For more than ten years I have been telling people that I am writing an historical novel about domestic life in 19th century Berks County, Pennsylvania. It is not a romance, I was careful to tell the admissions committee of the American Studies program which gave me the foundational tools to do the research. I was admitted to the program in 1992 and for three and half years I took classes, learned a ton of stuff about American history, made friends, got back in touch with research methods, and improved as a writer and a teacher. I loved every single aspect of that program and I regret not one single minute I devoted to it.

But I didn’t write the novel. Even though I took a sabbatical in the 1995-1996 school year and studied fiction writing with Robert Olmstead at nearby Dickinson College and assembled a good preliminary bibliography, I didn’t do what I had declared I was going to do. And that’s a pattern with me -- I get close to a goal, and I freeze. There is something of a fear of success in me, every bit an impediment to completing something as a fear of failure.

So one issue in personal growth that I am consciously addressing these days is that of order and completion. My decision to back away from the entrepreneurial life and devote my energies exclusively to research and writing was an important step in the process, and I see progress. I gathered all in one place the notes and drafts and other papers related to this project that I’ve accumulated, and I made a chart of tasks to be completed month by month in order to have the novel written in a year.

That was the order part. I am moving more slowly than my chart suggest on the
completion aspect, but I am moving, and that’s what’s important.

My project draws on certain facts I know about a woman who lived in Berks County, Pennsylvania from 1848 until 1929. I gave a brief outline of who she was and why she is important to me in a piece that appeared in the first month I was on line with this journal. You can read it here.

Today I spent the afternoon in the library of Harrisburg Area Community College, which is about two miles (as the crow flies, a little bit longer as the Toyota drives) from my house. Because HACC has a program for prospective nurses and other students in the allied health professions, its library is rich in practical and historical medical subjects.

Today I spent time with Folk Medicine of the Pennsylvania Germans: The Non-Occult Cures, a book by Thomas Brendle and Claude Unger first published in 1935. The Pennsylvania Dutch had a tradition of “pow-wow” medicine which borrowed much from the spirituality of the indigenous peoples of the region. “Non-occult” in this sense means that there was no magic involved. They are meant to be straightforward application and cure methods.

The real Katherine Whitmoyer lost four of her children in the summer of 1885 to what the newspaper called “the summer sickness.” The Pennsylvania German dialect calls this a pescht or a pestilenz. These are the words for any infectious or epidemic disease. Localized outbreaks of these diseases were common in the nineteenth century, especially among the farming population. What felled the Whitmoyer children (and my fictional Hassinger children) was a dysentery with high fever caused by exposure to water or food contaminated by hog waste.

One remedy for such a malady was “to boil garlic and rue in strong vinegar and drink of the liquor in the morning and the evening.” Breaking the fever was the goal, and sometimes a “decoction of sheep excrement” was given to draw out the heat. (A decoction is prepared by boiling the substance until an extract is achieved. It is not clear how this particular decoction was administered.) Other methods involved drinking a strong hot tea made from wormwood or mugwort or yarrow. Also thought useful was dandelion or snakeroot combined with whiskey.

I spent about an hour and a half with this book. By the session’s end I had several pages of notes, both handwritten and photocopied. As I got up to stretch and begin packing up my things, I realized I was feeling a slight headache and some other twinges familiar to those of my gender. “For ziet der frauen [“women’s time”] take a gill of burdock roots, a gill horseradish, pulverize and put in a quart of rye whiskey and drink often thereof.”

On the way home I stopped at the Rite-Aid for some Midol.