the pin in charles' arm
When Laura taught the Bouchie school, she was required to spend ten minutes twice weekly teaching from Julia Colman's book, Alcohol and Hygiene. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.) was active in De Smet and had given a copy of Colman's book to each teacher in Kingsbury County. It's a small volume, 231 pages, published in 1880.

While the intention was to teach the evils of drink, at the beginning it reads like an instruction manual for the home brewer. There are even simple science experiments to learn how beer, wine, and cider are made. These are followed by more complex chemistry experiments in distillation and fermentation.

About fifty pages in, it's time to get serious. Alcohol is poison, so there are lessons about alcohol and the nerves, alcohol and the stomach, alcohol and the liver. It's all disease, insantity, and death.

Lesson IX is "Alcohol and the Nerves." It begins by telling you that the body is seven-eighths water, then that blood has almost four times as much water as solid matter. Colman says: "And the body is so full of blood that you can not put in the point of the finest needle anywhere but that it will find some. You can try that for an experiment if you like."

From These Happy Golden Years, Chapter 3, "One Week" -- [Laura] turned her eyes from the window and saw Charles half-asleep. Suddenly he jumped wide awake. Clarence had jabbed his arm with a pin.

"Look, Miss Ingalls! Miss Colman was right! Clarence is bleeding."
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:01 AM