The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 4
Wow. If anybody had told me that in my fourth post on Erasmus Miller Owen I wouldn't have gotten past the whole name question, I would have thought they were crazy. But, here we are in the third post, and that is still what we are looking at. After studying the death certificates of Erasmus himself and of his children, and after considering the fact that Edgar's family knew that his father was called Dr. Joe, and yet Edgar did not report on his death certificate that Joseph was his actual name, I have come to the conclusion that it probably wasn't.
However, I would like to investigate the Dr. Joe story anyway. The first time I heard it, I was pretty skeptical. I mean, my mother and my grandmother were really close with the Maben side of the family. My grandmother wrote a whole book of family history and never mentioned such a thing. Surely at the time she was doing her research she asked Clara's daughter, her Auntie Babe, what she knew about Erasmus Miller Owen. She was also in contact with Orlena's son, James, and still didn't seem to have heard that particular story. She had scores of old family photos and she could tell you who almost every single person in them was, and yet the fact that Erasmus was a Baptist preacher was the only significant detail of his life story that has been passed down!
Now, I've come to discover that the legend of Dr. Joe is pretty widely cited out there in internet-land. I might have been so skeptical as to suspect that one person had posted it on a discussion board way back at the advent of Ancestry and everyone became a believer (I have seen this happen), except for the fact that Leon Owen told the story to his sister only thirty-three years or so after his grandfather's death. That means that the story either has at least a kernel of truth to it or our Erasmus really had his family fooled!
Since the story has more than one version, and since we do not have definitive proof as to whether or not Joe was Erasmus' given name or a nickname, and since I am never satisfied if I haven't investigated every single source of information I can find about an ancestor and wrapped it all up into a cohesive story, we are going to take a closer look at it.
So, let's review for a moment, shall we?
In my first post, I showed an article from the Owen Family Association Newsletter that said, "Some biographies state Erasmus attended medical school for two years in New Orleans, leading to his nickname, "Dr. Joe." He would become a circuit riding preacher, ministering to souls and physical ailments." I also showed a transcript of a letter from Edgar's son that said, "Grandpa was raised in Memphis Tenn . . . . Grandpa Owen went to Vanderbilt University at Nashville where he studied medicine and he was called Dr. Joe in San Saba Co before he quit practicing medicine."
Okay. Both stories state that he practiced medicine and was called "Dr. Joe." The first one, which is a relatively recent summary of all of those "family stories" out there, says he attended medical school for two years in New Orleans. The second, which was written down in approximately 1950, says he went to Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. I figured that the easiest first step would be to find out what year Vanderbilt University was founded.
Well, Vanderbilt University was founded in 1873. This particular detail, then, cannot be true, because Erasmus Miller Owen was living and preaching and supposedly doctoring people in San Saba County for like ten years before then.
And here is the problem with writing a research blog - in order to confidently make that claim, I had to look at the census records, the tax rolls, the marriage records, the birth locations of his children, and his confederate pension application. If I tried to show all of those to you right now as proof, not only would it be a giant detour from what we are supposed to be talking about, but it would be silly to show you a document, say a tax roll, and just say, see, he was living in San Saba County, but ignore all the other interesting stuff we could learn from the document. Or I could show you his pension application and say, see he says he entered Texas on Christmas Day 1849, but ignore everything else, like where he was born and what year he moved to Brown County and all of the other interesting bits of information that we could learn. So, right now you are just going to have to trust me when I say that I looked at all of those documents and that I am going to show them all to you before we are finished telling the story of Erasmus Miller Owen.
Alright. Vanderbilt was a bust. But what about Nashville? Well, the University of Nashville had a medical school, but it wasn't opened until 1851 (it was later transferred to Vanderbilt University in 1874). I guess the whole location mentioned by Leon Owen was a bust then. Maybe he just assumed that his grandfather had studied in Nashville, because that is where Vanderbilt University was located.
So how about New Orleans? I did some searching, and I found a 1934 article from the Annals of Medical History titled "HISTORY OF MEDICAL EDUCATION IN NEW ORLEANS FROM ITS BIRTH TO THE CIVIL WAR" By A. E. Fossier, M.D. According to Dr. Fossier, the first medical school in New Orleans, the Medical College of Louisiana, was organized in 1834. (If I read it right, in the following year the French-speaking Medical College of New Orleans was created and the two were joined.) At the time, the next closest medical schools were in Ohio and Georgia, so this new school served what was then the entire western and southern portions of the U. S. The school was very small, had very few students, and grew very slowly. In 1845, the state of Louisiana chartered a university, and the medical college was absorbed into it (today it is known as Tulane University).
