The Horse Doctor’s Botched Abortion

  The old newspapers now increasingly coming online are a morgue from which the voices of the dead, both the peaceful and the violated, continue to emerge. A pathetic one came to my attention recently, first through an undated letter, author unknown, posted at Ancestry.com under the moniker mjturpen. The author is clearly a woman, so with awkward courtesy I’ll refer to her as Ms. Turpen. Hers is a voice troubled in feeling, enough to move me to excavate the newspapers, and if she or some kin person or acquaintance would get in touch with me, there could be no greater reward for the humble historian’s labor. We delve in the past, but only because the past is never past. It’s always present.

Ms. Turpen’s opening paragraphs state the facts surrounding the death of her great aunt, sixteen-year-old Mary Fry:

Rachel Alleger Fry married  a man named John Coffield in 1899.This was after the death of Mary's father David Fry. He took Rachel and 6 of her children to Lincoln county soon afterward.They are listed in the 1900 census in Lincoln County. On April 25,1901 Mary died due to a botched abortion. The newspaper says that her step-father had raped her. Mary was 16 years old at the time.She was engaged to a prominent young man of Lincoln County. However Coffield was the father of the unborn child.

He engaged the services of a horse doctor named T. J. Talbot to perform the abortion. Talbot gave her something to induce labor. Mary died. Talbot was charged with manslaughter and Coffield was charged with statutory rape. Rachel Coffield was charged as an accessory. Talbot and Coffield were jailed. Rachel bonded out and returned to Joplin Mo. She was later extradited back to Chandler Oklahoma by Governor Jenkins of Oklahoma.

T. J. Talbott actually was, in fact, a horse doctor. The 1870 census for Stark County Illinois gives his occupation as “horse Dr” and the 1880 census for Rice County Minnesota shows him as a “Vetenary Sergon” --the latter offering two fancy words for the earlier phrase but both beyond the spelling ability of the census enumerator. That might have been because of the novelty of the word veterinary. Veterinary science only came of age in the late nineteenth century, and as a credentialed career option only since the mid 20th century.

Having acquired my love for literary language from a compulsory childhood reading of the King James Bible, the phrase in the back of my mind was “the horse-leach’s daughter,” but such was not to be. The abortion botched by Talbott was not performed on his daughter, and anyway my title phrase has as much music as the phrase from Proverbs. 

Thomas Jefferson Talbott, to denominate him fully, may have been a person who took pride in his profession, explaining why at the age of thirty-one he called himself a veterinarian surgeon. If it was pride, it took a terrible fall in 1901 when an abortion performed on sixteen-year-old Mary Fry near Chandler Oklahoma went wrong. His declaration of remorse was incontrovertible. While under indictment for manslaughter and awaiting trial in the Chandler jail, he took carbolic acid and killed himself. The sincerity of his act was clear, because he covered himself with a blanket to make sure the jailor would not discover him until he was dead. This is in complete contrast to a similar action on the part of the man who impregnated Mary Fry, and he had much more reason to feel remorse, for she had been his step-daughter and placed under his guardianship. 

All of which brings up the legal status of abortion in the United States in 1901. Ignoring laissez-faire attitudes from the dawn of human history to the 18th century, abortion became a problem in the anglophone world when Victorian England decided that unwed mothers were something shameful. Thereafter, throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, it was illegal for a doctor to perform abortions. (Indeed, in the Jesus-haunted U.S.A., he can hardly do it openly to this day, not if he values his life.) The problem mostly afflicted the poor, forcing women to all kinds of brutal and often fatal procedures. For those who could afford it, there were of course proper medical solutions. What doctors throughout the country offered and advertised was attention to “diseases of women.” I take my example from Chandler Oklahoma, where beginning in 1909 a “Sanitarium” run by Doctor  J. W. Adams and various colleagues advertised attention to “diseases of women” in connection with the word “surgery.”

 

Ad, Chandler News, 3 Dec 1909

The key phrase is “Diseases of women” linked with Surgery. And “the Rectum” calls our attention to the key area of the anatomy—as Freud liked to remind us, we’re born between feaces and urine.

It would be supererogatory to add that the fees collected from this sort of complex intervention would have been many times larger that what Doc Adams received from a trip to the rural districts to treat malaria, pneumonia, or typhoid fever. It is doubtful, however, that the abortions were done at the sanitarium, which would have been too public. They were done at Doc Adams’s home, where he had a private clinic, his wife acting as nurse.

I hasten to add that to the best of my knowledge--and I have searched the newspapers--no charge of performing an abortion was ever brought against Doc Adams in the courts of Lincoln County. He had wealthy and powerful friends. I did locate one case in an adjoining county where the woman had died, but the charge was dismissed by a Lincoln County judge. How a judge in one county has the authority to dismiss a charge made in another county is a mystery to me, but like most citizens the law to me is a closed book. All I can hazard is that it helps if you know the judge.

Doc Adams has been dead seventy years but his memory lives on in Chandler, When his house burned down a few years ago, neighbors were said to have come out digging around for hidden money. What they found, small-town rumor said, was a yard full of fetuses. This hardly bears scrutiny. A fetus doesn’t have bones. Was Doc Adams evil? “Evil” is an anagram of “vile” and “live.” Perhaps he was as vile as you or I.

