Health & Medical & BushCo & Human Rights Posted by James Killus, 17 Jul 2007 03:32 am

Two More Parables

[being a continuation of a meditation begun earlier]

Parable #2: Benjamin Rush and Yellow Fever

Philadelphia’s yellow fever epidemic of 1793 was the largest in the history of the United States, claiming the lives of nearly 4000 people, nearly 10% of the entire population of the city. In late summer, as the number of deaths began to climb, 20,000 citizens fled to the countryside, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other members of the federal government (at that time headquartered in Philadelphia).

Into this stark landscape stepped a hero: Benjamin Rush, physician, public figure, signer of the Declaration of Independence. He mobilized medical efforts, orchestrated the construction of makeshift tent hospitals, and personally oversaw the treatment of hundreds, if not thousands of the stricken. He gave the city hope, when others offered nothing but stoicism, or despair.

His treatments were as heroic as the man himself. He favored bleeding, to the point of anemia, for a host of ailments, including Yellow Fever. To counter the “buildup of yellow bile,” he prescribed, calomel (mercurous chloride), as a purgative, and jalap, a powerful laxative. These sometimes caused his patients’ hair and teeth to fall out. “Rush’s pills,” otherwise known as “Thunderclappers,” remained popular for decades, and were carried on the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Rush also formed the opinion that Africans were immune to Yellow Fever. At Rush’s urging, the support of Philadelphia’s free black community was enlisted by Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and William Gray, men who had secured support to build the African Church the previous year. Philadelphia’s black community dedicated themselves to working with the sick and dying, as nurses, cart drivers, and gravediggers. Over 200 of those so enlisted died of the fever.

Let no one say that Rush was an evil man. He was, in fact, a very good man, a hero, using heroic measures in times that seemed to call for strong remedies. And his medicines were powerful; they just lacked efficacy. Indeed, they undoubtedly added to the death toll.

But there is magic in words like “strong,” and “tough,” and even “heroic.” Even today, advertisements for medicines often contain such power words, as if medical treatment were a form of armed combat. Who, after all, wishes to take a “mild,” medication, when “maximum strength” is available? And when death impends, will “heroic” treatment be ignored?

Parable #3: The Cult of Kali

The English word thug, meaning a violent criminal, comes from the Hindi word thag (and originally from the Sanskrit word sthaga), meaning a thief or villain. The original Thugs were bands of roving criminals in India who strangled and robbed travelers. It was said these gangs committed murder following precise religious rites to honor Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. However, although Kali is a Hindu goddess, there were said to be Muslim Thugs as well.

To further complicate matters, by the 19th century there were 40,000 people a year strangled in robberies, but by then many cases accredited to Thuggee were straightforward robbery with no religious significance.

In Confessions Of A Thug, written in 1837, Phillip Meadows described how the members of a band of Thugs specialized in different roles. There were the sothaees who lured travelers; the lughaees, who dug the graves in advance; and the bhuttotes, who killed. The victims were strangled with a scarf called a roomal. Although the book is fictional, Meadows based some of it on the evidence of a captured Thug called Ameer Ali.

A typical Thug killing was done by joining a group of travelers and entertaining and cooking for them so that the travelers were soon off their guard. At a pre-arranged signal (the code phrase was bring the tobacco) the Thugs would strangle the male travelers and take everything of value. The Thugs kept the valuables themselves and dedicated the corpses to Kali.

The history of the Thuggee is clouded and rife with speculation masquerading as fact. In the early nineteenth century, both the British Occupation Government of India and the East India Company were incredulous as to the very existence of such a cult. By 1830, however, owing largely to the single-minded efforts of one man, Captain William Sleeman, the British were conducting a policy of eradication. In the first four months of 1833, for example, Francis Curwen Smith, the Governor-General’s agent in the Saugor and Narbada Territories, tried 203 suspect Thugs. All were found guilty; 40 were hanged, 156 were sentenced to transportations for life and to be branded; five were given short sentences, and two died after trial while awaiting sentence. All of this was for the murder of 112 persons, only 56 of whose bodies were ever actually found.

