Doctoring Removal: Southern Medicine, Indian Removal, and the Cholera Epidemic of 1832–1834 in Arkansas Territory

Doctoring Removal: Southern Medicine, Indian Removal, and the Cholera Epidemic of 1832–1834 in Arkansas Territory Cane West (bio) On November 11, 1832, in Rock Roe, Arkansas Territory, the friends of a twenty-four-year-old "sprightly" Choctaw man awoke to find their companion struggling with intense nausea. Waves of stomach cramps struck the man, whose name was not recorded, and soon led to uncontrollable diarrhea, described as a "hominy water" stool. The man's friends and family quickly called for camp physicians to see the patient. What treatment the doctors may have provided that morning did not help as the Choctaw man's condition worsened throughout the day. He was becoming increasingly dehydrated from persistent diarrhea. His thirst became "intense and ungovernable." His arms began to contort in muscle spasms, and his chest lifted in violent heaves. Occasionally, he shrieked in pain.1 The physicians hesitated to provide further aid in a terminal case, but the Choctaws convinced the medical men to at least try to ease the patient's suffering. The physicians focused their treatment on the pain in the man's stomach: drawing blood from his abdomen, using salt water to make him vomit, applying blistering heat to his stomach, and rubbing his body with flannel sheets and brandy. Their final tool was calomel and opium. The young Choctaw man died roughly twenty-four hours after the onset of symptoms—his body exhausted and having received no remedies for dehydration. The young man was the twentieth person in his removal party to die of cholera in the course of a week at Rock Roe and one of several dozen Choctaws who died of cholera during the Choctaw removal in the fall of 1832.2 End Page 249 The tragic story of the Choctaw man's brief and fatal illness appeared in a medical report from Dr. Bushrod W. Lee to the Little Rock Board of Health. The territorial newspaper republished the report as an example of the typical course of cholera and the appropriate medical response. Despite the medical crisis "raging" in the Choctaw camp, Lee and the board of health assured readers that cholera was "perfectly under the control of medicine."3 The circumstances of the meeting of Choctaw emigrants, cholera patients, white physicians, and medical observers at a steamboat landing in the middle of Arkansas Territory hint at the intersection of medical authority, Indian removal, state-building, and mass social migrations that were in action in the lower Mississippi River Valley by the early 1830s. The encounters between Indigenous cholera patients and southern white physicians in Arkansas offer just one window into the social dynamics surrounding the cholera epidemic of the early 1830s. Scholars have long examined the cholera outbreaks on the Atlantic coast, where nativists blamed recent immigrants for poor hygiene, social reformers pushed for temperance societies, and physicians struggled to maintain their medical authority in the face of horrendous fatality rates. The outbreaks in Arkansas Territory among emigrant Choctaws in 1832 and Cherokee removal parties in 1834 shifted the geography of the disease to the western bank of the lower Mississippi River. Scholars of Indian removal have highlighted these cholera outbreaks to demonstrate how federal actions subjected removal parties to the ravages of disease, in clear contrast to federal declarations of removal's humanitarian benevolence. Otherwise, scholars have largely skipped past the 1832–1834 cholera epidemic in the South. Yet Arkansas physicians' response to Native cholera patients emerged within the prism of national debates about the authority of orthodox medicine and the regional turmoil wrought by Indian removal. Federal removal records and newspaper accounts reveal that physicians treated Choctaw and Cherokee cholera patients as foils in a larger effort to assert the role of physicians and public health institutions in a territorial government that was growing increasingly concerned with the dangers of an interconnected region.4 End Page 250 The 1830s cholera outbreaks in Arkansas bring Native American communities into the historiography of southern medicine in a period when white physicians were building the medical framework of racial and cultural difference in the South. Antebellum southern medical studies have typically highlighted the power relations between physicians, enslavers...