The Indian Doctress in the Nineteenth-Century United States: Race, Medicine, and Labor

Abstract

During the early 1820s, French-born Theresa Chaux began work as an Indian doctress in Philadelphia. She continued in the occupation for nearly thirty years and became prosperous enough to amass considerable wealth in real estate prior to her death.¹ In the mid-1850s, Sarah Baxter became an Indian doctress in Providence, Rhode Island. Her ancestry is ambiguous, but she became relatively successful, producing and marketing botanical medicines like “Mrs. Baxter’s Indian Healing Balm.”² In the 1870s, Madame Lee-o-Netto, “healer of every ill that flesh is heir to,” began to advertise her business in New York newspapers.³ Born in Canada to Seneca parents, the “celebrated Indian doctress” traveled around in her “full Indian costume,” providing medical care and counsel—“ladies a specialty.” Lee-o-Netto took care to be discreet, however, noting, “All cases of a delicate nature strictly confidential.”⁴ Ten years later, Princess Viroqua toured as an Indian doctress in the western Great Lakes, highlighting her Mohawk lineage and the prominence of her brother, Dr. Oronhyatekha, the second Native person in North America to receive a medical degree.⁵ Although Viroqua had once been part of a traveling Indian show, it is unclear whether she appeared in “costume” while treating patients. Like Lee-o-Netto, Viroqua also professed expertise in female complaints, advertising remedies “composed of roots, herbs, berries, barks and gums, which are nature’s own.”⁶

These four brief sketches provide a glimpse of the Indian doctress trade and the diverse women who shaped it into a distinct occupation. Whether Native or not, the women who became Indian doctresses profited from (and by extension reiterated) myths of indigenous anti-modernity—yet as entrepreneurs, they capitalized on new technologies of communication to sell products and services to customers with whom they did not have preexisting relationships. By “indigenous anti-modernity,” I mean to signal a matrix of ideas, including the notions that Native people were indivisible from the wilderness, had superior knowledge of the natural world and its healing powers, and could offer cures not found in modern science. I argue that Indian doctresses marketed indigenous anti-modernity in a thoroughly modern way and that doing so may have offered them an opportunity to earn a living outside conventional and emergent occupational spheres. Thus, even as they perpetuated essentialist ideas about Indianness, these women challenged racial and gender norms that dictated the economic dependence of both women and indigenous people. Their work is an important but largely overlooked site for investigating the overlapping discourses of class, race, and gender during the nineteenth century and sheds new light not only on histories of American medicine but also on the labors of American women and the business of Indian representation.

The growth of American cities, the expansion of print culture, and changes in American medicine all contributed to the development of the Indian doctress occupation.⁷ Focusing my research primarily on print materials (newspapers, city directories, advertisements, medical guides, reform tracts, and popular literature), I identified women from varied backgrounds who worked as Indian doctresses between 1800 and 1900, with the bulk of their activity occurring between 1840 and 1890, starting in the urban North and East, then spreading southward and westward.⁸ While their numbers are comparatively small, as medical historian George Rosen observed, “The significance of irregular physicians lay not so much in their numbers as in their activities” and the forces and beliefs those activities illuminate.⁹ Following a brief statement on historiographical impact, my examination of nineteenth-century Indian doctresses will comprise an analysis of the rise of the occupation and the women who shaped it, followed by a consideration of the criticisms they faced, particularly related to women’s work, and conclude with an investigation of the occupation’s association with abortion and aberrant womanhood.

This study is important and necessary for three key reasons. First, historians of medicine have analyzed medical reforms and alternatives like Thomsonianism, homeopathy, hydropathy, and eclecticism, often referred to as “sectarian” practices that “ranked high among the irrepressible energies” of the nation during the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Yet, little scholarship within this subfield has been devoted to commercialized Indian medicine.¹¹ In the few instances that such business has been studied, the focus has been on practitioners who have typically been dismissed as quacks.¹² And despite the fact that women were particularly drawn to “irregular” or sectarian medicine (as patients and providers), their role in the development of these practices is still largely understudied.¹³ That the specific and historically evident occupational niche of “Indian doctress” has not been systematically analyzed is noteworthy since it attained particular valence in reform rhetoric and popular literature from the antebellum period through the end of the century.¹⁴

Second, while scholars have produced illuminating studies of women wage workers and entrepreneurs in nineteenth-century American cities, Native people and themes are generally absent from these discussions.¹⁵ The same is true of labor history generally, notwithstanding significant scholarship on “Indian work” during the past twenty-five years by Indigenous Studies scholars.¹⁶ Indeed, the authors of one overview observe, “historians in general have scarcely touched the subject of Indians and the American economy.”¹⁷ Colleen O’Neill puts the problem specifically in terms of modernity: “Modernity has become synonymous with capitalism,” and within that narrative, all things Indian are deemed “irrelevant.”¹⁸ Such a persistent omission suggests that the very presumptions about indigenous anti-modernity that enabled the development of the Indian doctress occupation have also blinded scholars to the place of Native peoples and ideas of indigeneity in histories of work and business. As a result, American Indians and their resources (including medicinal knowledge and commodified images) are often seen as “casualties of modernity” rather than constitutive of it.¹⁹

Finally, although we know a great deal about how images of “the Indian” influenced nineteenth-century American art, literature, and politics, the way discourses of Indianness influenced the private decision-making of ordinary Americans remains mostly unexplored.²⁰ As Leslie Reagan notes, “Medicine was a private business,” making it more secret and “unobserved” than public realms of communication, even as it was quite literally a commercial enterprise.²¹ By examining the growth of the Indian doctress trade, the key tropes embedded within it, and its association with women’s care, particularly reproductive health, this essay demonstrates that ideas of “Indianness” have long pervaded even the most intimate corners of American life. My analysis of how popular ideas about “the Indian” were intertwined with the “private business” of medicine is thus an effort “to restore representation of American Indians to a social and economic context.”²²

It is probably helpful to briefly delineate what this study is not doing. I am not concerned here with formally trained Native women doctors, like Omaha physician Susan LaFlesche Picotte, widely regarded as the first American Indian woman to receive a medical degree. Her career is undoubtedly significant, but she worked primarily in tribal communities and never used or accepted the appellation “doctress” (carefully distinguishing herself from those that did).²³ Similarly, my focus is not on women who were traditional healers, medicine people, or curanderas in Native settings.²⁴ While ethnographic writing on such women sometimes informed depictions of Indian doctresses, these caregivers were engaged in a distinct cultural enterprise and did not target non-Natives as patients or consumers. Nor am I investigating formally or semi-formally trained female physicians like Harriot Kezia Hunt, Elizabeth Blackwell, Rebecca Lee, and Sarah Hackett Stevenson, who carved out professional careers for themselves against considerable odds during the nineteenth century.²⁵ My concern is with primarily urban women—Native and non-Native—who mobilized widespread notions of indigenous anti-modernity to make a living in the lay business of alternative medicine, selling their products and services to a wide variety of consumers.

