Tag Archives: Dr. John Crawford

Tiny Animals That Cause Disease?

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So much for Eliza’s brother Thomas. What of her father, Dr. John Crawford? Alas, poor Crawford. Like his daughter, he suffered for being ahead of his time.

Crawford’s learning went beyond his medical expertise. According to the eulogist at his funeral, he was well read, conversant in French and German, and well acquainted with Latin and Greek. But medicine was his profession and his primary concern, and he did his best to use his knowledge to serve the cause of public health.

In 1800, after having been in Baltimore for four years, he submitted a report on local health conditions to the City Council. That summer, he introduced the new practice of vaccination to the city–no small accomplishment, since vaccination was far safer than the previous method of immunizing people against the dread disease of smallpox, called variolation or inoculation. When you’re inoculated, you’re actually given a case of smallpox–and you keep your fingers crossed that it’s a mild one. (For some reason, when smallpox is deliberately introduced into your system by a doctor, it’s usually–but not always–a mild case.) But when you’re vaccinated, instead of smallpox you’re given cowpox–a disease that causes few or no symptoms in humans but has the effect of immunizing them against smallpox. (The word vaccination actually comes from the Latin for “cow.”)

Edward Jenner had first experimented with vaccination in England in 1796. He wrote up his findings in 1798, but it took a little while for the idea to reach these shores. According to a pamphlet about Crawford published in 1940, Crawford actually introduced vaccination to Baltimore at the same time Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse introduced it in Cambridge, MA. But because Waterhouse devoted a great deal of energy to publicizing his success (and, some say, to profiting off of it), and Crawford did not, Waterhouse has gotten all the credit.

The following year Crawford helped to organize a “General Dispensary” in Baltimore. This appears to have been an institution devoted to the medical needs of the poor, with a particular emphasis on the yellow fever that plagued Baltimore–and other American cities, including Philadelphia–on a regular basis. Crawford was involved in other good works as well: he was a member of the Hibernian Benevolent Society, a director of the Baltimore library, and, in 1802, a founder of the local penitentiary. (This qualifies as a a “good work” because a penitentiary–where prisoners were supposed to become “penitent” and reform–was an improvement over a jail, where they were just warehoused until they were released.)He was also an elder of a Presbyterian church and, for many years, he held the position of “Right Worshipful Grand Master” of the local Masonic order. And he was apparently generous in his personal life. Years after his death, his son-in-law recalled the hospitality he provided to “all who were unhappy.”

But Crawford’s opinions got him in trouble. First there was some theological difficulty. In an 1806 letter to his friend Benjamin Rush–the foremost American physician of the day, who, unfortunately for the population at the time, was an enthusiastic proponent of massive bleeding as a cure for yellow fever–Crawford lamented that his opinions about the doctrine of revelation had cost him a lot of his business. Apparently Crawford believed that revelation–the process of God’s revealing himself–was coeval with creation. Personally, I don’t have a position on this question, but even if I did I can’t imagine that I would care what my doctor thought about it. Things were different in the early 19th century, though. “The premature disclosure of my opinions,” Crawford told Rush, “has afforded a means to the envious and malignant to prejudice those I had every reason for valuing myself on, so as to deprive me of all the valuable practice in this City.”

And that wasn’t Crawford’s only controversial opinion. The following year Rush recorded in his diary that Crawford “had lost all his business by propagating an unpopular opinion in medicine, namely, that all diseases were occasioned by animalculae. He said he was sixty-two years of age and not worth a cent, but in debt.”

Basically, Crawford was saying that tiny animals–“animalculae”–somehow entered the human body and caused disease. Sounds pretty weird, huh? But in fact, Crawford was anticipating germ theory by many decades. While Crawford wasn’t the first person to propose a theory like this, he was considered something of a crackpot for doing so. (Are there theories around these days that sound nuts to us but that will, in 50 or 100 years, be proved eminently sensible?)

So that was pretty much it for Crawford. Nobody wanted to go to a doctor who espoused not only the idea that revelation was coeval with creation, but–get this!–that disease was caused by germs. Who cared that he’d saved untold lives by introducing vaccination to the city? He died in 1813, heavily in debt. His estate consisted primarily of his collection of 400 books–the finest in the city, it was said. The books were sold to the fledgling University of Maryland, where they became the nucleus of its medical library, one of the oldest in the country. The sale brought $500, but that wasn’t nearly enough to cover the claims against him.

In his will, he left his daughter Eliza any money left over from his estate after his debts had been paid–an empty bequest, as it turned out. But of course, long before he died,he had given her something else: an education, and a sense of her own worth, despite the fact that she was female. And as we’ll soon see, she put those things to pretty good use.

A Life of Wicked Idleness

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Before we turn to Eliza’s next adventure, let’s pause to examine the rest of her family–which will allow me to unburden myself of some information I’ve come across only in the last week or so.

As I mentioned, Eliza–after a disastrous early marriage that effectively left her the single parent of an infant daughter–lived with her father, Dr. John Crawford, in Baltimore. What I’ve only just discovered is that she also had a brother, named Thomas.

