Honey

Chimborazo Hospital's blockade-era honey medicine, and the 1964 court fight over saying so

• Confederate Surgeon General Samuel P. Moore authorized Chimborazo Hospital in 1861; Dr. James B. McCaw built it into the largest military hospital in North America to that point, treating somewhere near 76,000 patients with a survival rate unusual for its era
• The Union blockade cut off normal medical and food supplies, so the hospital became largely self-sufficient (gardens, bakery, brewery, icehouse, herds of cattle and goats); no documented on-site apiary or beehives exist in the historical record, despite that being an earlier draft's claim
• Moore commissioned physician Francis Peyre Porcher to survey Southern plant-based substitute medicines under blockade, published in 1863 as Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests; an Emory University review (2019) validated several of Porcher's plant antiseptics
• In 1964, U.S. marshals seized a New York distributor's stock of Sterling Vinegar and Honey along with copies of Dr. D.C. Jarvis's Folk Medicine, after a district court ruled that shelving the book near the honey turned the book itself into illegal drug 'labeling'
• The Second Circuit reversed on November 18, 1964 (Chief Judge Lumbard), rejecting the government's 'proximity' theory that a book becomes a drug label merely by being sold near a product it describes: United States v. Balanced Foods, Inc., 338 F.2d 157 (2d Cir. 1964)
• The blockade made sugar scarce and the South had plenty of honey, which helped fill the gap
• Lancashire cotton famine: by 1862 the mills of Lancashire, England, had gone quiet, with hundreds of thousands of mill hands out of work; on the last night of 1862 a crowded meeting at Manchester's Free Trade Hall voted to send Lincoln support for the Union and its fight against slavery; Lincoln replied on January 19, 1863, calling it "an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country"; the relief ship George Griswold docked at Liverpool from New York carrying fifteen thousand barrels of flour, plus bacon, bread, rice, and corn, met by a crowd of some four thousand (Confederate flags also flew in a few cotton towns)
• Andrew Pettigrew, The Handy Book of Bees (1875), drew a lesson for beekeepers from the Lancashire mill owners who kept their machinery in order through the famine ("So the skilful bee-master is not inattentive to the machinery and mill-hands of his factories when they are not working 'full time'")
• 103rd Ohio (Philip Hayes), New Year's Day 1864 at Strawberry Plains, Tennessee, after the siege of Knoxville: below-zero cold, "not over half a dozen overcoats in the regiment," "not a mouthful of anything eatable" issued, then a foraging party "chanced to come upon a small cornfield" that fed the regiment for several days; Hayes's 1872 regimental history runs 148 pages and closes with blank forms, one per man
• John Richardson's letters mention honey three times: Camp Dennison, December 17, 1861 (a request to send home food, honey among it); Fort Pickering, Memphis, November 10, 1862 ("the capt got a lot of butter and a lot of huney"; the captain was Virgil Moats, Eliza's husband); and February 8, 1863, on the way to Vicksburg, where honey came out of a ransacked house rather than a box from home
• Mad honey has a war record: around 400 BC Xenophon's Ten Thousand lost their wits after eating comb in hill villages above Trapezus and recovered by the third or fourth day; Strabo says the Heptacometae left bowls of "the crazing honey" for Pompey's soldiers and then cut down three maniples, about six hundred men; Porcher's field guide notes that Azalea pontica is said to be the source of the narcotic quality of Trebizond honey (Porcher, 1863, p. 383)

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