Knowlton Biography, Chapter 39
Thirty-nine: Living the Life
For the gratification of those who have read the before mentioned ‘History,’ I will here inform them that the Rev. Mason Grosvenor therein mentioned, left Ashfield in about one year from the time he openly and publicly undertook to drive me out of town. He left because—to be sure about fifty of his parish signed off, and several more were disposed to do so, but that is nothing—he left because ‘the meeting house is too large for his voice!!!’
As for myself, I think the scriptures somewhere say, the wicked flourish for a season!
The Greenfield prosecution of Fruits of Philosophy was quietly thrown out, with many of the prosecutors wishing they had never agreed to indict Knowlton and Shepard. It was the last time Charles had any trouble with the law. Mason Grosvenor left Ashfield in the fall of 1835, and it took the church nearly six months to attract a new minister. Grosvenor moved west as he had originally planned to do. He helped establish a women’s seminary in Ohio, and later became the Aetna Life Insurance Company’s general agent in Cincinnati.
Charles continued to enjoy the support and patronage of more than half his neighbors, and did his best to mend fences with the rest. Charles and Tabitha had their last child, a son they named Willis, in 1837. At about the same time Roswell Shepard moved away, and Knowlton had the largest medical practice in western Massachusetts all to himself. Charles also served on the school committee for his section of town, and in 1838 he used his debating skills to entertain the local lyceum, where he took part in a light-hearted argument about the use of tobacco.
Knowlton was given the difficult task of defending tobacco use, probably against his future son-in-law, Stephen Tabor. Charles took the opportunity to say a few words about consciousness and happiness, but he kept his remarks light. “Tobacco becalms the roguish passions,” Charles offered as an example. “It keeps a man home at night, where he should be. Polygamy was far more general before tobacco,” he continued. Finally, to avoid leaving his listeners with the wrong impression, Charles concluded that, “Tobacco is a good thing—not as a medicine, but as a poison; not to cure, but to kill—ticks upon sheep!”
Although Ashfield still had its political parties and social factions, Knowlton was no longer the focus of local controversy. Charles settled into the life of a respected local professional. The town’s 1840 valuation lists Knowlton as the owner of a house, barn, and office worth five hundred dollars, and three acres of land worth another hundred and fifty. Charles also paid taxes on two horses worth sixty dollars, a cow worth ten, and a hundred dollars of “Income from Profession.” The final item in the entry is “Stock in Trade,” worth two hundred fifty dollars. Physicians did not list their tools or drugs for tax purposes, so this item almost certainly refers to Knowlton’s personal inventory of Fruits of Philosophy. At the retail prices of fifty cents apiece for the Kneeland edition and a dollar for the new Philadelphia edition, that would mean Charles had between two hundred fifty and five hundred copies of his book on hand. But in spite of the substantial income he was now earning on Fruits of Philosophy, Charles continued “consuming the midnight oil” as a country doctor.
Charles joined the Massachusetts Medical Society, and in the early 1840s began contributing to its journal, the Boston Medical & Surgical Journal. His goal, Charles said in one of his early articles, was to help make the journal more “useful to numerous country practitioners…by encouraging them to report their experience and their reflections” in letters to the editor. Knowlton’s reports from the field gave the details of interesting cases, sometimes challenging conventional wisdom regarding diseases and treatments. Not surprisingly, Charles’s first contribution addressed the “disease” that had haunted his own youth.