake that man's hand. I keep a jar of pulled molars on my shelf for the same reason. Every one is a receipt. I've pulled teeth from more liars than any judge in Merrimack County, and at least my patients spit out the truth with the molar. Now Junior, tell me about snakes. I hear your mountains are thick with them.
Junior: Copperheads, rattlers, and a cousin of mine named Dewey who was dumber than both. Dewey got bit on the back of the hand by a copperhead turning over a rock pile looking for his dropped pocketknife. And every old man on that mountain told him the cure was liquor, so Dewey drank a full quart of it, sitting on a stump, while we all stood around praising his courage.
Wilkins: A full quart. Lord preserve us.
Junior: Doc, by the bottom of that jar he was singing to the snake. The snake was still there, coiled under the rocks, watching him like a deacon watches a collection plate. Then Dewey just tipped over backwards off the stump, out cold, and we couldn't wake him. Come morning his hand was swole up like a smoked ham, purple as a plum, and he didn't remember his own name. We hauled him to a real doctor in a wagon, and the doctor said the liquor near about finished him off faster than the snake ever could.
Wilkins: The copperhead got the hand, the whiskey got the head, and the cousin got the bill for both. And Junior, that doctor was right. I'll get to it at the anvil later tonight. Hold that thought.
Junior: Dewey kept the knife, by the way. Found it under the stump. Said the whole thing was worth it.
Wilkins: Spoken like a true patient. Mr. Junior Vance of Wilkes County, North Carolina. Stay put and keep your fingers off the windowsill.
Junior: Yes sir. That bear's licking his lips at me again.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
♪ Brisk patent-medicine wagon banjo vamp
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♪ Banjo vamp ends on a bright chord
♦ Wax crackle, drip into jar
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. The druggist's art and the distiller's art are blood brothers, neighbors. Let me walk you through it the way I'd teach it in my own shop.
Wilkins: Start with the mash. If you're working corn, you crack it and cook it in water till it goes thick as porridge. But mark this, because half the fools on the turnpike never learn it: yeast can't eat corn starch. The starch has to be turned to sugar first, and the old way is the malt. You take barley or rye, let it sprout on a damp floor, dry it, grind it, and stir that malt into the cooked corn once it's cooled to where you can hold your hand in it, but not comfortably. The malt has a hidden virtue in it, what the chemists call a ferment, and it turns the starch to sugar the way a pickpocket turns your wallet into his. No malt, no sugar, and the yeast starves.
Wilkins: Then you cool it further and pitch your yeast. Now here's a bit of alchemy most men never hear. Keep that ferment fed and keep it cool. A yeast that's starved or overheated gets sick and lets out hydrogen sulfide, the rotten-egg gas. Stressed yeast farts sulfur like a deacon after a bean supper, and the copper's job is to forgive him. The healthier your ferment, the less sin the copper has to wash away.
Wilkins: And where does the copper do its washing? Everybody believes it's the pot. It isn't, chiefly. It's where the hot vapor kisses the metal: the helmet up top, the vapor pipe, and the coils of the worm. The sulfur in the vapor binds to that bright copper face and stays behind as a dark film, and your spirit comes through clean. That's why an honest still has copper all the way up the vapor path and not just a copper bottom with cheap iron above. A copper pot with a tin cap is like a sermon with no ending: all the good intention, none of the result.
Wilkins: Now the cuts, and these matter more than anything I've said tonight. I learned them from an old Epsom man who learned them from his father, and I'll give them to you straight. Bring the heat up slow. Low and steady, never a roaring fire. Never walk away from a running still, not for a pipe, not for a privy, not even for a pretty widow. Alcohol vapor catches fire like dry birch bark, and a leaking joint near an open flame will burn your shed and your eyebrows down together.
Wilkins: When the first drops come, those are the foreshots. Set them aside, every drop, and pour them out. Never drink them, never sell them, never rub them on a baby's gums. Next come the heads, sharp and solventy, and they go out too, or into a separate jar for cleaning your tools. Then the hearts, sweet and clean on the tongue, and that's your keeping spirit. After them come the tails, oily and dull, smelling of wet dog and old regret, and you set those aside to run again.
Wilkins: And a warning for my apple men, with all the orchards up the Suncook Valley. Fruit mashed with its skins and pomace makes more of the poisonous wood-spirit than grain does, because the pectin in the fruit breaks down into it. So with apple or pear brandy you cut wider and you cut braver. A greedy man saves an extra cupful of heads and pays for it with his eyesight. I've seen a Barnstead man blind in one eye from it, and he still argues the cupful was worth it. It was not.
Wilkins: As for proof, the old story is that the soldiers of England poured spirit on a pinch of gunpowder and put a spark to it. If it lit, that was proof it hadn't been watered. If it didn't, somebody got hanged, or ought to have been. That spark catches at roughly fifty-seven parts in the hundred of pure alcohol, and that's where the word comes from.
