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(upbeat music) - Hello.

Welcome to "Illinois Stories".

I'm Mark McDonald in Springfield at the SIU school of Medicine.

You know, Springfield in Central Illinois has hundreds of museums, but here in Springfield today we're in one of the, maybe the lesser known ones but a very very impressive one at the SIU School of Medicine called the Pearson Museum.

And as you look up over my shoulder here this is Dr. Emmett Pearson and many of you know him and his family.

He didn't pass away that long ago but he founded this museum and left it here with the SIU school of medicine.

And if you haven't been in here or even if you have you're gonna find this very interesting.

Mike Mosley, you're fortunate enough to be the curator here just a couple of years back, I guess.

And it's been an interesting learning experience for you I'll bet as well, hasn't it?

- It has, I'm always finding stuff that people have forgotten about and cataloging it.

And I really enjoy showing it off to students and faculty and people that just like to come in.

- Yeah.

Tell us a little bit about Dr. Pearson and how this came to be.

- So yeah, Dr. Pearson was an avid collector of medical memorabilia and when the school was starting up as medical humanities department he made this the first donation of hundreds of items that really got this place going.

And he was instrumental throughout his life and donating more and getting-- obtaining things like the pharmacy.

- Before we go into the pharmacy that's gonna be our first stop after this, but here, this is the-- you can have several of these cases that have medical items from-- Oh, we're kind of shooting at the turn of the century from the 1800s to the 1900s, aren't we?

And that's sort of what we're looking at.

And what about course the doctor's bag and everything but would this be, this would be what a doctor would carry on the frontier with them, or later than that?

- Exactly.

Like this was before hospitals were common.

And when you saw a doctor, they would typically come to your house and they would have to bring everything they needed with you with them.

So in the bag, they'd have things like the stethoscope, syringes, bloodletting supplies if they needed that, even dentistry equipment.

- Oh, boy.

- Dentists were pretty rare around then.

And they would have to bring medicines at times too.

- We're gonna see some of these things in greater detail as we go on through but it's good to scan this before we go into the pharmacy.

Let's go in there now because this is a real experience.

What you all have done here is shoot for actually.

You actually do replicate a pharmacy that existed in Canton, Illinois, about this time.

- That's right.

So this all was donated by Ed Lewis Jr. And he was a pharmacist and his father was a pharmacist, Ed Lewis, Sr he bought the old Gustine pharmacy in Canton and changed the name to a Lewis' pharmacy.

And he decided it was time to modernize so he packed away all of the old fixtures and all the old patent medicines and stuff and stored them in the basement.

And Ed Lewis Jr. in the fifties decided he really would want to collect.

So he started with that stuff from the basement.

And over time, he added to his collection.

He got these shelves and a soda fountain.

The soda fountain was from Branson, Missouri.

The shelves are from Burlington, Iowa and over-- he eventually compiled an entire pharmacy and he had it displayed in his basement.

In 1967, the State Fair contacted the pharmaceutical association of which he was a member and they asked if he would recreate sort of a period pharmacy in the Centennial building.

And they did.

And they named it the Spoon River pharmacy.

And it was staffed by all real pharmacists And they would hand out period candy and stuff.

- Yeah.

- Dr. Pearson saw this display and a few years later he remembered it and asked Dr. Ed Lewis if he would be interested in donating it to the Pearson.

And he did.

And that's how it ended up here.

- The whole thing.

I mean, can you imagine transporting this?

- Yeah.

I don't know how they did it.

(Mark laughing) It was a lie.

- That's amazing.

This wasn't it either.

He'd donated thousands of other items everything from like household goods to surgical instruments tons of stuff that isn't even displayed here.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Everything a pharmacist would need.

What amazes me is you probably had to inventory every one of these bottles and all these medicines and it's remarkable what a pharmacist had to have.

Isn't it?

I mean, with the number of-- and we've identified many more conditions since then so you can imagine.

Now this is an interesting case and it has an interesting story because it's not part of this pharmacist but it came out of a Springfield pharmacy, didn't it?

- Yeah.

So this came out of the Corneau and Dillons drug store which was located on sixth street in downtown Springfield across from the old Capitol.

And this was well known as the Lincoln Family pharmacy.

- Aaaah!

- Abraham Lincoln would hang out here a lot.

And this is-- these are sort of the original items that would be in here.

And it was probably in the store for 60 years.

- Okay.

Can you open this book for us?

Because this was a ledger of what the Lincoln families or the whole stores orders for a period of time.

