Lewis and Clark: an indian chief with paralysis

[catbirdseat]

I was reading The Essential Lewis and Clark, edited by Landon Y. Jones and came to a description by Captain Lewis of an indian chief who had been paralyzed in all his limbs for a period of three years. He was well cared for by his fellows and ate well, was lucid and could speak. The indians having observed the medical skill of Captain Clark asked whether anything could be done for the chief.

 

Lewis recommended that the chief's diet be changed from one of mainly roots to that of meat. They also admisistered a sweat treatment which had recently helped one of their party, Bratton, who had been ill for a long time.

 

In the space of about a week, the chief recovered almost full use of his limbs. I'd have to say that the man must have been suffering from some sort of poisoning. Since he was no doubt eating much the same diet as his fellows, this would seem to be rather puzzling. The only thing I can think of is that there were poisonous alkaloids in some of the roots and that the man may have lacked some liver enzyme that in normal people detoxified the alkaloids. The change in diet to meat was no doubt responsible for the man's recovery.

 

Do any of you medical types know anything about this?

[Dru]

saved by horsecock

[mtn_mouse]

saved by horsecock

 

More likely it was snafflehound or dog meat. They routinely ran out of meat on the trip. Both Lewis and Clark got quite sick in the nez perce area, probably by eating too much raw camas or couse.

[mothboy88]

My dad is an MD and a casual Lewis and Clark buff. He has a book called "Only One Man Died" or something like that which chronicle the journey from a medical perspective. I'll ask him or try to find it in the book next time I see him and post about what I find out.

Its hard to imagine a poison that would only effect him for 3 years and be cleared up so fast. Wierd.

[catbirdseat]

The other possibility is that the man had some sore of vitamin or mineral deficiency, such as copper. I tried a Yahoo! seach and couldn't come up with anything that matched Lewis' description.

[Dru]

The OTHER other possibility is that there are a wide variety of cures which will work on psychosomatic illness

[mothboy88]

The OTHER other possibility is that there are a wide variety of cures which will work on psychosomatic illness

Word to that. Maybe they cured a conversion disorder.

[catbirdseat]

Anything is possible, though you should try faking paralysis for three years, crapping and pissing in your drawers and see how you like it.

[Dru]

psychosomatic disorders are not "faking it" the sufferer truly believes they have a disorder

[catbirdseat]

Where's Norman_Clyde?

[mothboy88]

OK, this is a really long post below but it probably gives the best answer to the question.

 

The following is taken from the book Or They Will Perish by David J Peck,DO, pages 248-252.

Clark met a difficult and interesting case of "loss of uce of their limbs," an "extraordinary complaint" in which "a Chief of Considerable note.. .has been in the Situation I see him for 5 years, this man is incapable of moveing a single limb but lies like a corps in whatever position he is placed, yet he eats hartily, dejests his Food perfectly, enjoys his under standing, his pulse are good, and has retained his flesh almost perfectly; in Short were it not that he appears a little pale from having been So long in the Shade, he might well be taken for a man in good health," Clark later recorded that he prescribed cold baths, and left a few doses of cream of tartar and Rowers of sulphur as a cathartic, to be given every three days. Dr. Clark also recommended that the man eat more meat and fewer plants.

 

On the 13th and 14th, the Corps moved to campsite near present-day Kamiah, Idaho, where they would stay for the third-longest time of the whole trek, until June 10. Seven weeks of travel time had not been sufficient to allow for spring to do her work: there was still too much snow on the peaks to pass over the Bitterroots back to the plains of the Missouri. The men passed time with various activities aside from the constant action of the hunters and cooks. Games played included foot races between the men of the Corps and the Nez Perce. Shooting matches were held, and Lewis baffled the Indians, whose bows and arrows had a range of probably thirty yards, with his marksmanship and the power or his flintlock and its range of more than two hundred yards. The Nez Perce displayed their fabulous talents at horsemanship. Team games, including one called Prison Base, an 1806 version of Capture the Flag, cut some of the layover's tedium, and provided the men with some run as well as the conditioning they would soon need to conquer the Bitter roots. Cruzatte played his fiddle on occasion and both the men or Corps as well as the Indians danced for each other's entertainment.

 

Dr. Clark continued to offer his clinic. Two weeks after the pararlytic chief came to the captains' attention, Private William Bratton was still suffering with his back problem that had hegun at Fort Clatsop. Lewis noted (hat "he eats heartily digests his food well, and his recovererd his flesh almost perfectly yet is so weak in the loins that he is scarcely able to walk four or five steps, nor can he set upwright but with the greatest pain." John Shields now came up with an idea. He had seen men with similar complaints cured by sweating in a hot house. Bratton was game for anything after months of pain and asked for the procedure. Shields dug a hole four feet deep and three feet in diameter. A large fire was built inside the hole and removed once the earth was heated. The patient was placed on a seat inside the hole and an awning of blankets over willow poles was erected to cover the pit. Bratton was stripped naked, given some water to sprinkle inside to produce "as much steam or vapor as he could possibly bear," and left inside for about twenty minutes. Then he was taken out of the hole and put into icy water not once, but twice. He was then returned to the sweat hole for another round of forty-five minutes. After that he was wrapped in blankets and allowed to cool gradually while drinking "copious draughts of a strong tea" of horse-nettle.