Wilkins: And neighbors, I'll say it plain as a molar on a plate: under the laws of these United States, distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, even in your own woodshed for your own use. Everything we do on this program is for history and education, and for the fine art of tinctures, oils, and honest demonstration.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Barnaby is the most law-abiding thing on this property, chiefly because nobody's written a law about him yet.
♪ Fiddle bridge
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the call-in line. The tape machine is wound. Let's hear what we've got.
♦ Tape hiss, click
Wilkins: This one comes from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, from Mr. Cletus Miller, called Rabbit by his friends, and I expect by his creditors too. Go ahead, Rabbit.
♦ Recorded voicemail crackle
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Click, tape hiss fades
Wilkins: Rabbit, it's a fine question, and your uncle sounds like a man worth a jar. Let me take his two notions one at a time. First, the hickory ashes. Ask any farm wife in Pittsfield what you get when you soak wood ashes in water. You get lye. That's the potash this state sold to England by the shipload a lifetime ago, leached in iron pots, which is where the very word potash comes from. Lye is fierce stuff. It eats acids, it turns fat into soap, and it'll take the skin off your knuckles. Tip it into a boiling charge and you'll get foam rising up the still like a mad dog's mouth, maybe a puke into your worm, and a soapy, scorched taste. What it won't touch is the wood-spirit, the poisonous part of the heads. That only leaves your liquor one way: you catch it in the first jars and you pour it out. Rabbit, putting lye in your thump keg won't clean your liquor, but you'll have the cleanest-scrubbed stomach in Wilkes County, right before it wears through.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Ask a cooper. No cooper worth his adze builds a liquor barrel from red oak, because red oak is open-grained. Its pores run clear through the wood like straws, and a red oak barrel weeps whiskey out its sides like a widow at a reading of the will. White oak is different. Its pores are plugged by little growths the botanists call tyloses, and it holds. Red oak holds liquor about as well as a Concord selectman holds a secret. Toss oak shavings in a thump keg and the vapor bubbling through will pick up color, a bit of tannic pucker, and a woody flavor. Some old-timers did it on purpose, and some put apples or peaches in the doubler too, for the scent. That's flavoring, Rabbit, not doctoring. It adds something, but it doesn't take anything bad out. So your uncle's half right about the taste and all wrong about the cure, which makes him like most uncles. Mr. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, this anvil strike is for you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There, a fresh copper cent, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., warm off the anvil, with your name on the envelope.
Wilkins: Now I promised Junior a myth, and here it is: whiskey for snakebite. Every porch from here to the Brushy Mountains swears by it. Lay this coin on the anvil.
♦ Coin clinks onto anvil
Wilkins: Myth the first: the whiskey kills the poison.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: False. Spirit does nothing to snake venom, not in the bite and not in the blood. There's no Latin, no chemistry, and no jar on God's earth that turns venom into water.
Wilkins: Myth the second: a big enough dose will carry the patient through.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Worse than false. Doctors in this very century have poured a quart or two into a bitten man as the cure, and some of those men died of the whiskey alone, poisoned outright, while the snake got the credit. Junior's cousin Dewey is lucky he's not under that stump instead of sitting on it. A man who treats snakebite with a quart of whiskey has given the snake a partner.
Junior: Dewey'd want it known he still has his knife.
Wilkins: The knife will outlive us all, Junior. Now, the truth.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: If you're bit, sit still and keep calm. Keep the limb still and get to a real doctor as fast as somebody else can drive you. Don't run, don't drink, and don't let some fool from the tavern cut you open with his whittling knife and suck on it like a hog at a trough. Barnaby would cure snakebite too: he'd eat the snake, then the man, and the symptoms would stop right away.
♦ Barnaby grunts loudly, chain rattles
Wilkins: He's not offering, neighbors. Don't write in.
♪ Banjo bridge
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! For tinctures, essential oils, and demonstrations of the old craft, there's nothing like the Flame-Flow still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, in heavy-gauge pure copper. Order yours today at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle, drip into jar
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, the lamp's burning low and Barnaby's dreaming of plaid trousers. Before I let you go: if you want to learn the craft properly, malt and mash and cuts and copper, the honest way, the safe way, the historical way, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read a run like I read a jaw full of bad teeth, and you'll never once need a bear to keep you honest. Ask for it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or by post.
Wilkins: My thanks to Mr. Junior Vance of Wilkes County, who's keeping his fingers in his pockets, and to Mr. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, whose coin is cooling on the anvil. Remember: whiskey can carry medicine but it's seldom the medicine itself, the cold will kill a drunk man quicker than a sober one, and no snake ever got sober for your sake.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. Tell that bear goodnight for me, from a safe distance.
Wilkins: Barnaby, say goodnight to the Carolinian.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clinks
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme rises, then fades into wax cylinder crackle