- So this is the Corneau and Diller formulary and this contains all of the formulas or recipes for all the drugs that they would make.

And this tells us a lot of what was in the items that the Lincolns would purchase.

And it actually predates Corneau and Diller and it belonged to Wallace and Diller first.

William Wallace was the Lincoln family doctor.

And there's a recipe in here that was specifically made for governor Thomas Ford who was in office from 1842 to 1846.

And it is a tuberculosis medication.

- Is that right?

So there's a piece of history.

We know that he had tuberculosis or thought he had tuberculosis.

- He died of consumption in 1850.

- Is that right?

- And he apparently had it while he was in office.

- This is a precious piece of history here.

- Yes.

- This is, 'cause this was, like I said it was the Lincoln family pharmacy.

So we know that there was a relationship between the medicine that he took and it was right across the street, wasn't it?

From he was.

Yeah.

Well, this is fascinating even some of these on the soda fountain here.

This fascinates me because I don't know what it is and apparently nobody does it.

It was some kind of a spin game, wasn't it?

You put change in it and-- - We've tried to figure it out.

(Mark laughing) You put a coin in the top and it kind of bounces around in here and ends up down here.

But we're not really sure what the point of it was.

- A game of ch-- Well, the point was for the drugstore to make money I think.

- Oh, that's true.

(Mark laughing) - Okay.

It's fascinating.

And really, and these were just for decor, I guess.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

The light would shine through them.

- Like a lava lamp, only earlier, huh?

Okay.

And it was-- was it unusual to have a dentist office adjoining or do you know even?

I mean this, 'cause this is a pretty good setup here if you want to learn how early dentistry was accomplished.

- Yeah.

So this was a separate donation.

This came from Dean Doolin who was a dentist in Lincoln, Illinois.

And it would not have been in a pharmacy at first but we kind of split this down the middle and gave this half to the dentist office.

- Now the couch is kind of a grim reminder of what it must've been like to go to the dentist in those days.

'Cause if you have to lay down your appointment it must have been pretty tough.

- Exactly.

Yeah.

This was before the time of anesthesia or at least before it was a widely use.

So if you've got a tooth pulled you would need a rest afterwards.

- And the dentist of course he didn't have an electric thrill.

He was pumping it with his foot, huh?

You can imagine that would grind pretty slowly.

- Absolutely.

- Man, that'd be tough.

That would be tough.

Well, this is a tremendous exhibit in the pharmacy.

I guess the pharmacy is really the most popular part of this, isn't it?

- Oh yeah.

Yeah.

We have guests that come in and they remember getting sodas and floats set.

- Sure.

- Places just like this.

So it's kind of interesting to hear those stories.

- Mike, we were just talking about bloodletting and what you know, most doctors at the time were practicing that as opposed to the homeopathic route.

And these are some of the tools they used for bloodletting.

- Yeah, exactly.

So this is one of the most simple forms.

This is just called a thumb lancet and it's just got this sharp point the sides aren't even particularly sharp.

And he would just press that into the patient's artery or vein with your thumb and extract however much blood you needed to.

- And the doctors did, they differ.

I mean, I know bloodletting, I guess the point of bloodletting is you may either have too much blood or there's something in your blood that's making you not well and so get rid of that.

- Right.

- Is that the thought of that?

- So the theory is, or was that your body has these four humors in it and one of the humors is blood.

And if you had too much of it, it would be making you sick and you would have to put those humors back into balance so you'd have to let some of that blood out.

And that theory dates back thousands of years to Rome.

And they were still doing this in the 19th century even if they weren't adherence to the humoral theory in itself.

- And these are all different.

This is the most sophisticated one here is.

Can you show us how that works?

- This is called a scarificator.

- A scarificator?

- Yes.

- Scar.

Okay.

- So it's this brass box and it has these slots for blades to come out.

- Yeah.

- This one has 12.

- Wow.

- They can have anywhere between four and 24.

- Can you push those again so we can get a good look at?

Wow.

They are sharp, little devils aren't they?

- Yeah.

So you would operate it by pulling this lever back and that cocks it.

And then you put this down on the patient's arm or wherever you want to take the blood from and press this button on the side.

The blades would come out.

- Yeah.

- And score the skin.

- Mhmm.

And then do you catch the blood?

Does the doctor catch the blood then in something?

- Yeah.

You'd have a bowl they would use.

And a lot of times they would be marked on the side for certain amounts and it would let you know what how much you were taking out.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

So there was some science involved.

