Venereal Disease and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (review)

In this short, quirky book Dr. Thomas P. Lowry, a retired psychiatrist and associate clinical professor of psychiatry, seeks to show "the centrality of sex and venereal disease" in the Lewis and Clark expedition (p. xvi). He is at his best when closest to his sources. The most intriguing chapter, for example, examines Merriweather Lewis's famous "shopping list" of items to take on the expedition: among the medical supplies were a suprisingly high proportion—about 15 percent—most likely intended for the treatment of syphilis or gonorrhea. When the author wanders farther afield, the book is less fresh and far more derivative. Thirteen of fourteen footnotes in a chapter on Indian medical knowledge cite the same secondary source, while the chapter "What Did Lewis and Clark Know?" is heavily dependent on Claude Quétel's History of Syphilis (1990).

Lowry makes three large claims for his subject. The first, and probably weakest, is that sex is a "long ignored theme" in scholarship on the Corps of Exploration (p. xiii). Because topics can be long ignored for good reason, the second claim is far more compelling—namely, that Lewis and Clark correctly expected to find venereal disease among Indians encountered on the trail and feared its effects on Corps members. The shopping list and scattered journal entries sustain that claim, and it may well be the book's greatest contribution.

The third major assertion is more questionable: it is that venereal disease was "a major threat" to the expedition, "one that was in many ways as dangerous as grizzly bears, snakes, warfare, and slippery trails" (p. 13). However devastating to the expedition syphilis and gonorrhea might have been—and mostly they were not—neither had the capacity to wipe out the Corps all at once. Indians did.

In attempting to demonstrate the importance of his subject, moreover, Lowry stretches beyond what the data will bear. While there is no evidence that any member of the Corps had venereal disease before heading west, expedition journals name three men as requiring treatment for it on the trail, and it is Lowry's "informed conjecture" that "nearly all of them had syphilis and/or gonorrhea at some time during the journey" (p. 86). Further "informed conjecture" leads to speculation that the expedition's lone woman, Sacajawea, may have been infected by her husband (the best evidence being that he had multiple wives), and that syphilis may have contributed to Lewis's bizarre death.

Questionable diagnoses aside, the quotations about Indian sexual practices and Lowry's demonstration of the extent of Lewis and Clark's concern about venereal disease are fascinating. He concludes, however, with an assertion that military personnel typically find more persuasive than do their civilian loved ones: "Whatever pain and disability the men suffered from venereal disease," he writes, "were wounds received in the service of their country" (p. 101).