Now, Erasmus was reportedly born in 1832, so he wouldn't have been ready to go to college until he was something like sixteen years old at least, which would have been in 1848 or so, which means this story is plausible. But, the book also said that the medical school was very, very expensive, that it had a three year course, and that the first year was spent with a private tutor or preceptor before entering the medical school proper, which took two more years. (And that was it - after two years of medical study, the person would graduate as a doctor!) The book also said, though, that no student was even allowed to apply for graduation until they were twenty-one years old, which means they couldn't enter the medical college until they were eighteen years old; Erasmus would have been eighteen in 1850, but he was already in Texas by then, and I forgot to mention that he married his first wife (in Texas) in 1852, so that means that he could not have gone to medical school in New Orleans for two years.
So, it looks like both stories are a bust.
On a positive note, I learned something very, very important from reading that book. Apparently, "it was the custom of that time for all letters from the public published in the newspapers to be signed with a non de plume." That means that, when we read those old, old newspapers, any letter to the editor will not be signed with the person's real name, but instead with a fake 'pen name.' Well, that sure throws a monkey-wrench into research, doesn't it? Maybe this was a negative note instead!
Anyway, once I discovered that neither version of events could be entirely true, I decided to see if I could find a chronological listing of all medical schools in Tennessee or the United States, just in case there was some other school in Tennessee in the late 1840s that he might have attended. Not so easy, friends. Either the search engines can't do their job properly, or nobody has cared enough to put the information online. Finally, finally, after many attempts with different search terms, I stumbled upon a blog post from somebody named Brian Altonen, MPH, MS, Public Health, Medicine and History. And that might actually be the title of the website. I'm not really sure, because the banner at the top is arranged very strangely. Anyway, it was just a random post from his blog, and I wasn't even sure why it came up in the search results, because it sounded like it was just some sort of criticism of a famous and often quoted writing on medical history because it is full of cultural biasness that gives a one-sided picture of medical history or something. So, I was like, weird, what does this have to do with a timeline of medical schools?, but I scrolled down the page, and lo and behold, I found this:
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| Excerpt from Chronological Review chart "Timeline of Medical Schools" by Brian Altonen |
I couldn't include the whole chart because it was really, really long, but this is the part we are really concerned with anyway. I snipped the portion beginning with the medical college in New Orleans that I mentioned above, and I went until 1848, which would have actually been later than we need to look at here. I really, really like this chart, because it tells us all kinds of useful information: the year the medical school was founded, where it was located, what type of medicine it taught, and whether or not it was discontinued. I don't know where this guy found all of this information, because like I said, I had trouble finding much of anything online!
It looks like the medical schools fell into four basic types: regular, botanic, homeopathic, and eclectic. I am assuming that regular is what we think of as a traditional medical school, homeopathic should be what it is today (I didn't even know that was a thing way back then!), and botanic sounds like herbal or medicinal medicine, not surgery and whatnot. I'm guessing eclectic was a mix of the others.
So, let's take a closer look at the schools and their locations. By the time Erasmus would have been old enough to attend a medical school, there were options available to him in Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, and . . . . well look at that, Tennessee. The Botanic Medical College, founded in 1846, was in the city of Memphis, right there in his own backyard! According to Mr. Altonen, this medical school was a mixture of regular and botanic, which means that the doctors training there would have learned traditional medicine, like obstetrics and surgery, as well as "botanic" medicine, which simply means the use of herbal remedies.
I did a bit of looking around online, and discovered that botanic medicine became popular during the Jacksonian Era, and it was sometimes called Thomsonian medicine, after its founder, who actually had his early training with a local "root doctor." (There is a long but interesting lesson on the history of this type of medicine, and you can read it here if you are interested.) I tried to discover what the summary in the chart meant about "political problems" and couldn't find anything specifically related to the school in Tennessee, but apparently the entire botanic movement met with a whole lot of resistance from "regular" doctors (who were actually still doing things like bleeding their patients and treating them with mercury!!), as well as from the founder of the movement himself who, believing that training should consist only of hands-on experience, was opposed to formal schools that used texts in a classroom setting, causing the movement to split into two rival factions. The funny thing about the whole mess is that the "regular" doctors were offended that the botanic doctors called themselves such, while the followers of botanic medicine accused the regular doctors of "scientific poisoning and quackery."