You did want to calculate how much you were taking out.

- There was measurement involved.

Yeah.

And this is before actually before we had really good mannequins, you know they were building models, weren't they?

- Yeah.

So this is a wax model of a portion of the leg and you can see there's these red rays rashes on it.

- Yeah.

- So this was created by a man named Joseph Town and he worked at Guy's hospital in London and he made hundreds of these, all different-- - All body parts.

- All body parts, yeah.

And he based these a lot of times off of autopsies and these would be used for teaching students to identify diseases.

And at the time, it was not particularly safe to have students around patients because you know it was so easy to get sick.

So they would use these instead.

- Now this is this-- this floor's made that I had never heard this before but in this container is something called mummy dust.

- Mummy powder.

Yeah.

- Mummy powder.

Okay.

So what's the deal there?

So mummy powder was believed to have been a cureall from basically the middle ages up until the 19th century.

It was all based on a mistranslation but the mistranslation was thought to have said meant "mummies" like the type that are in pyramids.

So Europeans mostly would get these mummies and grind them up and eat the powder.

- And they stopped because they ran out of mummies?

Is that what-- - Yeah.

They were running out of mummies.

So they would try and find-- - Oh.

- Basically the less honest sellers would try to find people who had died in the desert and just use them instead.

- Oh, it's kind of a shame to find humor in something that you know, I'm a cop, but I mean it is kind of to believe that we can believe that would make you well.

It's just, it's hard to-- - It's bizarre.

Yeah, it is.

- And this is kind of bizarre too although this is a beautiful piece of art and it's really old, isn't it?

- Yeah.

So this is a Moche pot.

The Moche people were from Peru, that area.

They're pre Inkin, pre-Columbian.

They were around from 100 to 700 AD.

So on the long end, this is 1900 years old.

And they did not have a written language so they had to rely on images to pass information on.

So this is a man with tertiary syphilis.

You can see he has the saddle nose sort of the tip of the nose falls off and the lip is kind of cleft.

- Yeah.

And that's to depict what that disease does to you.

- Yeah.

Exactly.

- Okay.

And this would be used for any other purposes to carry any fluid or anything you wanted to carry but this was the message.

- Yeah.

The primary purpose was to show this condition.

- And you mentioned Rome a little bit earlieR.

And you-- this museum is incredible.

You talk about old.

Okay.

This is 2000 years old.

This is very likely about the same age, isn't it?

- Yeah.

So this is second or third century.

These were taken from a tomb in the Syria-Lebanon area.

And these are Roman surgical instruments.

- Wow.

So I can take one of these out.

This is called a spatha meal.

This one's really interesting too because it has an engraving of a serpent on here.

- Yes it does.

- Which is a symbol of the God Asclepius who is the God of medicine.

- Mhmm.

- And this is called a spatha meal and it would have been used to spread ointment on a wound.

- Yeah.

And then you've got-- can you lift that layer up and show us the next layer?

- Sure.

- This is a real find.

I mean, this is a very, very valuable thing.

- So we have some other stuff in here.

There's a scalpel here.

There's a blade, larger leaf shape blade.

- A variety of spoons.

- Yep.

A lot of spoons.

These are measuring spoons that would have been used to measure out powders and such.

- Wow.

- One thing that I find really interesting in here is this.

This is a pair of forceps and they're not that unlike forceps, we would use today, even as a slide lock.

- And they're even serrated so they can grab.

- That's right.

- Wow.

That's a piece of work.

Are those, what are those made up?

These are made out of bronze.

- And it's really interesting because a lot of these are more sophisticated and more ornate than some of the stuff that we have from the 19th century.

- Michael, when you enter the museum, you come in here and the first thing you see on your right is a doctor's office from around 1900 circa 1900, I guess, huh?

- Yeah.

This is sort of a recreation just to remind people what things were like 120 years ago.

Probably the most noticeable thing that you see here is the desk.

And over here, we have a table with a tray of amputation saws and forceps and chisels.

These are all a little bit more modern probably 1900 and 1920.

They all have the metal handles so they can be disinfected.

So after germ theory, it was widely accepted.

- He may or may not have had electricity at that time 'cause he's got an oil lamp.

- Exactly.

Some people had electricity, some didn't.

You mentioned the desk.

It's fantastic.

I mean, I, this was, this doctor probably had to have some means because this is a piece of work here.

- Yeah.

It definitely is not a typical desk.

