Knowlton Biography, Chapter 24
Twenty-four: Ashfield
The town of Ashfield—far famed for peddlers and peppermint—lies in the southerly part of Franklin Co. Mass, fifteen miles from Greenfield, and contains about 1800 temperate, industrious, and for the most part, enterprising inhabitants—besides a good many sheep. It also contains four meeting-houses…Most people hereabouts have been so thoroughly bred, and I may almost say born, in the belief of christianity, have heard from the pulpit such denunciations against infidels (so called), and are so entirely ignorant of their views and arguments, that it seems to them almost impossible for an infidel to be sound in the head and sound in the heart. To convince you that this may be, is my chief object on this occasion.
While Charles had been on the road struggling to sell enough copies of Modern Materialism to feed his family, his older brother Emery had moved to Ashfield, Massachusetts, a few miles east of Hawley where Charles and Tabitha had lived. Emery bought a farm in 1830, paying one hundred thirty-three dollars for a house and barn, and two hundred sixty for fifteen improved and eighty unimproved acres of land. Improved acres were cleared fields where a farmer could immediately plant crops or pasture animals. Unimproved acres in Ashfield were forest.
The youngest Knowlton brother, Augustus, lived in Ashfield with Emery for a couple of years. Augustus was listed in the town’s annual records, where he paid a poll tax but no property tax. A couple of years later, Charles first appeared on Ashfield’s tax rolls in the same way, as a resident but not a property-owner. Emery and his wife Polly had three children in Ashfield, between 1828 and 1833: Leander, Augustus, and Charles.
Before deciding to try his luck in Ashfield, Charles had moved his family to Ashburnham, just east of Winchendon. “I had not been there but a few weeks, Charles said, “before an orthodox minister brought his brother-in-law into town, and, having consulted the orthodox minister of the place, and a few others, it was determined that this said brother-in-law, should settle in the town as a physician—and all on the strength of my unpopular opinions.” But Charles had gone to the trouble of moving his family again, and had paid the town’s previous physician for his practice, so he decided to stand his ground in Ashburnham. Charles posted a placard on the doors of the meeting-house, announcing he would “say a few things in relation to myself, next Thursday evening.” The speech was well-attended, and Knowlton’s appeal to the common sense of the townspeople was successful. The other doctor, “with his orthodoxy, total abstinence, and rich wife, remained in town but two or three months, doing scarcely business enough to support his horse. After he left the town, the minister and myself got along very peaceably together, he attending to his business and I to mine. My principles were well known in the place,” Charles said, but the people were tolerant, and “I commanded the principal part of the business within three or four miles of me, and I considered myself well established.”
But Ashburham was a very small town, and Charles had a growing family to feed. Tabitha was pregnant again in 1831, for the fourth time in six years. Charles left his family in Ashburnham, and went to Providence, Rhode Island. While trying to find a place and build a medical practice in the unfamiliar city, Charles filed the copyright application for Fruits of Philosophy. Then he heard from his older brother, that Ashfield needed a doctor.
Ashfield’s principal physician, Dr. Enos Smith, had begun winding down his practice around 1828 so he could represent the town in the state legislature in Boston. Smith had two sons-in-law who were physicians, but neither of them were brilliant doctors. Emery alerted Charles to the town’s need, but Charles wasn’t the only person interested in being Ashfield’s next doctor.
Luckily for Charles, he was able to make friends with Roswell Shepard, the other physician planning to take advantage of the opportunity in Ashfield. Knowlton and Shepard formed a partnership in the summer of 1832. Although his new partner apparently lacked the formal medical training Knowlton had received at Hanover, Charles considered Roswell a very talented practical physician. “He came to town without money or friends,” Charles said, “and success alone soon brought him a great run of business.” Shepard and Knowlton’s practice together lasted five years and captured most of Ashfield’s medical business.
After briefly owning a half-share of a property while he built up his practice, Charles bought a big house on Ashfield’s main street. Roswell Shepard lived on ten acres close to town and kept a few cows, but Charles had no interest in farming. He and Tabitha decided on a two-story wooden house with a detached barn, on an acre-and-a-half corner lot. The home had been built by Ashfield’s first physician, Dr. Phineas Bartlett. Charles probably liked the fact that the house and office had long been associated with Ashfield’s leading doctor. The home was comfortable and spacious enough for a family of six—Charles and Tabitha’s fourth child, Augusta Comfort Knowlton, had been born in November, 1831, while the family was staying in Winchendon.