 

By the following day, Bratton was amazingly "walking about today and says he is nearly free from pain." As Gary E. Moulton notes, various explanations have been offered to account for Bratton's lengthy back problem.7 Some have suggested an abdominal infection but, given the history and remarkable recovery, I don't know what these theorists could be thinking about. Bratton simply didn't have any evidence that anything was wrong with his abdomen. The possibility of a herniated disc in his spine should be considered given the lengthy period of pain. Over the two-month period, it is possible that the disc material healed but some muscular spasms continued, which could have been relieved by the hot/cold treatments. From my personal experience with back pain, my vote goes to the possibility that Bratton never did rupture a disc, and simply was suffering from a bad case of degenerative disc disease and the arthritis that accompanied it. Or on a less likely note, he was malingering and simply decided that after the sweating it was time to stop faking his pain. Whatever the reason for Bratton's problem, he started feeling remarkably better after his treatments of frontier physical therapy.

 

That same day of Bratton's improvement, the Nez Perce arrived bearing the mysteriously paralyzed chief. Lewis observed that "this poor wretch thinks that he feels himself of somewhat better but to me there appears to be no visible alteration, we are at a loss what to do for this unfortunate man." So, they comforted him with a little laudanum—for who knows what reason—and some of the rancid portable soup.

 

By the- next day, Clark had an idea. If it worked for Bratlon, maybe it would work for the chief. On the 25th of May, they lowered the chief into the sweat hole. But the captains' inability to secure the chief led to the therapy's being cut short when the patient was unable to sit up. Two days later (after a day given to serious hunting and food-trading), the hole was enlarged and the man's father went in with him to support him during treatment. After the sweating, the chief was in considerable pain, a problem relieved with thirty drops of laudanum. On the 28th, Lewis noted an amazing discovery. "The sick Cheif was much better this morning he can use his hands and arms and sems much pleased with the prospect of recovering, he says he feels much better than he has for a great number of months." The following day the man "washed his face himself today which he has been unable to do previously for more than twelvemonths." On the 30th, after another treatment, the chief "could move one of his legs and thyes and work his toes pretty well, the other leg he can move a little; his fingers and arms seem to be almost entirely restored."

 

What could have accounted for this illness and its apparent remarkable recovery by nothing more than the sweating treatments? The possibility that there was something truly wrong with the man's bodily functions, that he was paralyzed or so weak he could not move, and yet responded so remarkably to the sweating treatments, in my mind is zero. Paralysis-producing diseases to consider in this case could include a ruptured disc in his neck, putting pressure on his spinal cord and resulting in a near-total body paralysis. If this were the case, he would need immediate spinal surgery to solve the problem and he would not have gotten well with sweating. Various other abnormalities of the brain or spinal cord could produce such pathology, but again would not respond to sweating. The mysterious Guillain-Barre syndrome can produce profound muscle weakness without a wasting of muscle mass in the involved limbs. This disease can be preceded by mild respiratory or gastrointestinal infection, followed by progressive bodily weakness. It can also be associated with infectious mononucleosis, hepatitis, or diphtheria. At times the syndrome can be fatal, but total recovery is seen in up to 75 percent of victims. The recovery usually occurs in a few weeks or month, but may take as long as six to eighteen months. Although some factors of the chief's illness may fit, the entire picture does not, and it does not make sense to diagnose the man with Guil-lain-Barre syndrome.

 

Another possible explanation goes down the path of psychiatry. It is possible that the chief was suffering a mental disorder manifesting itself in an apparent bodily disease. A person suffering from this problem may not have voluntary control over physical symptoms. In an illness termed Somatization Disorder, the victim has symptoms suggestive of physical illness without any known physiological cause. It is believed that psychological conflicts or unfulfilled needs may result in this problem. We can't do a physical exam and lab tests on the Nez Perce chief, but we do know that he recovered his functional health by way of a treatment that would not heal any known physical cause of his symptoms. We also can't conduct an interview with him to assess his mental state. Could there have been something in his psychological past that could have resulted in his problem? It seems more likely to assign his problem to this cause than any of the other organic problems we have discussed. His recovery after being treated by a white man who was believed to have great medical powers — and possessed such fantastic items as compasses, magnifying lenses, and magnets — may have been a psychological cure of a grand scale.

 

Showing his up-to-the-minute medical knowledge, Lewis had expressed his wish that he had some electricity available to treat the chief's problem. The study of medical applications of electricity in the early 1800s was in its infancy. As a result of the discovery by Galvani and Volta in the latter 1700s that nerve and muscle function was dependent on electrical principles, numerous electrical treatment fads had developed. One was Englishman James Graham's "Temple of Health," where patients underwent mild electrical stimulation while they watched dancing girls.9 Benjamin Franklin had experimented with electricity in treatment of some paralytics brought to him in hopes of a cure from their disease by being "electrised," in Franklin's term. Franklin was apparently able to temporarily help some of those he treated who had unclear neurologic/muscular problems, but did not achieve any permanent successes. Electricity, by the time of Lewis's 1803 training, had developed a following among the medical and scientific community in hopes that it might be a cure-all for many mysterious ailments.

 

to Dru. Looks like you made the best guess.

 

I have worked with a few people with somatosization disorders. I consider myself a pretty patient guy, but I still have a part of me that just wants to shake the guy and say "Dude, snap the hell out of it." But that goes against all reccomended treatment protocols.

[catbirdseat]

Thanks, that was an interesting read.