So the story behind it was, it was on its way to Chicago.

And the Great Fire broke out in 1871 and the driver of the wagon that was carrying it stopped in Oswego and dropped it off there since obviously that doctor was not gonna have a doctor's office to put it in anymore.

Eventually, it came into the possession of the Illinois College of Obstetrics and Gynecological Society and they donated it to the Pearson Museum.

- It's just beautiful.

I wonder if it's in one piece or if it had to be moved like that or if it could be taken apart, but it's, it just-- perfect place to put your medical books.

- Yep.

And it would have also contained everything that the doctor needed to use to treat patients as well.

- Yup.

And right to the left of that is this patient chair.

I'm not sure what that's called but that's, certainly, I guess that can be adjusted to sit upright or lay all the way back and he'd get good look at you.

- Yes, absolutely.

It's made out of a metal or like iron.

I mean, it is one of the heaviest things I've ever-- - I bet you moved it too, I bet you had to move it.

(Mark laughing) Yeah, it does.

It looks like it'd be really heavy.

It would last forever too.

Now who's our patient over here?

- So his name apparently is Fritz.

The story is he is a German criminal and he was executed for whatever crime he committed in the 19th century.

But that's just the story.

I don't actually know what the truth is.

- Well, I'm surprised we know anything about them.

Was it typical for for a doctor to have skeleton in the office?

- Yeah.

It was pretty typical.

Not uncommon at all to see that.

- Yeah.

So what they would do now of course is they would mold a likeness for you to have in your office.

You wouldn't have a real skeleton hanging around.

- But it would be made out of plastic or even 3D printed.

- Mhmm.

And over here, the wheelchair that's interesting too, because I mean we've come a long way in that department too.

That would have been pretty difficult for a person to-- that'd be unwieldy, wouldn't it?

- Yeah.

Very unwieldy.

So that's the 1920s design and it is not the most user-friendly of designs.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, let's move on this way.

And there's a big ledger book here and I'm not sure what what's in there?

- So that's the ledger for the Illinois Central Hospital for the Insane.

- Oh.

- That's from 1905.

- Where was that located?

- That was in Jacksonville.

- Okay.

Oh, that later became the Developmental Center, I think before they closed it down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

- And then around it we have all sorts of psychiatric restraints that they would have used on patients there.

- Oh, man.

That was a grim time.

That was a grim time.

So if a person is deemed to be insane and thinking that he or she may hurt themselves they had to be bound and tied up, didn't they?

- Right.

- All right.

Let's move this way.

More compounds.

Now these look, these don't look quite as scientifically serious as some of the other stuff we've seen.

- No, not at all.

These were sort of the patent medicines of the time and you'll notice that they kind of all looked like a little bit like whiskey bottles.

- Yeah.

They do.

- Most of them are very high in alcohol and a lot of them don't really do what they're advertised.

They're mostly just laxatives but they were-- - You would know that you got to respon-- your body got a response, you'd know that you paid for something that you might think was working.

- Exactly.

The idea was if it was doing something then it was working.

- So would you, would these qualify as snake oil in many cases?

- Yes, absolutely.

- Okay.

Some of them probably were legit but most of them were just compounds that a guy would find an old whiskey bottle and he'd make up something that would give you the runs.

And there you go.

Here's your magic.

- Yeah, pretty much.

That's kind of how it worked.

- Well, that's a chapter in history that we can put behind us, I hope.

You also hold meetings and seminars in here, I guess.

And that's what classroom work and things.

So that's the area that we're in right now.

And this is rather new here, isn't it?.

- Yeah.

So that case is new and decided to fill it with the stuff.

On the left there is a Chinese apothecary kit or actually a Chinese immigrant apothecary kit also from the turn of the 20th century in California.

We also have some acupuncture needles and a model showing the pressure points.

- Oh.

- Acupressure.

- Okay.

So a Chinese would-- would this, this would have been probably I dunno if they call them doctors or not but this would have been a person that does physician services.

This wouldn't have been just any person from China didn't carry this around.

This was a professional.

- And those were mostly herbs in those bottles.

- Okay.

And we were talking about that's sort of like homeopathic Eastern and homeopathic Western.

Hair's kind of the difference here.

What does homeopathic actually mean?

These were, again, were from around 1900, right?

- Right.

So this dispensary, the cabinet is from around 1900.

The bottles in here are probably from the 1930s or so.

This all belonged to F. August Karst who was a homeopathic doctor in Chicago.