Although some became rich and famous, many Indian doctresses lived and worked in the margins, making the research for this project particularly challenging. These challenges necessitate combining profiles of Indian doctresses with popular representations of them, thus creating a kind of composite biography of the occupation. In addition to the analytical and historiographical interventions outlined above, I want to also suggest this study can offer some methodological insights. Beyond newspapers and advertisements, documenting the Indian doctress occupation is difficult by means of conventional archival research. Since many clients who received care from Indian doctresses may have done so discreetly (to seek illicit services like abortion or as a last resort when conventional cures failed), they were extremely unlikely to record their experiences, to say nothing of their motivations, in letters, diaries, or memoirs.²⁶ Likewise, while the self-representation of some Indian doctresses is evident in existing print resources, others left no record of how they promoted their business. In such cases, the example of a few must stand in for the many. Finally, as is frequently true of research on women and people of color, it is far easier to find sources about them than sources by them. As a result, the reactionary archive of critics—like one account that called Indian doctresses “weird women of the modern time, who, when doctors and their systems are discussed by doubting gossips, stand on the brink of the actual and the mystic”—sometimes threatens to overwhelm the experiences of the doctresses and their clients.²⁷

When we consider Indian doctresses in the aggregate, a few common denominators become apparent. They tended to be mature (often married or widowed) women who provided a range of services that might include botanic medicine, therapeutic treatments, obstetric care, or fortune-telling. Some Indian doctresses were of verifiable indigenous lineage, several maintained an itinerant practice, and many specialized in women’s maladies.²⁸ Some women in this occupation were disapprovingly noted for their financial success, accused of or implicated in crimes, and depicted as unfeminine in one or more ways. Some Indian doctresses launched businesses that operated for decades, trademarked and marketed their own medicines, and used the title “Madam(e)” to signal skill, sophistication, or exoticism.²⁹ Others appear to have passed in and out of the occupation, taking up the Indian doctress trade only intermittently. Despite the diverse nature of their practices, their success hinged on perceptions of medicinal knowledge peculiar to indigenous people, provided by women, and desirable to largely nonindigenous consumers.

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Starting in seventeenth-century New England, a number of Native women earned fame as healers and purveyors of medicinal knowledge.³⁰ Depictions of these women in contemporary writing reveal several characteristics that later came to define the Indian doctress occupation. They were almost always described as old, possessing unmatched knowledge of medicinal flora, and capable of remedying conditions that regular physicians could or would not. Such employment, or “workways,” not only provided these American Indian women with a measure of financial security but also carried a kind of social power.³¹ Although Virgil Vogel asserted in American Indian Medicine that early English colonists eschewed much of the materia medica found in the forests and fields around them because of “European bias” against a “savage taint,” Indian practitioners were in fact frequently recognized as reliable purveyors of effective botanical medicine.³² And during the first half of the nineteenth century, the market for Indian medicines and therapies (both genuine and spurious) expanded considerably. The most notable factors in the growing demand for such cures were changes in medical practice, urbanization and industrialization, and the explosion of print culture. Importantly, each of these forces acted to “both constrain and expand female attempts to enter the male-dominated world of commerce.”³³

Shifts in medical care, such as the regularization of medical education and the rise of so-called heroic medicine, with their emphasis on “scientifically sound” techniques, contributed to a backlash that spawned numerous alternative medical practices.³⁴ Foremost among these alternatives was the botanic medicine movement whose most notable disciple and evangelist was Samuel Thomson, a New Englander who began practicing in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Thomson and his adherents rejected “modern” medicine because mineral or chemical remedies and invasive techniques often did more harm than good and because they believed that medical knowledge was increasingly being obscured or withheld from “the laboring classes” by elitist professionals.³⁵ Thus, the rise of botanic medicine hinged on a rejection of “science” and modernization as promoted by so-called regular physicians. In this context, the long-recognized utility of Indian medicinal knowledge took on newfound importance not only as natural but also as practical and traditional. Native practitioners were now joined—and often supplanted—by non-Native men and women who claimed to have learned botanic medicine from (often unidentified) Indians. Thomson himself claimed to have learned his techniques from an unnamed Indian doctress in Vermont.³⁶

The growth of American cities and the profusion of print culture also led to an expansion of the health-care market, including the Indian doctress trade. By 1850, 15 percent of Americans lived in cities and by 1890 that number had more than doubled. These changes had an impact on medical care. Not only were urbanization and industrialization often hazardous to one’s health, but city-dwellers were also far more likely than their rural counterparts to seek “extra-familial” care from paid medical practitioners. The number of doctors in urban areas grew even faster than the general population, leading to intense competition.³⁷ In addition to orthodox physicians, there were increasing numbers of unorthodox ones. Besides the aforementioned Thomsonians, alternative practitioners included homeopaths, who dispensed medicine in infinitesimal doses, and water-cure advocates, who promoted regular consumption of and immersion in clean water as remedies par excellence—all of whom drew significant numbers of women patients and practitioners. Many of these practitioners advertised their services in newspapers, broadsides, and directories that were increasingly cheap to produce and purchase. Indeed, the growth of the press was both cause and consequence of a surge in medical advertising.³⁸

Within these overlapping contexts, certain women distinguished their practice from that of their competitors by establishing themselves as Indian doctresses and taking advantage of print media to advance their claims. One of the earliest Indian doctresses to make profitable use of print advertising was Mrs. Charity Shaw. In 1805, her broadsides and newspaper advertisements began to appear in Boston, hawking a variety of effective plant-derived “Indian medicines” in both the “simple compound and liquid state,” particularly suited for “those of her [own] sex.” Shaw’s business was successful enough that she expanded to New York and later into Philadelphia during the subsequent decade. As Charity Shaw is one of the earliest urban Indian doctresses I have identified, her career provides a helpful baseline for understanding the development of the occupation in later years.

