[Faith-talk] {Spam?} Daily Thought for Friday, May 27, 2016

[Paul Smith]

Hello and greetings to you from an abnormally warm (or hot), depending 
on how you cut it, Baltimore.  Hope you are all doing fine on this 
Friday or, for you in Australia, New Zealand or even the Seychelles as 
this message is being written, a good Saturday, by God's matchless 
grace and His providential care.

The following article is one that I posted several years ago, but many 
of you have never read it.  Although not specifically Christian in 
tone, if you read it carefully you will notice the hand of God in this 
article.  It was originally written by Richard Bachman, a writer from 
California, and it is entitled "The Quack Who Cured Malaria," rendered 
as follows:

John Sappington was a frontier physician who promoted treating and 
preventing malaria with quinine.  His use of quinine saved thousands of 
people from the damaging effects of the disease.  Nonetheless he was 
declared a "quack" by the St. Louis Medical Society.

In 1803 France ceded 828,000 square miles of land to the United States 
for just $15 million.  The Louisiana Purchase nearly doubled the size 
of the United States.  It also opened land west of the Mississippi 
River to settlement.

Today it's known that malaria is a mosquito-borne illness.  Experts in 
the early 1800's thought malaria--literally "bad air"--was caused by 
foul vapors rising from lowlands and stagnant water.  Sappington 
started practicing medicine in Franklin, Tennessee, in 1800.  Malaria 
in Tennessee was bad enough, but tales that drifted east from the 
lowlands along the Missisippi, Ohio, Missouri and Arkansas Rivers were 
horrendous.  June to October was known as "the sickly season." Often, 
half of the population in a given settlement were sick with malaria.  
Most of the time people didn't die, but the recurrent chills, "shakes," 
and general malaise that befell them was devastating, especially since 
it occurred mostly during the months when energy was most needed for 
growing crops and hewing out homes from the wilderness.

The traditional medical "cure" for malaria was just as debilitating as 
the illness it was supposed to relieve.  The prescribed treatment was a 
brutal regimen of emetics, enemas, and bleeding.  This was supposed to 
eliminate the fever's poison from the body.  He termed it "murderous" 
because patients often died from the "cure," or became susceptible to 
other illnesses due to their weakened state.

Sappington read medical journals and books searching for up-to-date 
information about malaria.  In one, he found an article that described 
a treatment that used the bark of the cinchona tree, grown in Peru.  
The bark contained quinine, a chemical that proved effective in 
treating malaria.  He obtained some cinchona bark and treated some 
settlers suffering from malaria with it.  After some trial and error, 
he found the dosage that worked for most people.

Sappington's treatment wasn't without flaw.  Initially, he had patients 
consume the ground-up cinchona bark.  The coarse bark, however, often 
caused stomach discomfort.  Furthermore, the amount of quinine varied 
from batch to batch of bark, which made finding a uniform dosage difficult.

Sappington learned about two French scientists who had extracted 
quinine from cinchona bark.  This was an important discovery because 
the strength of quinine would be consistent and the regulating dosage 
would be more precise.  It took three years before he acquired some of 
the quinine made by a Philadelphia chemist who had started the first 
quinine factory in America.

Sappington experimented with dosage and learned the most effective 
quantity for controlling a fever was one grain of quinine every two 
hours, in all, 12 grains a day.  This is about the same dosage that was 
typically prescribed by modern-day doctors, before the disuse of 
quinine for treating malaria.

Sappington ordered 100 ounces of quinine but received 100 pounds 
instead.  He was first upset, then elated.  The huge amount of quinine 
meant he could expand his battle against malaria.  But his elation was 
short lived.  As he expanded his anti-malaria practice doctors who 
didn't believe in quinine resented what they considered his intrusion 
into their bailiwick.

To overcome the entrenched opposition into quinine, Sappington became a 
"quack." He concocted "Sappington's Anti-Fever Pills," and kept the 
ingredients secret.  Each pill contained one grain of quinine, well 
disguised in licorice, myrrh, and other fragrant but inert ingredients.

In the eyes of most doctors he became the medical equivalent of P.T. 
Barnum.  He proclaimed the pills a "new discovery," and advertised the 
pills in the lurid style used by the purveyors of other patent 
medicines.  Sappington didn't mind being dubbed a quack, because as 
people tried his pills and found out they worked, sales shot up.

Keeping up with demand was near impossible.  The entire Sappington 
household--his wife and their nine children, plus servants--spent hours 
every day rolling pills.  Sappington hired a core of traveling salesmen 
to sell his "fever pills." Each of them had to take three pills a day 
to prevent contracting malaria.  None ever caught malaria despite 
traveling through some of the most disease-ridden areas in North America.

Sappington's Anti-Fever Pills became the frontier's most famous, and 
effective, prescription.  He sold over one million boxes of his pills.  
In the covered wagons that set out from Missouri for Santa Fe and 
Oregon, one of the most important items was a stock of Sappington's pills.

Sappington wrote a book, "Theory and Treatment of Fevers," in 1844.  In 
it he told the secret of his anti-fever pills--quinine.  Then he 
advised readers to buy quinine and make their own pills at home.

He literally gave away his secret, and at the same time tossed some 
barbs at his antagonists and those who stubbornly clung to the 
traditional treatment.  The book was dedicated to the people of the 
United States and "to that portion of the medical profession who can 
divest themselves of the _prejudice _of _education."

By publishing his secret ingredient, his pill business was destroyed.  
He lost tens of thousands of dollars, which didn't surprise or upset 
him.  "I've made enough money," he told anyone who wanted to 
commiserate about the loss of fortune.  He had invested well and when 
he died was still wealthy.

Sappington lived to be 80 years old and practiced medicine almost to 
the day he died, September 7, 1856.  Shortly before he died he created 
the Sappington School Fund.  In those days before free public schools, 
the fund was used to aid the education of deserving youngsters.  It was 
the first fund of its kind west of the Mississippi.  It still exists, 
but now provides college scholarships.  At the end of 2010 the fund had 
more than $100,000 in assets.

Quinine was the first effective treatment for malaria.  It remained the 
antimalarial drug of choice until the 1940's, when other drugs were 
developed.  And Sappington's early use of quinine made possible the 
eventual settlement of numerous states, where about 100 million people 
live today.

This article sounds like something that Paul Harvey might have featured 
in his "The Rest of the Story," in my opinion.  I hope you enjoyed reading it.

By the way, I would be remiss, and my friend Bill who lives in St. 
Louis, might point out that there is a bedroom community of that city 
called Sappington.  I learned that, while traveling on a bus from the 
St. Louis Society for the Blind, sitting beside Pastor Dave Andrus, 
director of the then Lutheran Blind Mission, of the existence of that 
town but had no idea of whom it was named for.  In my opinion it was a 
deserving honor.

And that will do it for today.  Until tomorrow when, Lord willing 
another daily thought message and article will be posted, may the God 
of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob just keep us safe, individually and 
collectively, in these last days in which we live.  Your Christian 
friend and brother, Paul