Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyAugust 10th, 2016
The outer walls and a guard tower of the old Ft. Madison Penitentiary (Source.)
A regular column in the nineteenth-century journal The Medical Standard included a roundup of items submitted by doctors from each of the 38 states, several territories and a number of Canadian provinces. Many of the notices amounted to little more than gossip: the practice of a “voodoo doctor” in Georgia, a doctor in Illinois who was charged with criminal assault “by a hysterical female,” a “magnetic healer” in Kentucky “who is ‘curing’ hypochondriacs and hysterical females in great numbers at Bowling Green.” (Women were commonly diagnosed with “hysteria” in the nineteenth century; its cure was sometimes a hysterectomy.) Among those notices was this case from Iowa:
A case of sexual perversion has been discovered in the Ft. Madison penitentiary. A woman from her early youth had dressed in male attire, was universally regarded as a man, married and lived with a woman as a husband. She was recently arrested for horse-stealing and sent to the penitentiary; in the hospital of which her sex was discovered.
This is all I know about the man in question, although I’ll certainly keep my eyes open. The Ft. Madison penitentiary was established in 1839, seven years before Iowa’s statehood. The old facility, expanded several times over the years, is still in use today as the Iowa State Penitentiary, making it the oldest operating prison west of the Mississippi, although that distinction is set to end in a few months when a new facility opens and the 175-year-old facility will finally be retired.
[Source: “State Items. Iowa.” The Medical Standard 4, no. 2 (August 1888): 60. Available online at Google Books here.]
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