Shaw claimed, remarkably, that she had studied natural history “from her infancy” and supplemented her own native genius with knowledge she “derived” from Indians, including one recipe from “an Indian chief.”³⁹ Eschewing a scientific approach to the study of medicine—which “proved too methodical for the slender fibres of her brain”—she simply listened to her Indian informants and wrote down what they said. Shaw deployed a common trope in the marketing of Indian cures by both men and women: the nameless, faceless Indian proffering medicinal wisdom that was “natural” (not scientific) and would benefit all humankind.⁴⁰ But by implying the inappropriateness of women pursuing a “methodical” approach to medicine, Shaw also maintained a firm claim on her femininity. Although she was operating as an entrepreneur and asserting her authority as a knowledgeable practitioner of Indian medicine, she was careful not to exceed the limitations of her sex.⁴¹

Shaw’s case encapsulates a number of themes in both the self-representation and the public perception of Indian doctresses throughout the nineteenth century. As with Madame Lee-o-Netto, she offered some services primarily for female clients, “whose great delicacy and keen sensibility, induces them to sacrifice their lives, rather than communicate their indisposition to a physician,” who would presumably have been male. Although she claimed to be skilled in treating conditions common to both men and women (e.g., scrofula, pimples, dysentery), she also employed a common sort of coded language suggesting female remedies of a more private nature. For example, Shaw included revealing words of caution for some medicines, such as an “Indian” cure for worms. “It is perfectly safe,” her advertisement stated, “except in the cases of pregnancy--either drank or burnt, the smoak [sic] will cause abortions.”⁴² This kind of backhanded instruction on abortion was typical of health recipe books and advertisements in which emmenagogues were indicated for use in removing “obstacles” or as “female regulators.” Amenorrhea, or irregular cessation of the menstrual period, could be caused by a number of ailments besides pregnancy, but since there were few overt references to abortion and contraception in the nineteenth century, instructions on restoring menstruation provided important and much-desired information.⁴³ Enterprising doctresses like Shaw could graft on the word “Indian” to indicate the safety and “natural” origin of such substances and imply their proven utility among Native women. Over the course of the century, the association between Indian doctresses and abortion would become more commonplace, whether or not a given practitioner actually provided the service.

As noted above, the rapid growth of print media made broadsides like Shaw’s, as well as newspapers, far cheaper and more accessible than ever before. In 1800, there were twenty daily papers in the United States. By 1860, some 400 daily and 3,500 weeklies were circulating across the nation.⁴⁴ Some of these papers catered to specific audiences, such as urban African American communities, and these too carried advertisements for Indian medicine and Indian doctresses, such as Mrs. M. Bennett (1863–64), Mrs. G. A. Brown (1866), and “Madam Gilbert” (1878–80), all of whom courted black customers in Philadelphia.⁴⁵ The fact that these women advertised to diverse audiences reflects not only the broad reach of American print culture and medical advertising but also the widespread appeal of the occupation and the possibility that they were themselves of mixed ancestry.

Indeed, consumers were beset with patent medicine advertisements, home health manuals, and traveling medicine shows in which Indian images, names, and likenesses abounded.⁴⁶ One could even purchase patent medicine in a bottle shaped like an Indian maiden.⁴⁷ Home health guides and almanacs claiming to contain cures obtained from American Indians also proliferated as the century progressed and the domestic advice contained therein was frequently directed toward women.⁴⁸ Many of these guides went through multiple editions over several decades, attesting to their continued popularity. Some texts contained elaborate authenticating statements about the author’s indigenous lineage or, as Charity Shaw claimed, their extensive experience among American Indians. Others simply affixed the word “Indian” to common folk cures and herbal medicines in order to profit from the association of Native people with effective botanic treatments. This tactic reflected a widespread acceptance of the idea that indigenous people lived in perpetual harmony with nature, a remarkably persistent image examined by Shepard Krech in The Ecological Indian.⁴⁹

Shaw’s broadside also represents another key dynamic in the subsequent growth of the Indian medicine business. Whereas rural inhabitants often had access to the botanicals familiar in folk practice or described in home health manuals, an urbanizing American population increasingly did not. One editorialist observed that when city dwellers found themselves in need of medicinal herbs, “away goes twelve and a half or twenty-five cents … to buy what might have been raised for a sixteenth part of the amount.”⁵⁰ Shaw’s advertisement thus augurs a growing trend in marketing botanical remedies to urban customers who saw themselves as progressively distant from both Indian people and the fields and forests from which they were presumed to derive their medicines.⁵¹

By the 1810s, quite a few Indian doctresses were working in the urban North and East and over the next three decades, their numbers would increase and their range expand. For instance, D. McCarr, Martha Gordon, and Sarah Green competed for business in New York City, while Ruhamah Sackett set up shop in Boston.⁵² Charity Shaw might have had the Indian doctress market to herself after she relocated to Philadelphia in the early 1820s had Theresa Chaux not come on the scene shortly thereafter.⁵³ Each of these women assumed the same occupational moniker, but they may have pursued their businesses in somewhat different ways. I have not located advertisements from McCarr, Gordon, and Chaux, but all three appear in city directories as Indian doctresses. Green promoted her practice but only in African American newspapers. In each of these locales and soon in those further west, Indian doctresses occupied a crowded field of regular and irregular practitioners, thus it was important to distinguish their practice from that of their competitors, including male Indian doctors who employed similar techniques in their advertisements but could not use their sex as a selling point.

