On the Trail with Doc McPhail (rough description of paper for comments/discussion)

My microhistory paper will be based on the diary of a young US Army assistant surgeon named Leonard C. McPhail, chronicling his experiences with a small group of soldiers traveling through the Oklahoma Territory to negotiate the government’s first treaty with the Plains Indians in the summer of 1835. McPhail’s diary begins with his departure from Fort Gibson, one of the earliest garrisons established in the Southwest, about 40 miles from present-day Tulsa, Oklahoma. His 35-man detachment of infantry and dragoons traveled about 180 miles southwest to a council meeting location that had been designated as Camp Holmes, near the border of Texas, which was then part of Mexico.

McPhail’s diary details the hardships of the journey – the oppressive heat, flies, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, along with particular ailments that afflicted his soldiers and himself. The trip was not all misery, though, and McPhail balances the travails with some lighter moments, including games the soldiers played and their excitement at seeing, hunting, and eating buffalo for the first time (after which he became quite sick). He also provides some unique perceptions of the Native Americans he encounters, including their appearance and dress, their tattoos, their tribal interactions, and the mourning ritual of a “Cumanche” who had recently lost a child. McPhail is a man of his own time, and the racial stereotyping and presumed white superiority common among his demographic are quite evident in his record. After a day of foot races and wrestling matches with some Osage braves, he takes pride in noting that the white soldiers “even without training, are far superior to the savages in athletic sports.”

The diary is only 20 pages, comprising the period of June 16 to September 5, 1835, but it seems perfect for the type of analysis and narrative exploration typical of the microhistorical method. Like the diaries of Martha Ballard and Robert Durand and the inquisition cases of Menocchio and Arnaud du Tilh, this primary source will serve as a lens on the broader world in which the author lived, in this case the early 19^th century American frontier. Since I am specifically interested in the history of medicine, my paper will focus on that aspect of Dr. McPhail’s experience and, by extension, the medical practice of his day.

The research for this paper will be interesting because relatively little has been written about American medicine in McPhail’s time. The period between the American Revolution and the Civil War has been called the “dark ages of American medicine.” The professionalization and scientific renaissance movements in Europe had not yet taken root in the newly independent United States, and the spirit of egalitarianism that drove the popularity of men like Andrew Jackson also led to widespread distrust of “elitist” pursuits in science and higher education. Efforts to enforce standards of practice were rebuffed by a largely agrarian, self-sufficient public leery of anything resembling aristocracy, and unlicensed practitioners of homeopathy, hydropathy, and other pseudo-scientific forms of medicine challenged the conventionally trained allopathic doctors around the country. The Army Medical Department had only been in existence for 17 years when McPhail wrote his diary, and was still under the direction of its first Surgeon General. Everything was experimental – the medical support system, the relationships between the Army and the Native Americans, and certainly the techniques for dealing with injuries and illnesses encountered on the march. By placing McPhail’s experiences in the larger context of the scientific and medical environment of the 1830s, I hope to develop a deeper understanding of what life was like for the doctors of his time and the people they cared for.

I envision my paper being closely aligned with the methods Robert Harms used in The Diligent. The diary will be a thread weaving through a contextual tapestry of 19^th century medicine, with observations on the culture and attitudes of McPhail and his contemporaries to flesh out the narrative. I will look at the state of medicine in general, the education that would have been available to McPhail, the role of the Army Medical Department in facilitating McPhail’s mission, and the external events that may have impacted and shaped the world in which McPhail and his soldiers lived. In addition to the diary, supplemental sources will include the treaties that resulted from the documented mission, official histories of the Army and the Army Medical Department, examples of medical school curricula and lecture notes from the time period, and possibly McPhail’s military service records if they can be located at the National Archives. A previous article written about the diary by Colonel Harold Jones in 1939 may provide additional information about the treaty mission and the men with whom McPhail served, but Jones’ article was primarily a rephrasing of the original diary entries supplemented with personal commentary and some biographical information pulled from the service records of men McPhail identified along the way, whereas my paper will place the diary in the context of the broader American medical setting.

One question for the group: When writing about a sensitive subject like pervasive racism and the treatment of Native Americans in the early 19^th century, how do you refer to the oppressed peoples without either seeming crass or introducing anachronisms? For example, McPhail spoke frequently about the “Indians” or “savages” he met, using terms I would never use today, but no one in his time would have said “Native Americans.” Obviously, when I quote McPhail I will use his own words, but would the paper seem disjointed to the reader if I bounce back and forth between “Indians” and “Native Americans,” or would it simply be offensive to use the term “Indian” in a paper written in 2016?