Body Horror

by Anne Elizabeth Moore

  The basic function of all master narratives is to uncomplicate. Like snake oil salesmen themselves, the guiding metaphors of our culture support certain belief systems and discourage others. That snake oil salesmen are liars is one such metaphor, even though in 2007, Scientific American found that Chinese snake oil does have curative properties. It can be used to relieve arthritis pain, improve cognitive function, reduce blood pressure and cholesterol, and alleviate symptoms of depression. Chinese laborers, who originally passed the palliative around to colleagues while building the transatlantic railroad, began to sell the stuff to passersby as the work they came to perform fell off and the railroad was completed. Snake oil became an industry all of its own, a way of supporting the immigrant population convinced to leave their homes for the dangerous labor locals weren’t sufficient enough in number to complete.

  The Great Wall had convinced railway owners that the Chinese could meet the 4,400-worker labor shortfall they faced. In fact, the thousands of workers lured from Asia to perform labor-intensive and often life-threatening work took five years to complete the railway. (Thus the need for a soothing oil.) Of course, immigrant housing options in the late 1860s Wild West were nothing short of abysmal to start with. Once the tracks were laid, thousands of workers were put out of work, far from their homes, in a racially hostile environment.

  It was the moment that made snake oil what it is (or is not) today. It’s unclear if the laborers themselves began selling a locally produced but nearly ineffective version of the stuff to combat a poverty largely fueled by xenophobia and racism. Or if, having built up a following for their Chinese water snake oil-based curative, word simply spread beyond the original providers and substitutions were made to meet popular demand. Probably a combination of both, but what was sold after the railroad was completed was mostly a good story. Entire companies grew up around snake oil manufacturing, but without the Asian snakes necessary, they used a more local alternative. Some used common ground snakes. The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company claimed their oil rub recipe used a Native American Indian rattlesnake.

  That racial difference played a key role in snake oil’s popularity among mostly white consumers is clear. But that the drive to expand the still-forming Empire in any and all available directions—in this case, westward—belied some deep concerns about the newness of the American project is less so. Folks who’d just uprooted their lives, whether they came from already urbanized areas of the young USA or from elsewhere around the world, were being sold a story about the survival of ancient cultures and cures for human ailments that were thousands of years old. In many ways, the complicated falsehoods rumored to lie behind snake oil sales are themselves symptomatic of real fears endemic to American culture.

  Despite widespread skepticism about the stuff, substances known as “snake oil” were sold under that name for almost fifty years before the Pure Food and Drug Act passed in 1907, forcing consumables to be labeled with actual ingredients.

  Some of my bottles of illusive liniments and curatives are branded with the Staff of Asclepius. A single serpent winding around a knotted tree limb, it is the traditional symbol of the medical community. Asclepius was a physician in Ancient Greece, later considered the god of medicine and healing. The snake—winding around the elderly physician’s cane—represents eternal youth, what with the skin shedding and all. It is a symbol of regeneration.

  Other bottles have two snakes, and a shorter cane, topped with a pair of wings. This is actually the Karykeion of Hermes, also known as the Caduceus of Mercury. It’s the symbol of alchemists, occultists, and magicians: Hermes was the god of commerce and theft. This is a symbol of fast-talking trickery.

  US history is riddled with confusion over the similarity of the images, a problem that some date back to the 1902 adoption of the caduceus as the symbol for the US Army Medical Corps. One presumes it is accidental when a government agency openly brands itself a sham, but who is to say? Real (by which I mean traditional) snake oils of my acquaintance, it should be noted, make use of neither symbol. They more frequently entwine a primary image—white man in a cowboy hat, stately white gentleman—in two snakes, and do away with direct symbols of medicine and commerce entirely. Not to suggest this visual trope may not have been the source of confusion for the Army Medical Corps, however. Throw a couple snakes on something called medicine and sell it hard enough, and someone’s likely to get confused about something.

  Certainly, my snake oil saleslady didn’t likely care if she was ironically using the Staff of Asclepius or unironically labeling her creations with the less-trusted caduceus. The ointments all look pseudo-official: they all give off the whiff of easily detectable deceit. After all, their creator put bath salts in a bottle labeled smelling salts, and smelling salts in another titled bath salts. And then, in a strange hat tip to the Pure Food and Drug Act—itself a response to complaints from snake oil consumers—properly labeled her own trickery.

  Other slippages occur: Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment turns out to be a real snake oil. Well—a real substance marketed under the term snake oil. In 1917, a shipment of the stuff was seized by border patrol agents. Scientists analyzed it and found it contained mineral oil, just as my even faker bottle does. The “real” snake oil liniment also contained a splash of red pepper, presumably to tingle the skin, and a single percentage of fatty oil. Not from snakes, though—apparently from cattle, according to Lisa Hix in a 2012 Collectors Weekly article. The final touch: trace amounts of turpentine camphor weed, to make it smell medicinal.