Assertions about the “natural,” authentic, and female-friendly approach of Indian doctresses proliferate in their self-representations. As noted above, not all such women advertised extensively or in great detail but those who did set the tone for the occupation. One example can be found in the notices of Madame Wabnocky in New England during the 1840s and 1850s. Like Charity Shaw and others, she claimed expertise in “female complaints … which need not be enumerated.” And, as was typical of the Indian medicine trade, she asserted that her medicines were “pure,” “vegetable,” and “solely dependent on Nature”—nothing but what “a wise and good Creator has freely given, to the unlettered Indian, among his wild prairie and native forests.”⁵⁴ In a similar vein, “Mrs. Louisa Mitchell, the real Indian Doctress of the Mohawk tribe,” claimed to have effected innumerable cures using “the Indian method,” concluding of conventional physicians that “we Indians can smile on them, and cure what they don't dream of curing.”⁵⁵ And somewhat later, Mrs. Marleah, the “Wild Flower” and “celebrated Indian doctress,” advertised in Pennsylvania and New York that she was very successful using “the Indian methods of treatment, by roots bark and herbs,” from the “wilds of the woods.” She suggested that “afflicted females” should take special notice and added that she was a “real Indian, no pale-faced Indian doctress,” implying an awareness that authenticity itself was also marketable.⁵⁶

Although doctresses’ success rested on the proclaimed superiority of anti-scientific and anti-modern methods and medicines, the Indian doctress occupation provided a modern and viable path to financial stability in a time of decreasing options for women. Indeed, as the nineteenth century progressed, occupations once open to women were increasingly closed. In cities like Philadelphia and Boston, women were excluded from many entrepreneurial positions they had formerly occupied, like that of shopkeeper. Becoming an Indian doctress offered a way to earn a living without resorting to low-skilled paid labor.⁵⁷ For middle-aged women, it could function as an alternative or addition to other forms of monetized domestic labor, like sewing, boarding, laundering, and wet-nursing.⁵⁸ Indian doctresses sometimes maintained offices, but they could also operate out of their own homes or in their clients’ homes. Thus, the occupation might offer a sort of middle ground between the spheres—not household work but often conducted at home or in a home-like setting.⁵⁹ This approach did not protect them from the critical eye of reformers, however, nor did it offer a clear path to respectability. While it might have been more acceptable than working as a domestic or wet-nursing, the Indian doctress occupation still violated precepts of the cult of true womanhood in its nature as a commercial enterprise and because of its claims to authority on women’s health matters.⁶⁰ As Gerda Lerner observed, by 1840, “Women’s work outside of the home no longer met with social approval,” meaning that work in factories, for example, placed female laborers in a precarious social position because they were perceived to be “out of their proper sphere.”⁶¹ Such disdain particularly followed women health-care providers, since for much of the nineteenth century, “the very idea of a female doctor was considered to violate the norms of feminine behavior.”⁶²

Concurrent with and connected to the growth of “Indian doctress” as an occupational niche in the United States was a general decline in the prominence of women in lay medical practice. Whereas women had been the de facto doctors in colonial and early American homes, and largely remained so in rural settings, by mid-century their influence in urban practice had waned, a trend particularly evident in midwifery and obstetrics, specialties women had once dominated.⁶³ It is unclear precisely what role obstetrics played in the Indian doctress field, but it is worth considering the relationship between the two trades. Interestingly, I have not encountered a single nineteenth-century Indian doctress who advertised her services as or was generally known to be a midwife, despite the fact that, as will be discussed in more detail below, they were often associated rightly or wrongly with abortion and infanticide, practices critics regularly blamed on midwives.⁶⁴

Another important factor in both the rise of the Indian doctress trade and a growing backlash against it was an increase of Native-inspired themes and images in American popular culture during the antebellum era. In novels, newspapers, art, and advertising, a fascination with all things Native American was evident. So too, in the world of medicine.⁶⁵ The frequency with which Americans sought out representations of Indians—even “played Indian,” imitating Native dress, customs, and language—rose in proportion to their relative distance from Indian peoples or at least their perceived distance.⁶⁶ This phenomenon (along with urbanization) helps to explain why Indian medicine, as well as many other kinds of Indianesque products and projections, first became popular in the northeastern United States and spread steadily southward and westward. Although indigenous people were not and are not absent from the region, assertions about their disappearance, as fait accompli or imminent fact, were the dominant paradigm in the Northeast by the 1810s and only accelerated thereafter. Jean M. O’Brien notes that non-Native nineteenth-century New Englanders crafted narratives of Indian vanishing in an attempt to legitimize their claims to the land and demonstrate “non-Indian modernity.”⁶⁷ The ethnic cleansing known as Indian removal was also predicated on presumptions of Natives’ inability to progress, but paradoxically occasioned a growth in the popularity of Indian characters and images. Once the threat of Indian resistance was presumably suppressed, non-Native people were free to appropriate and invent emblems of Indianness, and those claiming Native descent could find a ready audience should they decide to market their unique identities.⁶⁸

Images of Native women—as exemplars of anti-modernity and primitive simplicity—were particularly significant in the discussion and marketing of nineteenth-century American products, including medicine. Indian medicine advertising tended to make use of a stock figure (in both text and image): a Native woman in “traditional garb,” holding forth a bundle of herbs or patent medicine or both. As Rayna Green asserts, this common figure was in fact a dual image. So long as she was a “helper,” or a “giver,” sacrificing her own gain to provide cures and medicinal knowledge that could be properly and profitably used by whites, she was deemed good and decent, a pharmaceutical version of the legendary “Indian princess.”⁶⁹ An advertisement for Swift’s Specific, a nostrum first created in the 1820s, offers an illustration of the type. “Uanita,” a Creek woman in Georgia, once discovered a miraculous cure, but then happily gave it to a white man who was training to become a doctor: “She to nobler make his calling, / Whispered to him nature's secret-- / Told him of the herbs so potent/ For the healing and the saving.”⁷⁰