Thugs never attacked English travelers, but the British government of India decided to eliminate them, and over 3000 Thugs were captured personally by Sleeman during the 1830s. 483 Thugs gave evidence against the rest, 412 were hanged and the rest imprisoned or rehabilitated. I can find no record of a finding of innocence in the trial of an accused Thug.

Coda

Our leaders are wise. Our leaders are strong. Our leaders are just. Let no history show otherwise, for otherwise we have lost.

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Responses to “Two More Parables”

  1. on 17 Jul 2007 at 6:16 am 1. JP Stormcrow said …

    If you want to explore one manifestation of our “just” leadership, and your internal cooling system is in good enough shape to forestall boiling of the blood - read this Columbia Journalism Review article on Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese cameraman for Al Jazeera who has been held in Guantanamo for the last five years. (via Glenn Greenwald, the article is pretty long so you might want to start with Glenn’s synopsis.)

    For his part, Stafford Smith [al-Haj’s lawyer] believes that al-Haj “is clearly in Guantanamo for one reason only, and that’s because he’s an employee of Al Jazeera.” According to Stafford Smith, al-Haj has been interrogated approximately 130 times. Roughly 125 of those sessions, he said, dealt not with the allegations but with Al Jazeera’s operations.

    Stafford Smith told me that military interrogators have repeatedly asked al-Haj to confirm that prominent Al Jazeera journalists are members of terrorist organizations or that Al Jazeera is funded by Al Qaeda. In addition, said Stafford Smith, interrogators offered to release al-Haj if he would spy on the network. Several military and intelligence sources with knowledge of Guantanamo told me that those contentions seem plausible, but they are impossible to confirm.

    Recall that the “coercive interrogation” techniques that we use are pretty much derived from Soviet-style methods which were developed to elicit quick “confessions” rather than any real useful intelligence. This tawdry episode is but one part (albeit a particularly disgraceful part) of our stupid “cut off our nose to spite our face” demonization of Al Jazeera.

  2. on 17 Jul 2007 at 9:14 am 2. christian h. said …

    I love these parables, James - thanks! Especially the one about the Thugees seems very appropriate - after all, there was a real bandit problem there (I should say, though, that I don’t know to what extent it was a creation of the British rule over India). And then the powerful dealt with it the only way they know how: violence.

    In other news, JP broke the tubes by not closing an italics tag - retrunking coming up! Fixed it, though.

  3. on 17 Jul 2007 at 9:29 am 3. JP Stormcrow said …

    In other news, JP broke the tubes by not closing an italics tag - retrunking coming up!

    I suck.

  4. on 17 Jul 2007 at 9:57 am 4. James Killus said …

    I hope to check in here several times today, but it looks like my paying gig is going to demand a lot of attention.

    I have no real insight into the Al-Jazeera case other than to re-itterate, narrative trumps truth, and the purpose of propaganda is not to sell lies but rather to murder the truth.

  5. on 17 Jul 2007 at 10:45 am 5. Seattle said …

    It’s easy to criticize from a comfortable distance-say a hundred years or more. We can certainly take the stance that the British rule of the Indian subcontinent was in principal wrong and therefore everything that occurred during that rule was wrong. Indians had the right to their own traditions, including burning widows alive, organized robbery and murder with a religious twist, royal polygamy and all the classic patricide, matricide, fratricide and sororicide that went with the power struggles that inevitably resulted. It was a lovely place and they should have left well enough alone. And after they left, the ongoing issue of murdering new brides to acquire their dowry, well, that’s just another cultural tradition we should respect. Of course, a lot of women get trampled in the process, but what the hell. They’re just women.

    I think the example of thuggee is a difficult one just because the records are so sketchy. There would appear to be records of Indian officials trying to deal with the issue through deportation before the British ever stuck their walking sticks into the mess.