  Smell, it turns out, was crucial to the snake oil gambit. If you’ve ever spent a day installing a railroad and then sniffed yourself afterwards, you can easily understand why. Now imagine you’re living in a frontier camp, and bathing hasn’t caught on yet. Now pretend you’re either European, Native American, or Chinese, and as invested as you all may be in getting this country up and running together, you’re having a hard time trusting the unfamiliar. You need to find something you can share.

  What we believe is not always true; what sells does not always work; and what is not available is not always inaccessible because ineffective. Sometimes a story is only accepted as truthful because it’s been repeated so often. Even though you experience its falsities for yourself, you cling to the story. You believe it anyway.

  When I was young, I would help my mom with the dishes and ask her about the fancy bottles lining the window above the sink. Their labels promised miracle cure-alls, decorated with long and elaborately coiled serpents and always, always, a white-haired, bearded man in a cowboy hat. These bottles had come from the reservation in South Dakota where she, a white person, and her doctor-husband, another white person, had lived during the time I was born. And because that was far away, both psychically and physically, I was curious about these bottles, always. She would feed me answers, mixing up snake oil salesmen with medicine men, a pastiche of sepia-toned movie reels flitting through my head that included costumes such as railway engineer’s caps, Mandarin headware, ten-gallon hats, and feathered headdresses. Copious soap bubbles filled the sink as we talked, lending the air a gut punch of enforced cleanliness. Lineage and trade routes got confused. When I would try to pinpoint the race of whoever had made or sold a miracle tonic, or any of its purported but potentially transplendent uses, my mother would grow annoyed. “It doesn’t matter, Anne. They were all fake.”

  Her husband, my father, was a “real” doctor, sworn under the Hippocratic oath to share his personal wealth, heal his patients, refrain from seduction, and above all, cause no harm. He was also an abusive, philandering, racist alcoholic, and one of the most selfish men I have ever met. My mother remained wildly allegiant to him until he left her for the latest in a string of dalliances. Even at the age of six it was clear to me he was sleeping around, but the story that he was a healer, and kind, kept our family together despite mounting evidence for a quarter of a century.

  When I remember those years of my life, I recall the smell of
the air fresheners my father used to hang from the rear-view mirror of his expensive car, their put-upon pungency demanding acceptance as natural. PINETM. STRAWBERRYTM. FRESH BREEZETM.

  It was unclear to me, growing up, exactly which fakery I was meant to be appalled by.

  One of the more disturbing undercurrents of the history of racial constructs was how visual differences became associated with differences of other types, each of which then fit easily into preordained strata of social acceptance. Secondary factors of racial difference were then easy enough to prove, in controlled environments. Presumptions about intellectual capacity, for example, could be easily tested with queries on issues of “common knowledge”—never mind that bodies of knowledge common to white American test administrators may be vastly different from those common to Chinese immigrants or Mexican Americans born south of the border who crossed into Texas in their own lifetimes.

  The most striking of these secondary indicators of racial hierarchy, and perhaps the most persistent, was the belief that races were marked by smell. “Since the earliest contacts between Europeans and people of African descent, negative olfactory stereotypes have been wielded against those with dark skin,” writes Michelle Ferranti in a 2011 issue of Advertising and Society Review. J. H. Guenebault’s 1775 tome, Natural History of the Negro Race, claimed an odor unique to black folk. Thomas Jefferson contributed this: “Besides those of color, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor.” In 1915, one Dr. Bérillon claimed that odor formed the basis for racial animosity in America, which couldn’t ever therefore be quelled.

  Ferranti points to a wave of incidents of “passing” after the American Revolution and before the construction of the transatlantic railway that had triggered some concern. Folks of African descent moving through primarily white cultures unmarked was upsetting to the self-defined, white-identifying society. Olfaction offered a curative: “If one could not visually detect someone’s African heritage,” she writes, “they could at least smell it—or so it was claimed.”

  The claim however, in matters of smell as in matters of snake oil sales, may be more abiding than the truth. In a 1995 piece for the New Republic, Richard Klein writes of recent attempts to legislate the wearing of scents. “Perfume is threatening because it is so insinuating,” he writes. An activist group had convinced The New Yorker to stop running perfume ads that contained scent strips, agreeing that “the reader had no way of escaping the smell throughout the issue, for perfume’s very nature is to leak . . . it is always unavoidable. Perfume never gives the smeller a chance.”

  It is partially due to its insinuating nature that smell remains the most elusive sense to vocabularize. Words for the act of experiencing smells are too few: I bet you can’t name more than five. Now try to describe a smell. Frustrated? This is why we reach so often for the phrases, “What’s that smell?” and “Do you smell that?” when other senses allow us to maintain eloquence. Indeed, the metaphors for olfaction are more worn than others: old people’s farts, something rotten, earthy. Each of these describe vast worlds of sensations that all reside on the socially acceptable to downright unpleasant continuum, but for the sake of accuracy I’d suggest they could stand a bit more parsing.