In addition to advertisements for general medicines and in keeping with the tendency of Indian doctresses to emphasize their skill in “female complaints,” indigenous women were frequently invoked in relation to obstetric or gynecological care. Consider the advertisement for “The Great Indian Remedy for Females, Dr. Mattison’s Indian Emmenagogue,” which asserted that the medicine was “prepared from an Indian plant used by the natives for the same purpose from time immemorial” and “designed for both married and single ladies.” Like other “female” remedies, it claimed to “bring on the Monthly Sickness in cases of obstruction, after all other remedies of the kind have been tried in vain.”⁷¹ Similarly, a medical guide designed for household use by J. I. Lighthall, who claimed he had spent thirteen long years with the Indians before finally obtaining their secrets, instructed readers in the use of “rattle root” or black cohosh, which he described as indispensable to Native women as an emmenagogue or to remedy “in words that are understood by all, the checked monthly flow.”⁷² Whether or not readers sought an abortifacient, a medicine’s potential use in the removal of female “obstruction” implied its effects and had appeared in medical advertising since at least Charity Shaw’s day.⁷³

By mid-century, Indian doctresses could be found from Massachusetts to Texas and at least a few forged comparatively successful careers, particularly those who solicited women clients. In Lowell, for example, aged widow Mrs. Betsey Cox’s Indian doctress business put her in competition with a number of male doctors, including one who advertised “a full assortment of Botanic Remedies,” as well as several other female doctors, one of whom operated an infirmary specializing in “venereal diseases and female complaints.”⁷⁴ Even more notable was Madame Amelia Young, who ventured into private practice in New York as an Indian doctress at age fifty-four after seven years working at the Shaker water cure establishment in New Lebanon. Although she claimed expertise in all the “diseases of the human system,” she, like many other Indian doctresses, advertised a specialty in “diseases of her own sex.” Madame Young maintained that she had learned her particular skills after many years “studying the different languages of the natives in Canada, and their combination of roots, which have often proved successful after all medical advice had availed nothing.”⁷⁵ Over the next decade she maintained a permanent office in Albany, but also traveled widely across New York, northern New England, and Quebec, using newspapers and handbills to advertise her services: “Roots, & no Humbug.”⁷⁶ Like Charity Shaw and other Indian doctresses who promoted themselves in the print media of their day, she maintained that “her philosophy of practice is founded on the laws of nature--her theory of diseases.” Far from being scientific or experimental, her work was based on “her theory of experience and evidence--her materia medica, the boundless forest.”⁷⁷

The career of Madame Young, soon known as Grandma Young, can also help to illuminate the criticisms leveled against Indian doctresses. Although she was accused of “quackery” and “imposture,” Grandma Young managed to maintain a long if not prosperous career.⁷⁸ Her modest success is all the more remarkable because it took place during a time in which women practitioners of all stripes faced increasing scrutiny. No matter their specialty, by mid-century, Indian doctresses were frequently being identified by reform-minded medical men (a group of whom had established the American Medical Association in 1847) as troublesome quacks or dangerous imposters.⁷⁹ Oliver Wendell Holmes placed them alongside “Hygeists” and “bone-setters” as “the lowest” of health-care providers, far below the “educated class of men” who should take charge of the medical establishment.⁸⁰ Likewise, the author of a barbed editorial on “Quackery” attacked the very premise of Indian medicine and the print culture that promoted it. The idea that Indians “understood the science of medicine better than ourselves” was “preposterous,” and he railed against the Indian doctresses’ “brazen-faced, lying system of advertising,” calling it “low and contemptible.”⁸¹ A more humorous but no less pointed critique came from author and temperance advocate Lucius Sargent who complained that the infirm would rely on “the testimony of a dozen old ladies” who all claimed to be cured “by the famous Indian doctress, in Puzzlepot Alley,” and place their confidence in “a lying, ignorant, half-drunken squaw, rather than the most experienced member of the medical profession.”⁸² Although Sargent declined to name the “famous Indian doctress” in question, his readers would nevertheless have been familiar with his reference to the “weird women of the modern time.”⁸³

“Weird” though the doctresses may have seemed, they were indeed women “of the modern time.” They were not only savvy about market economics and print advertising but those who had the means were also able to mobilize public opinion to rescue their reputations. For instance, during the 1860s, Madame Young worked to consolidate patient testimonials, repudiate accusations of pretension, and assert herself as a serious lecturer on topics of women’s health. She ultimately published a home health guide and embarked on a promotional tour in New England and Canada, giving free lectures followed by private consultations by appointment.⁸⁴

Young’s experience also provides insight into the overlap between Indian doctressing and another notable occupational niche of nineteenth-century women, particularly those of the middling class, the lecture circuit. In addition to the proliferation of medical self-help texts, like Madame Young’s guide, public lectures emerged as a popular form of health education and entertainment. It was a perfect environment for the commodification of indigeneity, particularly with respect to health care and especially when performed by and for women. As Anita Clair Fellman and Michael Fellman note, “The health lecture was an appropriate outing for a polite woman and eventually became an acceptable occupation for a woman,” except, of course, when the topic was contraception or reproductive health.⁸⁵ But a number of women lecturers from the 1840s through the early 1870s did organize their talks around female anatomy, parturition, and contraceptive strategies, making them wildly popular among their female-only audiences and increasingly suspect among male physicians and reformers.⁸⁶ Young’s book, around which she designed her promotional tour, contained a detailed description of conception and pregnancy, as well as a number of herbal remedies for “derangement of the monthly courses.”⁸⁷ However, even Young felt compelled to include a lengthy denunciation of abortion itself, perhaps because she had been publicly accused of “immoral proclivities” as a result of her “repulsive” public lecture topics.⁸⁸ Her ability to capitalize on both the natural, plant-derived wisdom of the Indians as well as the “marketing advantage” of selling her own “female experience” to women customers was both a hallmark of the Indian doctress trade and a target for critics and caricaturists.⁸⁹

Indeed, although “regular” medical men practicing heroic therapies probably did more damage than most Indian doctresses, the latter were repeatedly depicted as dangerous miscreants who preyed on the poor, the ignorant, and the superstitious—all those of “weaker natures.”⁹⁰ Just as Philip Deloria noted that “the Indian has skulked in and out” of the stories Americans “tell about themselves,” so too did the Indian doctress begin to appear in all sorts of genres, seeming to lurk around every street corner.⁹¹ Interestingly, despite the fact that many Indian doctresses were not of Native ancestry and that, as Joshua David Bellin argues, whites “dabbling in the mysteries” of Indian medicine was a prominent theme in antebellum American literature, the critical image of the Indian doctress rarely hinted at racial masquerade.⁹² Still, the “fearful-looking, elf-locked hag” who hastened the death of her patients through ignorance or malpractice became a useful symbol for deceit and the dangers of trusting women who, by their autonomy and their mysterious knowledge, were inherently suspect.⁹³