I also came across this on the Tennessee Encyclopedia website:
Despite physicians’ efforts to professionalize medicine, an informal 1850 census conducted in East Tennessee indicated that of 201 practicing doctors only 35 had graduated from a medical school. The others possessed professional training ranging from one course of medical lectures to no formal training whatsoever. Clearly, many of the physicians were self-proclaimed. Without licensing procedures, which did not become law in Tennessee until 1889, anyone could declare himself, or herself, a physician. Although the Medical Society of Tennessee had the power to confer licenses, rarely did anyone apply. Initially, the state society languished before physicians’ lethargy, geographical considerations, and the Civil War.
Well, it looks like pretty much anyone could become a "Dr. Joe" back then in Tennessee, doesn't it?
So anyway, it looks like maaaaaaybe Erasmus Miller Owen might have possibly (I know, can I get any more non-committal?) actually attended medical school in Tennessee, like his grandson Leon thought, but instead of it being Vanderbilt University in Nashville, it was the Botanico-Medical College of Memphis.
I've been going back and forth between writing this and doing a google search to find more information about the place, and my persistence finally paid off, because I found this preview on Google Books:
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| Kindly Medicine: Physio-Medicalism in America, 1836-1911 by John S. Haller Jr. |
If Erasmus did attend this medical college, he would have learned anatomy, physiology, pathology, surgery, medical theory, "materia medica" (another name for pharmacy), obstetrics and the diseases of women and children, chemistry, and medical law. The school was supposed to be state-of-the-art with a library, modern instruments, and an extensive collection of specimens and illustrations. Now, this also says that the "course of instruction lasted four months" at the cost of $80 (plus $25 in fees). When I first saw that I was like, Holy cow! That is not enough time to learn any one of those things! And so cheap, too! Of course, when I put the amount into the inflation calculator, it came out to an equivalent in today's money of about $4,100. That also sounds pretty inexpensive for a college education, but let's talk about the term "course of instruction" for a minute. This book makes it sound like a person could pay the required tuition and fees and become a doctor in four months' time. I don't think that's what it means, though. The book about the medical school in Louisiana was talking about the fact that there were a lot of complaints at the time that a school term lasted only four months, and the student was expected to sit through something like five or six lectures every day. The founders of the New Orleans school had a five month term - November through March - and they required three years, whereas most medical schools of the day only required two. So, at the very least, a student would have to pay the tuition amount twice.
You might still think that is not a lot of money for medical school, but consider that (according to the 1849 Shelby County tax rolls) the cheapest town lot in south Memphis was valued at about $300. And according to this University of Missouri website, the average price of an acre of land in Shelby County, Tennessee in 1850 was $11.00. The average monthly wage for a Tennessee farm hand (with room and board included) was $8.67. That means it would have taken a farm hand more than an entire year's wages to pay the fees for one term of medical school. Now it sounds a bit more expensive, doesn't it?
I decided to do a bit more investigating to see if I could find out anything else about the school, and it dawned on me that I should look in old newspapers. Look what I found:
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| Circular from the Botanico-Medical College of Memphis The Tri-Weekly Memphis Enquirer July 2, 1846 |
This advertisement for the new college says that each course of instruction would last four months, and have thirty-five or more lectures each week. So that would be like taking seven or more college courses in less than one semester, which is a lot of information to master - especially for somebody who is expected to hold other people's lives in their hands! It also says that the students would have to complete two courses of lectures plus a two-year practicum under a "respectable physician" or one course of instruction with a three year internship instead. So, I guess if you could afford both terms, you could chop a year off the time it took to become a doctor. (And did you all notice that, in addition to the tuition and fees, each student was expected to purchase eight medical textbooks, which I'll bet cost an arm and a leg themselves.)
Now, it seems that I am always second-guessing myself, maybe because I am actually publishing my ideas, but I decided I'd better double check that book I showed you all a minute ago and make sure it didn't list some other Tennessee medical school that the timeline on the blog didn't mention. I found something, which led to another search, and it turns out that between 1847 and 1851 - the exact time we are looking at - there was a rival medical school in Memphis called the Memphis Institute. According to this journal article, the founder was "disappointed with the direction taken at the Botanico-Medical College of Memphis" and wanted a school that would include other arts and sciences as well as law. I actually saw a newspaper article in one of the editions of a Memphis newspaper advertising that new school, but it sounded like it was just being formed and medicine was not one of the subject areas listed in the advertisement, so I thought it did not have a medical school.