    The earliest authenticated mention of the Thugs is found in the following passage of Ziau-d din Barni’s History of Firoz Shah (written about 1356):

    In the reign of that sultan (about 1290), some Thugs were taken in Delhi, and a man belonging to that fraternity was the means of about a thousand being captured. But not one of these did the sultan have killed. He gave orders for them to be put into boats and to be conveyed into the lower country, to the neighborhood of Lakhnauti, where they were to be set free. The Thugs would thus have to dwell about Lakhnauti and would not trouble the neighborhood of Delhi any more.” (Sir HM Elliot’s History of India, iii. 141)

    So while it may be true the the victors write the histories-whether it’s accurate or not-there are some truly slippery examples, and the case of the Thuggee is one of them.

  6. on 17 Jul 2007 at 3:12 pm 6. James Killus said …

    Seattle,

    My actual point about the Thugee is that we simply know nothing about the matter. Nothing that I’ve ever seen in the historical record passes the rules of evidence. So I consider stories of the Thugs to be on a par with the stories of Robin Hood. Yes, there may have been some real events that inspired the narratives, but what we have now is almost pure narrative, unsullied by objective fact.

    As for it being “easy to criticize from a comfortable distance-say a hundred years or more,” I can only observe that it is easier still to accept historical mythology at face value, or to take xenophobic narratives of the time and translate them into xenophobic narratives for our time.

    What I find more interesting is that the facts that I gave about the percentage of convictions etc., which you take as my being critical of the British, in fact came from reference works that were entirely uncritical and fully credulous. In other words, prior to maybe 20 years ago, this information raised no red flags for scholars, as nearly as I can tell.

    Which may mean that there is something to this “framing” business after all.

  7. on 17 Jul 2007 at 4:24 pm 7. Seattle said …

    Indeed, it would appear we agree on your actual point. ; )

  8. on 17 Jul 2007 at 8:13 pm 8. Oaktown Girl said …

    Thanks for this post, James.

    Rush also formed the opinion that Africans were immune to Yellow Fever.

    I wonder on what basis this opinion was formed? I know historically (and sadly, even today), White people held all kinds of ridiculous ideas about Black people.

    I remember back in college that in the 19th and 20th centuries there used to be a belief by many White doctors that Black women did not experience physical pain the same as their “more delicate” White sisters did. Tragically, this lead to many Black women undergoing serious gynecological procedures without the benefit of any anesthesia at all, both here and in Africa.

  9. on 18 Jul 2007 at 11:47 am 9. JP Stormcrow said …

    I have no real insight into the Al-Jazeera case other than to re-itterate, narrative trumps truth,

    That is also a point that the author of the article made. That in fact, it is not clear exactly how much real injustice there is because of the way the government handles the Gitmo cases - so she admits that she does not really have any “balanced” insight - just one side of the story. So the real injustice is that you cannot assess the “injustice”. The government narrative is not particular to the individuals, it stops at “they are all bad people”, thugs you might say, and most were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt … for a while. So I think the fact that most of us have no real insight into the Al-Jazeera case is evidence that the government stance is “working”.

    And I will reiterate a point that I made in response to the first parable. It is critically important that we not let the current crowd control the long term narrative of their actions. Bamboozling the current political media, bamboozling history is another.

  10. on 18 Jul 2007 at 4:42 pm 10. James Killus said …

    Actually, on a bit more reflection, I will say this. The insight that I have on the Al-Jazeera case is the same insight that I have on the case of the Thuggee. Whatever the facts on any individual case, the overall statistics demand the conclusion that justice is simply not involved. The British trials were a sham, as is anything pertaining to Gitmo and the rest. Some of the prisoners may be “bad people” in either case; some of the pedestrians on any given city street may be “bad people.” But the system in place has no way of determining who is who, and does not care in any event.

    An evil system is worse than any individual evil can possibly be, which is why we have the exclusionary principle in proper jurisprudence. The “fruit from the poisoned tree” harms more than just those who must eat of it.

  11. on 18 Jul 2007 at 6:01 pm 11. JP Stormcrow said …

    Bamboozling the current political media, bamboozling history is another.

    Ahem, Bamboozling the current political media is one thing, bamboozling history is another.

    …and a really bad typo in your comment is a fourth thing.