Newspapers carried anecdotes (some humorous, some not) in which Indian doctresses urged outrageously anti-scientific cures on desperate customers. Not unlike many doctresses’ advertisements, these hyperbolic critiques emphasized the practice as anti-modern and steeped in the mysteries of the natural world. An incredulous editorialist in Ohio exclaimed that otherwise reasonable people inexplicably placed their faith in “some Indian doctress … foolishly supposing” she had some “magical gifts.”⁹⁴ Another paper suggested an Indian doctress had recommended “a wood chuck, baked alive, and then reduced to powder, taken in small doses” as a sure remedy.⁹⁵ A different Indian doctress had allegedly insisted that flaying cats and laying the “bleeding and palpitating carcasses ‘criss cross’” on the body would heal the sick.⁹⁶ Nathaniel Hawthorne even sketched a story centered on the “figure and character” of an Indian doctress, a “wicked old thing,” who “pretends to know some secrets of herbs.”⁹⁷

For their part, Indian doctresses also used print culture to defend their occupation. Doctresses shared with other “irregular” practitioners and nostrum vendors a penchant for providing (and perhaps authoring) testimonials from satisfied patients. Charity Shaw’s broadside contained no fewer than nine such endorsements; most of Madame Young’s advertisements from the 1840s through the 1860s contained one or more testimonials.⁹⁸ When Indian doctress Mrs. Lydia Collins arrived in Houston in early 1848, she brought along not only her medicines—acquired while residing for “many years among the Indians”—but also “certificates of cures” from previous stints in Tuscaloosa, Memphis, and Frankfort.⁹⁹ Practitioners like Collins, Young, and Shaw were wise to use patient letters and testimonies to advertise their skill and as a bulwark against critics, particularly because, as the century progressed, attacks on their occupation and even their very womanhood only grew stronger.

A key facet of the Indian doctress phenomenon that became more pronounced toward the end of the nineteenth century and to which I have only alluded up to this point was a discourse of aberrant or pathological womanhood. This complex of ideas included several interlocking notions concerning women as mothers and women as workers as well as assumptions about Native people. In this concluding section, I will examine three recurrent concerns with Indian doctresses—that they were entrepreneurs, abortionists, and criminals—which reflect ideologies emergent in the 1840s and dominant by the 1890s and frequently resulted in the perception that they were transgressive women. According to these ideologies, women were expected to be feminine, domestic, dependent, maternal, and morally superior, and Indians were presumed to be poor, dependent, suspect, and domestically deficient. Whether or not practicing Indian doctresses were of Native ancestry and despite the popularity of imagined Natives in American culture, the occupation and those who pursued it were circumscribed by these beliefs. Thus, negative reactions to Indian doctresses must be understood in relation to two nascent modes of thought in the antebellum period that gained momentum through the end of the century: the growth of and backlash against women as wage earners and the tendency to place Indians outside of the market economy as pre- or anti-modern, unskilled, and appropriately impoverished. Both influenced perceptions of Indian doctresses.

Indian doctresses were typically entrepreneurs, and although some became insolvent, others became comparatively and, in the eyes of their critics, inappropriately wealthy. Whereas in the colonial era unattached women were expected to be “self-supporting” and there was no “social sanction” on married women who worked, by the mid-nineteenth century, ideas about a woman’s proper sphere had narrowed considerably, even as greater and greater numbers of women entered the workforce.¹⁰⁰ The dominant belief that Indians were incapable of progressing in a modern economy, which Alexandra Harmon suggests was a settler self-justification for dispossessing them of “rich land” they were not “civilized” enough to develop, shaped reactions to successful Indian businesses.¹⁰¹ As a result, when Indian doctresses achieved notable wealth, they were roundly criticized for transgressing both gender and racial norms, even if their claims to indigenous descent were dubious.

Consider the case of Catharine Alberty. When she died in Raleigh, North Carolina in July 1856, the local paper recounted her story. Once a wealthy Indian doctress, she had practiced most recently in the city of Columbia, South Carolina. Over the preceding years, she had apparently built a very successful career, but when she turned up in North Carolina, she was “in the extreme of destitution.” Alberty had not the “commonest necessaries of life” and soon became the recipient of her neighbors’ “sympathy and bounty.” And yet, when her possessions were inventoried following her death, police discovered $2,500 in silver and gold, 20 shares in the New Albany railroad, and evidence of “a mass of other property,” including a plantation in Kentucky. The paper described her as a “miser” corrupted by the “effects of avarice,” a characterization that aligns with contemporary depictions of Indian doctresses as greedy and cunning.¹⁰²

Other Indian doctresses were likewise condemned for their perceived acquisitiveness. “Madame Laahceil Manitou Elaah,” who had once been the wife and business partner of stage performer Okah Tubbee, established a successful practice in Buffalo, New York in the late 1850s. Newspapers disapprovingly took note of her large home, where she conducted business and employed at least three (and possibly as many as six) servants during 1861–62.¹⁰³ Similarly, the appearance of Indian doctress Ella Chase in Savannah in 1877 inspired a local paper to observe that she arrived with “her hand full of greenbacks of various denominations” and was “apparently rolling in wealth.”¹⁰⁴ Local readers may have considered this description in the context of a recent exposé that reproached such practitioners for living in “grand style,” attributing their success to an “epidemic of abortions.”¹⁰⁵ Such accusations went hand in hand with aforementioned claims that these entrepreneurs were “painted, ignorant squaws” who exploited ignorant or desperate clients.¹⁰⁶

Criticisms of Indian doctresses’ financial independence stemmed in part from the narrowing of women’s sphere in the second half of the nineteenth century. As more women entered the workforce after the Civil War, depictions of their wage work were increasingly negative. Folklorist Mamie Meredith observed that the suffix “-ess” was often ascribed to women by male critics to “stigmatize women workers ‘outside the home,’” drawing attention to the inappropriateness of their autonomous wage-earning in health care and other realms.¹⁰⁷ And as Regina Morantz-Sanchez aptly notes, images of “women—always conceived of as mothers or potential mothers … were indispensable to emerging male capitalist social identities.”¹⁰⁸ Thus, women’s visibility as earners outside the home signaled “unnaturalness” and as Jeanne Boydston concluded, aligned them with “the witches of the seventeenth century … symbols of the threats posed to a particular concept of manhood,” its power and authority.¹⁰⁹ Because they were in direct competition with male physicians, Indian doctresses posed a threat to both ideal womanhood and capitalist patriarchy. Furthermore, those who achieved pecuniary success contradicted the prevailing idea that women workers (such as those who labored in factories) represented “subjection” and “economic suffering.”¹¹⁰ Although they were stigmatized by reformers and fiction writers as filthy and ignorant hags, the reality that some Indian doctresses were prosperous, accomplished, and sought-after was far more threatening to the social order.

