K. Patrick Ober. Mark Twain and Medicine: Any Mummery Will Cure. Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 2003. xix, 361 pp., illus. $47.50.

Abstract

K. Patrick Ober’s volume is a carefully researched and thoroughly documented exploration of Samuel Clemens’s relationship to medical practice and medical practitioners in the “Gilded Age” of post–Civil War America. On the surface, it is a wonderfully readable chronicle of Clemens’s often amusing and frequently biting observations on doctors, patients, and treatments. In the course of his presentation, Ober also paints a clear picture of the spectrum of fads, cults, and theories of practice in the era that immediately preceded Abraham Flexner’s study. Finally, the work inevitably contains Ober’s own reflections on the art of medicine, worthy of careful study in their own right. Samuel Clemens is perhaps the most highly dosed, dunked, doused, mobilized, and magnetized writer in American literary history. Clemens’s childhood encounters with measles, scarlet fever, and cholera were terrible in their own right, but the diseases were only slightly more deadly than the purgation, bloodletting, cold water cures, and patent medicines used as preventives or treatments. Later in life, dissatisfaction with conventional treatment of his own gouty arthritis and the chronic illnesses of his wife and children caused Clemens to seek aid from healers of every persuasion. He lost no opportunity to express his opinions on his experiences in his commentaries and fictions.