Charles and his partner Shepard built a strong practice in Ashfield and the surrounding towns. Charles began riding out into the countryside regularly, and he soon had patients in thirty towns and villages. Shepard and Knowlton’s success was jealously noted by Dr. Smith’s sons-in-law. Because he lacked formal education, “their chief cry against Dr. Shepard,” Charles said, were slurs such as “Quack,” “Don’t Know Nothing,” and “Horse Doctor.” Then Smith’s son-in-law, Dr. Jared Bement, who was also a deacon of the local congregation, discovered Knowlton’s infidelity. “Against me,” Charles said, “it was—‘No principles,’ ‘Bad principles,’ ‘Don’t believe a man has got any soul,’ ‘He would as lief kill a man as a sheep; what is the difference if a man have no soul?’” Dr. Bement’s income decreased steadily each year after Shepard and Knowlton arrived, in spite of his whispering campaign against his rivals. But it had little to do with the issues he complained of—Bement just wasn’t a very good doctor.
In the spring of 1832, for example, a twenty-year old farmer named Alanson Miles came down with a disease Dr. Bement called “lung fever.” As he was slowly recovering from his initial illness, Miles rode four miles into town to see Bement, “on account of a tumor which had appeared upon his back. Without examining the back,” Charles said, “the doctor prescribed a blister, and the patient returned home.” A few weeks later, Miles was visited by a traveling healer, who “lanced the tumor, or, rather, abscess, which discharged a large quantity of purulent matter, very much to the relief of the respiration and cough, and the entire relief of the expectoration.” But the abscess didn’t heal, and Miles didn’t recover.
Two months after Alanson’s abscess was opened, Charles visited the Miles farm to treat another member of the family. “The discharge,” Charles said, “was still very profuse and fetid; the patient very feeble.” Charles gave Alanson a prescription, but since the man was someone else’s patient, he thought no more about the case. “But in the following December—nine months or so from the time the abscess was opened—being in the family on a visit to another patient, a neighbor who chanced to be in said to me, as I was about to leave, ‘Doctor, can’t you do something for Alanson?—it is such a job to take care of him.’”
Charles promised to think about Alanson’s case and try to come up with a treatment. He found “little in my small library to direct me in such a case; but as it was generally believed that the patient would not recover, and as his condition was truly deplorable, I resolved to do something ‘upon my own hook’ which would be likely to have decided effect.” By this time, Alanson was “an object to look upon.” Most of the young man’s hair had fallen out, and he was stooped and emaciated. Alanson’s wrists, ankles, and face were swollen with fluid, and his fingers were “clubbed.” Alanson was having night sweats, and his abscess was still open and oozing “very fetid purulent matter.” His regular physician either didn’t know of the young man’s ongoing distress, or didn’t know what to do about it.
Knowlton wasn’t sure what to do either, but he had promised to try. He spent the night reading and thinking, then returned the next day and:
Placing the patient upon his knees on the floor…I succeeded in passing the slightly curved extremity of the catheter into the chest, and drew off full two thirds of a pint of fetid purulent matter. After the larger part of this matter had passed…Injections of a solution of chloride of lime were now repeated until they returned nearly clear…In less than twelve hours more, all oedematous swellings were removed, and I then gave an opiate…Nothing more whatever was done for this patient. The abscess healed entirely within a week. I did not even see him again until the following April, when his appearance was so changed that I did not know him—being a stranger to me before his sickness. He worked out for full wages, upon a farm, the following summer—has ever since enjoyed uninterrupted good health, no shortness of breath, has a family of healthy children, and still lives in Ashfield.
Nearly a year after Dr. Bement had diagnosed Alanson Miles with “lung fever” and sent him on his way, Charles spent three days treating the young farmer and healed him. Knowlton had no miracle cure—his drug bag was as limited as every other doctor’s in 1832. But unlike Bement, Charles thought creatively about the tools in his bag. And he worked hard at curing his patients. People in over two dozen western Massachusetts hill-towns were beginning to depend on Knowlton’s efforts, and on the results of his work. Unable to convince their patients Knowlton was a bad doctor, Charles’s rivals decided they would have to find some other way to protect their business in Ashfield.