In the eyes of critics and reformers, Indian doctresses could be degraded not only because they were women outside their sphere but also because of the occupation’s association with abortion. Examining the role that abortion played in perceptions of Indian doctresses and their patients will thus help to lay bare the intersecting strands I have outlined thus far. Indian doctors, doctresses, and home health manuals had long provided women in the United States with information on plant-based abortifacients, emmenagogues, and contraceptives, like black cohosh, ragwort, and American pennyroyal, and the very language used to discuss them invoked an association between Native women and abortion and contraception.¹¹¹ Among both free and enslaved women, golden ragwort and fleabane were referred to as “squaw weed,” partridge berry as “squaw vine,” black cohosh as “squaw root,” highbush cranberry as “squaw bush,” and American pennyroyal as “squaw mint.”¹¹² The popularity of these botanic means of reproductive control likely stemmed from women’s desire to limit births and avoid invasive and dangerous methods more often used by male practitioners who increasingly took control of obstetrics, particularly in cities.¹¹³ These substances’ implied connection to Indianness—often communicated through the use of stock images in print media but also rooted in ethnographic writing—shaped perceptions of Indian doctresses.¹¹⁴

The criminalization of abortion and contraception contributed to a growing negative perception of doctresses in general, and Indian doctresses specifically, as not only outside the boundaries of Victorian womanhood but also as a danger to other women and their children. The second half of the nineteenth century was an era of increasing regulations regarding women’s bodies, specifically reproduction. Abortion was not initially deemed illegal if it took place prior to “quickening,” the first felt movement of the fetus, but starting in the 1840s, states began enacting harsher and more restrictive laws against terminating pregnancies, stimulated by moral crusaders and professional guilds. These campaigns had a two-fold effect: to reduce women’s control over their bodies (and thereby limit their sexual freedom) and to restrict women and other “irregular” practitioners from the medical profession.¹¹⁵ As Linda Gordon notes, when “regular” medical men began to seriously campaign against abortion, their “stridence served as a further indication of the prevalence and tenacity” of the practice.¹¹⁶ After the Civil War, new federal efforts to foreclose women’s reproductive choices arose from social agitation and resulted in new legislation. One key turning point was the passage of the Comstock Act in 1873, an anti-obscenity law that forbade the circulation of print materials relating to abortion and contraception.¹¹⁷ In the late nineteenth century, a new imperative emerged: to preserve the Anglo-Saxon race by promoting white motherhood by all means.¹¹⁸ Even though many Indian doctresses did not sell abortifacients or perform abortions, as a group they were increasingly seen as obstacles to other (primarily white) women’s motherhood.¹¹⁹ Such judgements worked to discredit Indian doctresses as destroying the very foundation of virtuous motherhood by removing “female obstructions” and because they made money doing so.

These trends converged to cast a pall over the Indian doctress. These women were vulnerable to new laws and social reforms not only because they were operating outside the bounds of “regular” medicine (whose male practitioners’ profits they siphoned) but also because of their association with aberrant womanhood and even sexual immorality, as was evident in criticisms of Madame Young. As Morantz-Sanchez points out, the very idea of a female physician frequently conjured ideas of abortion providers, and some women who trained at “regular” medical schools vigorously resisted the term “doctress” because of this presumed taint.¹²⁰ Even without the dreaded diminutive, female practitioners faced the judgment of both male professional peers and other women, who regarded them as “un-sexed,” believing that their “sordid participation” in medicine, especially obstetrics and gynecology, “disqualified them from that class of women known as ‘ladies.’”¹²¹ Since Indian doctresses were frequently perceived to be (and sometimes were) providers of substances and/or services to end pregnancies, Victorian-era efforts to restrict women’s economic and sexual freedom intersected with traits ascribed to “squaws” to produce an image of Indian doctresses as not only deceitful but also immoral and even criminal. Considering a few legal cases in which Indian doctresses were implicated in abortions and the reform literature that surrounded them can help demonstrate the point.

Stories of sex and death, including accounts of abortionists, were fodder for the nineteenth-century penny press.¹²² The saga of Madame Restell has received the most attention from historians, but there were many others who also made the news, including those working in the Indian doctress trade.¹²³ One of the earliest criminal cases I uncovered was that of “Mrs. Halm, of Albany, calling herself an Indian doctress.” She was arrested in September 1857 for allegedly causing the death of eighteen-year-old Martha Lockley by having administered “poisonous drugs” in an attempted abortion.¹²⁴ As was true in Restell’s initial arrests, however, Mrs. Halm’s business apparently suffered little because “the celebrated Indian doctress” was acquitted and again advertising her expertise in the ailments “to which females … are subject” in 1859. She even went so far as to offer a money-back guarantee.¹²⁵

Just a few years later, another “celebrated Indian doctress” was charged in a highly sensationalized abortion case. When the aforementioned Madame Laahceil was accused of manslaughter in the 1862 death of a young white woman, newspapers “feast[ed] upon the loathsome details.”¹²⁶ In both Halm’s and Laahceil’s cases, newspapers implied a link between abortion, seduction, and the presumed ethnicity of the medical practitioners. Indeed, when accused in cases of abortion, Indian doctresses were often subtly or not-so-subtly implicated in the illicit activities that produced the unwanted pregnancies. Representations of midwives and other women accustomed to providing abortions had coalesced around images of older, independent, and ethnically different women since ancient times and across many cultures.¹²⁷ But the figure of the Indian doctress carried specific valences rooted in the “squaw” archetype that implied not only assumptions about age and wisdom (which made them dangerous rather than trustworthy) but that they existed in a position between the modern and pre-modern worlds or “the actual and the mystic.”¹²⁸