The small family–father, son, and daughter–had arrived in Baltimore in 1796 at the invitation of Crawford’s brother-in-law, a prominent Baltimore merchant named John O’Donnell. (Crawford’s wife–that is, Eliza’s mother–had died on a voyage from Barbados to England in 1782, when Eliza was only about two years old.) Before that, Crawford had left his native Ireland to study medicine in Holland and then practiced medicine in both the East and West Indies, where he’d had the opportunity to study tropical diseases–and, unfortunately, to contract them. In both 1782 and then again in 1794, ill health forced him to return from the West Indies to Britain to recuperate. After the second trip home he’d been planning to head back to Demerara–once a Dutch colony, now a British colony–when the invitation came from O’Donnell in Baltimore. Crawford accepted the invitation in hopes that “it might prove advantageous to his children.” Not to mention that, despite annual yellow fever outbreaks, Baltimore’s climate was pretty healthy compared to the West Indies.

Crawford was apparently in straitened financial circumstances when he arrived in Baltimore–O’Donnell put the family up in “an excellent well furnished house,” Crawford wrote to a friend, “and supplied me with money as long as I would receive it.” Which, he said, was only “until my earnings were in the barest manner sufficient to afford subsistence and cloathing for my Son and daughter and myself.” Lack of money appears to have been a chronic condition for Crawford. “Oh! how grievous it is to reflect upon the deranged state in which my affairs have been in almost my whole life,” he laments to his friend. But he had hopes that his luck was about to change. Alas for him, he wasn’t entirely right about that.

Crawford appears to have pinned his hopes partly on his son, Thomas. In 1799 he spent a portion of his still scarce money to send Thomas off to study medicine in London. There are hints, however, that Crawford has some doubts about Thomas’s potential. On the one hand, he tells his friend, the young man “has not discovered as yet an inclination to make sacrifices at the shrine of either Bacchus or Venus.” But on the other, “his genius is not very bright.” Still, he’s a hard worker and determined to excel. (In this same letter, Crawford tells his friend of Eliza’s marriage to Henry Anderson, who would abandon her less than two years later: he calls it a “union which has been highly to the satisfaction of every party, and promises much happyness.”)

Crawford keeps scrounging to send Thomas money for his education, but as the years go by danger signs begin to appear. In February 1802 Crawford writes to his friend that he hasn’t heard from Thomas in quite a while. The young man has his good points, Crawford says, “but I fear he wants those which I am most desirous to recognise, industry, and a most zealous inclination to acquire information in the way I propose…” Maybe the problem was an excess of money at his disposal: “I now perceive the allowance he has had has been too much__ It has furnished him with the means of indulgence in a way I never contemplated, and he has sought for opportunities to pass the time agreeably, when I intended to provide alone for his … application to the business in which he was engaged.” Apparently Thomas had by now discovered the allure of both Bacchus and Venus.

Ten months later Crawford still hasn’t heard from Thomas, and he seems to despair of him. “I fear his sun is nearly set,” he tells his friend, “but we must be resigned to the unsearchable ways of Heaven.” And that’s the last we hear of Thomas. As far as I can tell, neither Crawford nor Eliza every mentions him again.

In this same letter–of December 1802–Crawford says that Eliza “is doing very well. She is earnestly engaged in teaching the young idea how to shoot, and promises to excel in that line.” “Teaching the young idea how to shoot” is apparently an allusion to some now-forgotten poem, but what it means is she’s teaching school. Then, perhaps in a dig at the ne’er-do-well Thomas, Crawford exclaims, “How preferable is this to a life of unmeaning, rather let me say, of wicked idleness.”

This is a story that has no doubt been repeated throughout history: a son who has no particular interest in higher education has it forced on him, while a daughter who craves it is denied it. (Lest anyone think this kind of thing is a relic of the distant past, it happened in my own mother’s family, just a generation ago.) But while Eliza–who appears to have had a mind like a sponge–was denied formal education, it’s clear from her writing and correspondence that she learned plenty at home, presumably from her father.

What’s odd is that Thomas apparently just disappears. “Wicked” and idle as he may have been, he was still a member of the family. Of course, Eliza and her father may well have sat by the fire many a night and lamented Thomas’s absence; their thoughts just don’t happen to have been recorded in any of the letters or other writings that have come down to us.

But there is one more letter in the series I’ve been quoting from–all of them written to a Hugh McCalmont, first in Demerara, then in London. This last letter is from 1805, and it was written just after Eliza had returned from her sojourn in London with Betsy Bonaparte. Apparently she’d seen McCalmont there, and he’d been kind to her. You’d think, if her brother were still in London–or anywhere in the British Isles–she would have seen him there, or tried to. But there’s no mention of any such reunion, or attempt at one, in the 1805 letter to McCalmont. Apparently Thomas was now dead to the family–or perhaps, given the precariousness of life in the early 19th century, he was dead in a literal sense.

As we’ll soon find out, this was only one of poor Dr. Crawford’s many misfortunes.