And guess what? Apparently there was a third medical school in Memphis at the same time! While trying to find information about the Memphis Institute, I ended up back on the Tennessee Encyclopedia website, and it turns out that I just didn't read far enough the first time because it also said that the Memphis Medical College opened in the same year as the Botanico-Medical College of Memphis. I had actually found an 1848 newspaper article advertising that school, but the headline read "Medical College of Memphis" so I thought that it was the botanic college and that they had raised their rates. I did a new newspaper search and found advertisements for this other one in the newspapers of other states:
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| The Weekly Mississipian July 15, 1846 |
This medical school was a bit more pricy - equivalent to almost $4,800 in modern money even without the graduation fee. I read through several of the articles about this school and discovered that, although it was a traditional medical school, it took issue with the fact that the older, more famous schools focused too much on surgery. Its philosphy was that, because surgery is so rarely performed and can be dangerous in cases where "a fever" is present, the daily application of medical care is much more important to be taught. So, that makes it sound like their school was a lot closer to the botanic one in their ideology. I also discovered that there was a bit of a controversy over how young one of the instructors was, but the school countered with the argument that many instructors in the famous institutions had never even practiced medicine at all. From reading the articles, I found two other bits of information that were particularly interesting.
First, the school made a big deal about the fact that they were going to train doctors who could treat diseases and conditions "peculiar to the regions" in which they lived, meaning the South and the frontier. Also, it emphasized the fact that men from the South would be more comfortable in a Southern school, where abolitionist ideas weren't being pushed. (It's a perfect example of how early the tensions that led to the Civil War were ramping up.)
What else? The "public of both sexes" were invited to attend the series of introductory lectures free of charge, so I guess those Southerners were progressive in some of their ideas at least.
And here is something that might be particularly important to our line of research: In March of 1849, one article stated that "the low price of cotton and consequent scarcity of money" had "diminished the classes" in most other Southern medical schools. Although the Memphis Medical College had not yet seen a decline in enrollment, perhaps this situation was the reason that Erasmus Miller Owen never finished formal medical training. Maybe he completed one term and two years of internship and not only couldn't scrape up the money for another term, but for some reason was also unable to complete a third year of practice under a doctor. Maybe the hard economic times are what prompted him to move to Texas and explore new opportunities. It would certainly fit the legend of "Dr. Joe," wouldn't it?
And, if anyone is still skeptical about the fact that a person could just call themselves a doctor and practice medicine without a degree or license, the Kindly Medicine book says that, because botanic medicine was not accepted by the mainstream medical establishment, and also because its founder was anti-formal education anyway, branches of their professional organization (The Friendly Thomsonian Botanic Society) were encouraged to grant their own "licenses" (which of course were not official licenses), allowing botanic practitioners to become doctors:
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| Sample "Family Practitioner" License from the Friendly Thomsonian Botanic Society Kindly Medicine, pg 34 |
I am finding the idea that Erasmus Miller Owen was this sort of doctor more and more believable by the minute.
Other researchers investigating this mystery have also speculated that Erasmus Miller Owen was a practitioner of alternative medicine. Gail Fail, a fellow Ancestry researcher, wrote:
Erasmus’ obituary says that he “was a Baptist minister and also practiced medicine.” This is interesting, because his grandson Samuel Elias Shults did something similar, calling himself a magnetic masseuse or chiropractor, as did Samuel’s son, my father-in-law Denman Shoultz. Erasmus’ granddaughter Josephine Owen Morrison also claimed to be a chiropractor, an unusual profession for a woman. Both Sam and Josephine were of an age to have learned from their grandfather Erasmus before he died.
The period between about 1860 and 1900 is called the “free trade era” of medicine. There were few requirements for a medical practitioner, and even those men who trained in an actual medical school didn’t know much. Conventional medicine involved purging the body (with emetics and laxatives), bleeding, use of toxic mercury-based medicines, blistering the skin, and other inhumane and useless activities.
During the Civil War, so many men died of botched surgeries or infections, doctors got an even worse reputation.
As a result, hundreds of unlicensed people in America simply called themselves doctors. All of them claimed to be able to cure disease. Generally in the mid to late 1800’s a patient was better off with a gentle, well-meaning but poorly educated healer than with a college educated doctor.
By the 1870’s Americans could choose from many different non-conventional medicinal practices. Some relied on herbs and steam baths. Homeopathy, osteopathy, massage, faith healing, use of therapeutic magnets, chiropractic and naturopathy all emerged. None of these was based on science, but then neither was conventional medicine at that time. I believe that Erasmus and his descendants did more good than harm.
I went through the 1870 census pages for San Saba County line by line, looking at all of the occupations that were reported. Out of the 192 households, only two people reported their occupation as "Physician." I am assuming that those two men were "actual" doctors with a medical degree. Erasmus was not one of those - he reported his occupation as "Minister of the Gospel." I wonder how many others like him were out there.