For their part, Indian doctresses played to clients’ expectations about their presumed knowledge and specialty in safe and “natural” treatments, but criminal cases suggest they sometimes resorted to the same dangerous substances or instrumental procedures that their abortion-providing peers employed. Still, they were in no way responsible for the conceptions that led clients to their doors, and they knew it. After being sentenced to seven years of hard labor in Sing-Sing prison, Madame Laahceil confronted this implied complicity head-on. In a poem delivered before the court but addressed to her deceased client, she declared, “They found me guilty of sin/ Which you well know/ Did not begin within my house;/ Within my house, or by my hand.”¹²⁹ Halfway through her term of incarceration, she still maintained she was “guiltless.”¹³⁰

Later criminal cases reflected similar patterns. In April 1897, Indian doctress Mrs. Antonette Brothers was arrested for the murder of a white woman named Florence Stansbury in Galveston, Texas. Following the inquest, Brothers was charged with having “administered a drug for a criminal purpose,” i.e., procuring an abortion.¹³¹ Stansbury had sought the doctress’s services when she realized she may have “taken a cold,” a condition often understood to signal or lead to pregnancy, and one for which many Indian doctresses offered a cure.¹³² Originally from Louisiana, Brothers had been advertising her business in Galveston since at least the early 1890s, and at the time of her arrest, she was easily able to post the $2500 bond, though her case was later dismissed for lack of evidence. By the end of the century, she owned her own home free of encumbrance, despite the fact that she was a widow, which suggests she did not lack for business.¹³³ Interestingly, her advertisements never mentioned a specialty in abortion or other obstetric services, nor did they use language often understood to indicate pregnancy, such as “obstructed menses,” “female irregularity,” or occasionally, stubborn cases of “cold,” “rheumatism,” and “pleurisy.” Instead, she emphasized her expertise in treating “cancer, catarrh, [and] cataract of the eye without the knife,” implying that she was primarily a botanical physician. Nevertheless, when the desperate Mrs. Stansbury (married, but two years separated from her husband) found herself pregnant, she was directed to the Indian doctress, Mrs. Brothers.¹³⁴

Like the four women I introduced at the outset, many Indian doctresses were somewhat less circumspect about their specialties than was Mrs. Brothers. For instance, as mentioned above, Mrs. Lydia Collins advertised across the South that her expertise derived from her many years of residence “among the Indians,” where she “learnt their Medicines and their mode of practice,” assuring clients that her remedies were “roots, herbs, barks, flowers and seeds.” But she further indicated that “the advantages which the afflicted female part of the community can receive, are such as will have a lasting impression on their future health.”¹³⁵ Although she did not employ the precise coded language elsewhere used to signal proficiency in abortion, her appeal to female clients suggested it all the same. Her strategy mirrored that of numerous Indian doctresses across the nation who relied on the persistent association of Indian medicinal knowledge with remedies for “female complaints.”¹³⁶

Whether or not they came from indigenous lineages, when Indian doctresses represented themselves as such, they were strategically essentializing Indianness in ways that both empowered and disempowered them.¹³⁷ A final look at Princess Viroqua, mentioned in the introduction, underscores the degree to which Indian doctresses’ self-representation, as much as the characterizations of their critics, defined this occupation.

In the mid-1880s, when the prevailing sentiment about Native peoples was that they were vanishing (through literal death or assimilation), Princess Viroqua achieved fame as an Indian doctress. As noted, Viroqua, aka Maddie Martin, was Mohawk, as was her brother, Doctor Oronhyatekha (Peter Martin); both of them found that performing their indigeneity could advance their occupations.¹³⁸ After retiring from the traveling Indian show she created with her sister (Princess Neoskleata, aka Emma Martin, who also became an Indian doctress), Princess Viroqua embarked on a Great Lakes tour, during which she advertised her remedies as “only those which mother earth has given us,” and professed a specialty in women’s health care.¹³⁹

Although she took the somewhat unusual step of using her own image in her publicity (appearing in a beaded blouse and feathered hat), in many ways, Princess Viroqua’s career otherwise encapsulates many of the trends evident in the Indian doctress occupation. She invoked the tropes of anti-modernity found in Charity Shaw’s early advertisements, emphasizing that her cures were only those “which the natural instincts of Indians tells them how to use.”¹⁴⁰ Her remedies were “nature’s own,” provided by the Creator for those “compelled to subsist on nature” … “the children of the forest.”¹⁴¹ Like Madame Young, she worked in the occupation for more than twenty-five years and developed a reputation as a sought-after lecturer.¹⁴² As was the case with other Indian doctresses, she also found herself assailed by critics and officials, convicted of practicing medicine without a license and compelled to offer testimonials to her skill.¹⁴³ And, as noted, she repeatedly trumpeted her skill in addressing female complaints.

Like her predecessors, Princess Viroqua reinforced notions of indigenous women as purveyors of anti-modern medicinal expertise. This approach threatened to perpetuate narrow definitions of indigeneity and contribute to notions of Indians’ inability to progress in a modern society. Yet carving out a space for themselves as urban entrepreneurs simultaneously challenged ideologies of race and gender that circumscribed the lives of Native people and women. This is nowhere more evident than with Princess Viroqua, who capped her decades-long career by becoming a certified agent for Mrs. Lydia Pinkham’s ladies pills, a wildly popular “herbal remedy” that could provide contraception and abortion.¹⁴⁴ She used her image as an authentic Native woman, whose anti-modern knowledge was rooted in the Indians’ inherent connection to the natural world, to endorse the effectiveness of a modern wonder drug that American women relied on for obstetric health well into the twentieth century.¹⁴⁵ The Indian doctress occupation was fundamentally based on this contradiction—the skillful marketing of presumably anti-modern (and also presumably disappearing) knowledge by modern women who were not supposed to exert authority or achieve success in the business of medicine.

The author would like to gratefully acknowledge funding provided by the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University in support of this project.

Footnotes