And a homeopath-- homeopathy itself is based on the idea of like cures like.

So, say like a Walnut kind of looks like a brain so it might cure a brain issue.

- Huh.

- And it's also based on the idea that if a lot of something makes you sick then a little of that thing will make you better.

So this medicine in here has been, most of them have been diluted to the point where there's almost nothing of the original substance left in the pills.

So they're basically just kind of sugar pills.

- So it couldn't hurt you.

It wouldn't necessarily help you, but it couldn't hurt you.

But a little bit of what ails you might make your body respond in a positive way.

- Yeah.

That's the idea.

Yeah.

- Mike, in the old days, the pharmacist had a scale like this and he would put his compounds on that scale in preparation for making pills.

- Exactly.

Yeah.

They would have to measure out each ingredient separately and use these.

They would have a set of weights, various sizes that they would place on one side and then the powder or whatever it was on this side to measure amount.

- Yeah.

And they make a paste out of it.

They add some kind of liquid to it, make a paste out of it.

And that's where the pill roller comes in.

- Yeah, exactly.

After that, they would kind of roll it into sort of a cylinder and place it on here and then slide this down.

And then at this end, they'd all be little pills.

Prior to the development of this device they would have to roll them out all by hand individually.

Obviously could take hours.

- Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And this we have, this is called blue mass.

It was in a pill form and it was very common, wasn't it?

- Yeah.

- And if you look very carefully, this is interesting.

Even that far back Eli Lilly and Company found out of Indianapolis was making pharmaceuticals.

- Yes.

- And this was very common.

What would it have been used for?

- Blue mass was used for a lot of things.

It was used to treat melancholy which would be like depression, constipation tuberculosis, things like that.

The problem was the main ingredient in blue mass is mercury.

And one dose is several hundred times the safe daily allowance of mercury.

- They didn't know that then.

We know that now.

- Right.

- Yeah.

I think-- - So, it would be very easily to get mercury poisoning when taking these things.

- Yeah, yeah.

- I think Abe Lincoln took that for his depression at some point.

- He did.

- And this is the, this looks like we're really getting somewhere now compared to the amputation kits that we saw earlier.

- Yeah.

So this is very nice amputation kit.

And it was made sometime between 1865 and 1870.

- And we know that because the handles are different?

- Yeah.

So these are Ebony handles, which is type of wood.

And this is sort of-- this is the pre-based septic era of surgery.

So these after operating these would not probably have been washed off and the wood soaks up blood.

- Yeah.

- And that sort of thing, it can't be disinfected.

- And this is a grim reminder of what it was like to give birth when you couldn't get to the hospital.

- Yeah, exactly.

So this is an obstetrics kit and it was owned by a physician named A.W Garner he was a horse and buggy doctor.

And you can see there's all these bloodstains on here.

Now this was in use from 1880 or so to about 1920.

So it wasn't that long ago that stuff like this was going on.

- Okay, now these forceps here, this actually doesn't look that much different, I guess, than what we're using today.

This would be used by the doctor and to get in to grab the baby's head.

- Yeah, exactly.

- And it'd Help to pull it out.

- Yeah.

It was just, if the baby needed a little bit of help coming out, then they would use that to kind of help it along a little bit.

- Mhmm.

It's what I find interesting is that in many cases you not only know the age of these but you know the physicians that owned them which puts them in a time and place very personal.

- Yeah.

It's really nice when we can find out this sort of stuff and put it in its proper context 'cause it adds so much to the story of the object.

Yeah.

- The museum is still growing.

I see that there's exhibit space behind you that you intend to fill up.

It's going to be lit.

You've got your explanation board here ready to go.

So do you have any idea what's going to go in there?

- We're still coming up with some stuff.

We have-- I'm working on an exhibit right now about the diseases of early central Illinois.

So something like that will probably go in there.

- Yeah.

- We have a few coming down the line that we're working on.

- Terrific.

- Well, you know, hopefully that this pandemic will be behind us and you can charge ahead just like you want to.

That'd be great.

- I hope so.

- Thank you, Mike.

- You're welcome.

- A reminder.

Of course, the pandemic has everything sort of on hold but keep in mind that the Pearson Museum is open to the public.

You know, groups, if they want to make an appointment they have to make an appointment to come see it.

But Mike will be glad to host groups, small groups by appointment in the future.

With another Illinois story at the Pearson Museum SIU school of medicine in Springfield I'm Mark MacDonald.

Thanks for watching.

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