During one of those days that I was trying to find something with Google searches, I came across a book called Surviving on the Texas Frontier by Sarah Harkey Hall. It is the memoir of a woman who grew up in San Saba County, Texas during the time when Erasmus was living and practicing medicine there. She tells about the death of her mother in 1869:
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| Surviving on the Texas Frontier (pg 23) |
Concerning her own illness a few years later, she recounts:
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| Surviving on the Texas Frontier (pg 42) |
But back to the legend about Erasmus himself. Where did the idea that he studied medicine in New Orleans come from? My guess is that that version of the story was adopted by more recent "amateur genealogists." And by that I mean those of us descendants who look around online (or if they were looking in pre-internet times, who went to county courthouses and the National Archives) trying to fill out a family tree and maybe a family data sheet as well. Maybe somebody realized that Leon Owen had his information a bit off, and so they looked for the next closest medical school that existed in the late 1840s and came up with New Orleans. Or maybe that story is post-Ancestry, meaning that they decided to investigate the Dr. Joe thing and did a search for "Joseph Owen" in Tennessee or Texas on Ancestry.com. I did that, you know, just to cover my bases before deciding that "Joe" was most likely just a quirky nickname. I got some hits on the tax rolls, but they were in the wrong places. I got some hits on the census records and city directories in Tennessee, but those were all for years after our Erasmus had left. I got a Civil War hit, but I looked up the regiment and it was mustered from counties nowhere near San Saba, not to mention that our Erasmus said he joined the Texas Home Guard, not the Confederate Army.
Then, I got a hit from the Mexican American War. That one was interesting.
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| Mexican American War Muster Cards for Joseph Owen Ancestry.com |
These muster roll cards show a Joseph Owen who signed up as a volunteer in Nashville in 1846. He was appointed as a "hospital steward" before mustering out in New Orleans in 1847. So there you go. Joseph Owen. Two years. Pre-1849. Medical practitioner. Nashville and New Orleans. It checks all of the boxes, right? Could this be where the more recent version of the Dr. Joe story came from? And the bigger question - is this Joseph Owen the same man as the one we know as Erasmus Miller Owen?
I don't think so. In 1846, Erasmus would have been only fourteen years old. Not necessarily too young to enlist if he lied about his age, but to be appointed hospital steward? Well actually, a hospital steward is not what it sounds like; it isn't somebody in charge of a field hospital. It turns out that the hospital steward was just the assistant to the field surgeon, who helped with surgeries and whatnot and administered medications. Huh. I guess a fourteen-year old boy could do that. But, why would our Erasmus have gone to Nashville, 212 miles from home, at fourteen years old to enlist in a war? That makes even less sense than you might think because:
In the summer of 1846, state officials employed a lottery system to determine who among the overwhelming number of volunteers would serve and who had to return home. Approximately 1,000 men from Middle Tennessee counties formed the First Tennessee Infantry Regiment commanded by Colonel William Campbell. Volunteers from the western part of the state comprised the Second Tennessee Infantry Regiment commanded by Colonel William T. Haskell, while a contingent of dragoons hailed from East Tennessee. (https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/mexican-war/)
Apparently, 2800 men were called for, but 30,000 volunteered. So not only would Erasmus have had to be chosen in the lottery, but he would have been assigned to the infantry unit for men from the western part of the state, not in the First Regiment, in which the muster cards above show that Joseph Owen served.
Not only that, but if you look at the muster-in and muster-out dates, this person was only enlisted for one year, not the two Erasmus supposedly trained for. And, as we've seen, he would have been too young to then do a year of medical school in New Orleans after mustering out there. In addition, we do find some Joseph Owens in Tennessee after this date, so it is much more likely that one of those men was the one in these documents who had returned home after the war.
So where does that leave us? If Erasmus' grandson Leon believed that his grandfather had attended medical school, I think it is likely that he had at least some formal training. At the very least, it could have been that he simply attended the free introductory lectures that were offered at the beginning of each term. If all three medical schools in Memphis offered such a thing, it is possible that he could have attended 18 lectures for free each fall. Considering that many "doctors" of the time had no formal training, that might very well have been interpreted as "attending school."
And, although this medical mystery did not definitively clear up the name question, it offered no evidence to confirm Joseph as Erasmus' given name, so I'm going to lay that question to rest now. One thing is certain though - if Erasmus' own obituary (which I have not been able to find! Can anybody help me out with this?) said that he practiced medicine, then I guess that legend can be moved into the "history" category.
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