Something unseen was attacking Daniel Webstersomething so incapacitating that America’s greatest orator was nearly struck dumb. “I use the confidential hand of another to write you a short letter,” the senator-turnedsecretary of state admitted to President Fillmore in September 1850. “I read nothing, and hardly write anything but signatures.” Indeed, Webster’s health had become so bad that he was considering resigning his cabinet post. Haggard from lack of sleep, his eyes nearly swollen shut, Webster shuffled around his Boston home, bent over as each new paroxysm shook his weakening body. Why? Because he could not stop sneezing.
ON OR around 20 August, the same dreaded day each year, a mysterious malady descended on Daniel Webster and legions of his fellow Americans. The secretary of state wasn’t the only famous speaker laid low. America’s most prominent preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, was also afflicted. “Your handkerchief suddenly becomes the most important thing in your life,” complained the stricken minister in 1872. “You never before even really suspected what it was really to sneeze. If the door is open, you sneeze. If a pane of glass is gone, you sneeze. If you look into the sunshine, you sneeze… If you sneeze once, you sneeze twenty times. It is a riot of sneezes.”
In countryside and city alike, everyone knew what that riot of late-summer sneezes and nose-blowing meant: the hay fever season had arrived. From 20 August to the first frost, countless Americans hid indoors, wheezing and sneezing and blowing their noses. Some resorted to such alarming Victorian remedies as cigarettes laced with arsenic and strychnine, none of which helped. “My system,” Webster complained, “is so full of iron, potash, and arsenic, that my stomach has become deranged.”
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Webster’s ailment was well-known on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1819, a Liverpool doctor called John Bostock wrote the first medical description of the disorder that he called cattarhus aestivus, or summer catarrh, but which nearly everyone else knew as hay fever, though it was neither a fever nor particularly linked to hay. Americans had their own “June cold” much like the British affliction, but their late-summer version attacked a different group of sufferers in a curiously different fashion. In Britain, just being close to certain flowers or trees was enough to set people sneezing. But these triggers didn’t seem to be the problem for Americans. And while British sufferers generally found relief by escaping to the seaside, Americans discovered that their own coastlines offered little help. The only way to ease the suffering seemed to be to go to Britain – or at least to board an ocean-going vessel and get well out of sight of America.
By the 1850s, one other miraculous cure had emerged: a lengthy stay in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Only the well-to-do could afford to spend an entire month in the mountains but for those that could, it was worth the expense. Within a few days, their eyes grew bright and clear, their sinuses emptied and the sneezing and itching stopped. They were cured…until they left. Unless sufferers waited until after the first frost in the valleys below, they were liable to find themselves doubled over with sneezes as soon as they descended from the mountains.
Morrill Wyman, a prominent physician in Boston, was intrigued by these clues, and with good reason: in 1832, during his final year at Harvard Medical School, he fell victim to late-summer hay fever himself. After that, he suffered every year alongside his father, his brothers, a sister and his son and daughter. By September the doctor and his family would be wretched and exhausted. “After a time,” he wrote, “it becomes paroxysmal, most severe in night, compelling me to sit up in bed, and frequently causing retching and attempts to vomit.” But when he decamped to the White Mountains in 1865, he too found himself miraculously cured.
Wyman wondered what could be behind America’s unique version of hay fever. It did not follow the pattern of any known transmissible disease. Weather records did not show a consistent pattern to its onset. No one profession or location seemed specifically susceptible, though clearly a vulnerability ran in families. That left just one clue: the date everyone dreaded, 20 August. Wyman reasoned that because the trouble started late in August and ended with the first frosts, a plant was probably to blame. The usual suspects – cherry, apple, roses and the like – didn’t fit the bill. They all flowered months earlier. But while wandering about Boston during hay fever season, Wyman noticed one weed growing on waste ground which invariably set him sneezing. This was Ambrosia artemisiifolia, better known as roman wormwood or ragweed, a plant of little interest to anyone except for the fact that it flowered at the crucial time. Here, perhaps, was the cause of America’s unique summertime misery.
“From 20 August to the first frost, countless Americans hid indoors”
Wyman hit on a simple test of his theory. At the height of the hay fever season in 1870, while his family retreated to the mountains, he trudged miserably through the city, gathering up flowering stalks of ragweed and stuffing them into a box. He then joined the rest of the Wymans for some much needed rest. On 23 September, when the Wyman family was brimming with good health, he opened up his parcel. The doctor and his son bent over the box and breathed in deeply.
The effect was immediate and dramatic. They both exploded into sneezes, their eyes watering and reddening as if they’d never come to their mountain refuge. Wyman’s brother, on the other hand, who sat nearby but kept away from the parcel, remained blissfully sneeze-free. Another parcel of ragweed, which Wyman had sent to a neighbouring hotel, produced the same response: volunteers who investigated its contents immediately had a relapse. There was another piece of evidence that suggested Wyman had found his culprit. While the plant grew from Canada to Georgia, he pointed out, “it is not found in England, France, or Germany”.
Two years later, Wyman published his findings in his book Autumnal Catarrh (Hay Fever), which marked a turning point in understanding the affliction. But although Wyman had worked out the direct cause, it was decades before doctors discovered the underlying mechanism: to those allergic to it, ragweed pollen triggers the immune system to produce the antibody IgE (immunoglobulin E), which in turn prompts production of the histamine that irritates the lining of the nasal passages. The resulting “hay fever” is a needless response to a non-existent infection, a false alarm that modern medications from antihistamines to corticosteroids do their best to silence. In 1872, though, the best solution was still to run away, and fast.
Ragweed produces vast quantities of pollen which the wind can carry great distances, one reason why a trip to the seaside didn’t work well for Americans. Wyman’s Autumnal Catarrh included the first maps of hay fever’s distribution, displaying much of the country under an angry red tint. There were, however, a few alluring untinted spots, places so remote that not even ragweed pollen reached them. These included a few peaks in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, a remote area of the upper peninsula of Michigan, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. “This is the great, not to say the only remedy,” he wrote. “For complete prevention, the place of refuge should be reached a day or two before the usual time of attack…it is not safe to return to any catarrhal region north of New York until the end of September.”
Readers responded in droves. Little mountain villages became boom towns as well-to-do sufferers emptied out of the cities each August to enjoy badminton and croquet in posh hotels and second homes. Millions of dollars flowed into the economy of the White Mountains, and the US Hay Fever Association established its headquarters there. Members quickly grew rather fond of their mandatory period of leisure. “I can’t get well, and it seems to me I won’t get well,” preacher Beecher joked in 1879. “I esteem my six weeks’ vacation in the mountain too well.”
What began as a treatment for a debilitating allergy soon became a much-loved summer holiday for sufferers and non-sufferers alike, one that survives to this day in north-eastern cities. As modern Manhattanites and Bostonians flee to the mountains this August, they might pause to tip their hat, or better still, wave a handkerchief, in honour of their sniffling, sneezing ancestors who began their summertime tradition.