  Kant would not have agreed. He felt that smell was the least philosophically significant of all the senses. It was too subjective, he thought, brought about too much immediate experience, didn’t allow the intellectual distance for proper philosophical consideration. Yet one wonders if he was not pointing to a byproduct of the limited language we use to describe smell, as opposed to anything intrinsic to smell itself.

  The immediacy of odor has an upside and a downside, of course: the upside is that of all the senses, smell seems connected most intimately to our emotional core. A smart perfumer or florist or baker can wield that to easy advantage, and does: a smart real estate agent will bake cookies in a house they wish to sell right before a viewing. The downside, however, is that without the vocabulary or intellectual objectivity with which to consider the matter, we could easily go on believing that rumors of foul odors justify xenophobia and racism, and never have a vocabulary to describe or uproot this process.

  Smell doesn’t need to be a powerful and mysterious force, in other words, guiding us toward and away from products and people with the help of our reptilian brains. We just let it.

  Here is what I understand: hidden under inestimable shrouds of trickery, somewhere, sometimes, can still lay a truth. Sometimes the fake can cure real ailments. Something with no power exerts it anyway. This is not a miracle, or mysticism, it is just nature. The master narrative is only one of several running narratives and while you may wish to believe the one provable by sight, you may sometimes find yourself preferring, to your chagrin, the one deducible via scent. Or, perhaps, the reverse. They may be fungible. Sometimes the label you make up to store the fake cure accidently marks it as fake.

  Sometimes, and this is true, I rub a bit of homemade Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment into a pulled muscle after a hard day. It smells tangy and clean but old, like wet rock. The label indicates that I should expect nothing from this liniment, or rather indicates both that I should and should not expect anything from it, at the same time. But it is oily, it feels good, and I was told by my personal snake oil saleslady that it really works.

  She was joking, but so far I have no reason to believe that she was wrong.

  An earlier version of this essay was published in The State.

  Autocorrect functions across all personal digital communication platforms I use change “queer crip” to “queer crop,” or a similar mistranslation. “Clean crépe” has also appeared, and once, “queen creep.” My physical impairments, the results of any one of a variety of chronic illnesses I am navigating at any time, make it painful to change, once, again, and then a third time, which is about the number of manual corrections I must perform in order to make it clear to the machine what I intend it to automatically transcribe.

  It is similarly difficult to make myself clear in conversation with other people: “Not crit, crip,” I corrected recently. “As in ‘crippled?’ The reclamation of an offensive, slang term by the folks it is generally used against in an effort to own its power? Also in recognition of it being a bad-ass word thanks to media depictions of gang culture? Were you not alive in the 1990s?”

  Indeed, the young man I was speaking to was born in the 1990s. His earliest memory of the culture of that time period occurred over a decade later, when a grade school pal played him Nirvana for the first time. He loves the Oldies, he told me.

  I have lived with a shifting repertoire of physical impairments for a little over a year and a half, but I have only recently become accustomed to classifying them as “disabilities.” Still, the difficulties I experience physically navigating the world pale in comparison to those I face making others understand that I now require particular consideration regarding food, travel, and endurance activities like walking more than a block. It took over eighteen months for me to recognize that others also deal with such circumstances—all the time—and that in fact there is a long and amazing history of disability rights activists, organizers, and scholars who have worked extremely hard to secure legal recognition of their particular needs, not only for themselves, but for others, and to overcome barriers far more pronounced than my own in an effort to make my life easier, should I find myself relying on their foresight.

  I am, let me be clear, neither stupid nor ignorant of political struggles in history; indeed, I have studied radical uprisings extensively. I have taught critical art theory around what a cultural reliance on visuality means for those with visual impairments. I have worked closely with disability rights activists and advocates for healthcare reform on intersectional projects. Upon reflection, then, it strikes me as extremely s
trange that for eighteen months, neither I nor anyone I knew labeled my daily struggles “disabilities.”

  I admit I became fascinated, then, and my curiosity about the history of disability rights was only spurred when I needed to understand how folks in the past had dealt with the workplace discrimination, lack of medical support, and the pervasive, isolating ableism that I was now navigating as a matter of course. Yet I submit that when I wanted to find out more, there were shockingly few resources to turn to.

  What I wish to point out is that the historical erasure of crips, as reflected in the recent dormancy of that word itself, contributed directly to my inability to describe my lived experience to others. In fact, the communication struggle became another barrier, an additional impairment. The historical erasure of crips is an emergent cause of disability.

  Consider the function of language for a moment. It is, in theory, my field: I am a writer. I know a lot of words. Like everyone else, I use them to make sense of the world. Additionally, my vocation is stringing them together to form communicable ideas. You may be surprised to read that I am doing this, even now.