New Orleans: A Dark Past

The Pharmacy Museum

            

Sarah and I, poncho-ed up!

Day whatever on the trip (as I begin to lose track) started by a tour in the Cabildo, a historical structure that is now utilized as a museum. Its organization was chronological, by devoting rooms to decades and floors to centuries. Getting to this central location in the dense downpour was only successful due to preparation with ponchos packed previously! The clever structure through time of the Cabildo made my obsessive-compulsive tendencies smiled with gratitude. While reading through New Orleans history and witnessing artifacts first hand, I began to see a clear picture of New Orleans dark past. Native Americans were pushed out of their land, and their ability to cook by gathering, fishing, hunting, and combining such into edible dishes was actually "adopted" by the French. Sounds more like some type of historic plagiarism to me, as Creole and Cajun dishes are almost always combining vegetables that they learned to grow and cook from the Native Americans. And of course the wealth and success of New Orleans was literally built on a thriving slave-driven economy. Referred to as the "black ivory" market, New Orleans was the slave-trading hub of the South. It is discouraging to see such religion paired with the greed and violence that slavery held. Slaves were viewed as sub-human, and there are artifacts to prove it. The most disturbing image found at the Cabildo was a Slave Collar, adorned with bells. This made it easy for slave masters to find a slave that could try to run. Of course these slaves were actually people with intelligence and finesse and they found ways to muffle the bells' sound by stuffing mud into it. Many intricacies of the museum were still beautiful though, such as a soldier surgeon's chest, with compartments separating corked-glass medicine bottles and metal scapels that made me cringe of thoughts of tetanus. I also found an outfit that I would love to purchase, if it were only a bit more affordable (and not owned by a museum).

Surgeon's chest from War of 1812, preserved and on display in the Cabildo

The Pharmacy Museum further confirmed my concern of New Orlean's dim-lit history. The museum was the location of the first licensed American pharmacy in 1816. It was easily spotted, as the aged jade colored doors were holding up an enlarged, white, round teacup that read Pharmacie. Entering, my eyes evaluated the wall-to-wall shelving that held tinctures, glass medicine bottles, and other authentic found and purchased medical artifacts from the 1840s-1940s. I envisioned the people infected by metal syringes that were reused without cleaning and needle free, as they were inserted into an incision. Of course, in the 1840s, Germ Theory and any inkling of the understanding of infection was not developed. Mind wandering, I imagine the cannons being shot in the air to deflect and prevent disease from surrounding an area (yes this was actually done!!). By 1910, they did sterilize needles by placing the tips into flame, which by the way was not very effective. I was amused by the fact that prohibition laws were not placed on pharmacy prescriptions. Those roaming the streets of New Orleans in 1920 could walk into a pharmacy and pick up their nervousness tonic (literal heroin in a bottle that was recommended daily use) and their pain ailment (alcohol, opiates, and cannabis dilution!). It was cheaper and more legal to gather drunkenness supplies from the pharmacy than the bar. The shelf that held tattered voodoo dolls and a potion for the Goddess of Evil, were dark treats that I enjoyed reading about, sold in the 1930s-60s in Voodoo Pharmacies.

The darkness of the history continues though, as the Exchange Market was located across the street from the pharmacy. Yes, this would be to purchase and sell humans. The first pharmacist, Louis Dulifilho, was not the first pharmacist. He was merely the first licensed pharmacist. This white, rich male was the epitome of what we probably do not like about this time period. We hear about his lovely wife and children, but the story of his nine slaves was unshared and caused no unease for others to shop at his business. His ability to gain licensure to practice medicine, coincidentally, made it illegal for anyone without a licence (everyone else) to continue with their life profession. Many women lost their positions due to their inability to get accepted into medical school. And anyone of lesser means was not going to be able to afford it. And guys like him are the ones who created theories like the one I learned about today. The Brain-Uterus Theory was thought up and written by men, and it analyzed the possibility that female body is in constant battle with itself. It proposed that women can only use their brain or their uterus at one time. If a woman thinks too much, it would lead her to "hysteria". If a woman was pregnant, they were hardly allowed to leave the home because it was assumed they were unable to think during gestation. Naturally, with this theory under high-regard by men of this time period and culture, women were not allowed to attend school in most instances. Mind you, these were the same men that created the cure-all concoction of Mother's Quietness for teething infants, diluted opiates. I am positive it made the infant stop crying, though it probably did not help improve the infant mortality rates. Women could also buy opium-soaked tampons. They had painless menstrual cycles, I would wager. This method was also a prescribed cure for gonorrhea, and no it does not work. Women had other great luxuries, such as ground-butterfly eye-shadows, maybe in every color? They even color-coated the poison bottles, for those who were illiterate. My favorite of exhibits of course were the healthy medicines they sold and ingested which included: chocolate-coated arsenic, silver and gold-coated pills (indigestible but the status symbol was that of an iPhone Apple), alum (basically poison). And the adminstration process was even better, with soda being invented for medicinal purposes and mixed with cocaine, lithium, and opiates and served from a soda fountain with lead pipes! We also fed infants from lead bottle-nipples, injected medications with lead syringes, and our birthing tools were all made from lead. The metal catheters injured me from sight alone.

Delicious, illicit drugs in carbonated water, served through lead piping!

Yes, they inserted those into your urethra... OH NO!

It is fascinating to see how far we have come. It is easy to mock these practices that were common practice one hundred to two hundred years ago, but think of the horrible crap we somewhat knowingly ingest. Hydrogenated fats were created for taste, even though it is a cholesterol that we cannot breakdown. We still eat it, knowing it will clog our arteries and eventually end our life by some method of embolism or thrombosis. The chemicals in all of our processed foods and hormones used to grow our factory "cattle" to overweight proportions are mindlessly overlooked due to convenience and an apathetic consensus of society. We mock such insane childcare practices, meanwhile our infant mortality rate has hardly improved and it one of the highest in the world. We jarringly laugh at those who were swindled by the belief that medications became more potent and effective with dilution (they basically sold people tap water), but Big Pharma has an obviously fradulent agenda when testing medications and deciding what is going to become "approved". New Orleans spoke a morose story today, as I heard the side of the less fortunate and how the city prospered because of it.