An alternative to abortion was the popular Victorian practice of “baby farming,” which grew up in the mid 19th century when a great stigma attached to having a child out of wedlock and contraception was unavailable. Many older women of motherly mien made a living by providing fostering and adoption services to unmarried mothers. The mother would hand over the baby plus a substantial sum of cash believing that the child would be given a home. Getting rid of a child in this way had advantages for the mother--it was simple, quick and legal with few questions asked. If a baby disappeared, the mother was often too frightened or ashamed to tell the police, so it was very easy for the unscrupulous baby farmers to kill off unwanted or troublesome babies. Killing yielded a quicker profit than caring. For a lurid instance, the curious reader should look at the Wikipedia article about the prolific and ominously named Amelia Dyer (1837-1896). 

Central to the whole baby farming operation was the use of carbolic acid to get the little ones to sleep. The preparation was used for a wide variety of symptoms ranging from run-of-the mill fretfulness and colic, to the severest forms of dehydration caused by diarrhea. Despite the innocuous names, these patent medicines were sinister because of their opium content; Godfrey's Cordial contained one grain of opium in each two ounces and could be used to drug the unsuspecting and the innocent. Many infants died from opium poisoning in the 1800's, usually as a result of its surreptitious use by nurses to keep bothersome infants asleep. We have already met carbolic acid kept in the Chandler jail as a floor cleaner. It’s wide use was as “Mama’s Helper,” of which a beguiling photo may be seen below.

 

With that background, we can return to the case at hand and provide an outline of the event. Mary Fry’s abortion was performed by horse-doctor T. J. Talbott at the demand of the unborn child’s father, John Coffield. The latter, 57 years old, had married the widow Rachel Alleger Fry just two years earlier. She was 32 and thus 25 years younger than he. Her two eldest daughters Mary and Minnie (ages 16 and 14) were staying with their step-father. Thus the incest takes place between Coffield and his two step-daughters, though it is only Mary who gets pregnant. The operation that Talbott performed was only partially effective. The fetus was aborted, but four days later the mother died.

The Chandler News provided a complete description of the episode on the 19th of May under the heading “Charged with an Awful Crime” (spelling corrections bracketed below):

John Coffield and Dr. [Talbott] are in the county jail charged with most heinous crimes. Coffield is a man aged 55 years and has lived the past three years near Parkland on a rented farm. He married a widow lady named [Fry], who had five children, two of them being girls, aged 17 and 14 respectively. The older, Mary [Fry] was a bright young lady and engaged to be married to a school teacher last Sunday.

We might like to know the name of Mary’s fiancé, but I have thought it better to allow his troubled spirit to rest unnamed.

Coffield employed Dr. [Talbott], a veterinary surgeon, whom, it is charged, performed an operation to produce an abortion on the young girl on April 21, from the effects of which she died on Thursday noon. When Coffield was told that the girl would die he took a bottle of strychnine and went to the woods. On Thursday a deputy brought him in and placed him in jail. 

One can’t help feeling some skepticism at Coffield’s gesture of remorse. He must have announced his intention in advance, since the deputy had no trouble finding him. His probable motive was to soften the jury that he knew would try him. (This contrasts with the successful suicide of Dr. Talbott, who even within the confines of the jail made sure that no one would find and rescue him. ) The gesture was at least in part successful, though with its own twist. The jury that tried him did not find him guilty of incest, since by the time of the trial the chief witnesses against him--Mary and the doctor--were dead. They did, however, find him guilty of attempted suicide, for which he served two of  his three-year sentence in the Kansas penitentiary before being pardoned. 

The doctor in the meantime skipped out. On Friday Sheriff Tilghman located the horse doctor on Red Rock river, in Noble county, and arrested him and placed him in jail, charged with murder in accordance with the result of the coroner’s inquest. The younger girl, aged 14, testified at the inquest that her step-father, Coffield, had had intercourse with her at different times. When the prisoner was brought here there was strong talk of a double lynching, but wiser heads counseled a conservative course and the affair has passed and they are now safe. 

One cannot help wondering about the testimony of the fourteen-year-old Minnie. It’s impossible to know--even difficult to imagine--what went on in that farm house, but one possibility is that Minnie was testifying out of loyalty to her dead sister, trying to deepen the appearance of Coffield’s guilt. As I have said, it probably didn’t matter because with the death of the two chief witnesses, it was no longer possible to convict Coffield of incest. 

The mother Rachel should have been among the chief witnesses but somehow was not. Newspapers make it clear that she was living with Coffield and her daughters up until the time of Mary’s death, but when it becomes clear that she will be indicted as an accessory, she flees to Joplin Missouri. The News for October 3rd relates that Sheriff Tilghman went to Joplin and arrested her, charging her with “complicity in producing the abortion which caused her daughter’s death.” One wonders on what evidence she was being charged. It could only be the testimony of Coffield, not the most reliable of witnesses, that she agreed to the abortion. This must have come to him as a much delayed afterthought, for the inquest took place in early May, and yet it was early October before Tilghman went to arrest her. Again, one suspects Coffield of trying to avoid the charge of statutory rape, as he had done earlier by first blaming Mary’s pregnancy on her fiancé. However that may have been, Talbott’s suicide provides an unexpected reprieve. On the evening before he took the carbolic acid, he wrote three letters, one to his lawyer, one to Mrs. Coffield, and a third to Judge Allison. In the last he “exonerated Mrs. Coffield from any part in her daughter’s death.”

The person I cannot exonerate remains John Coffield. He was convicted only of attempted suicide, not incest or statutory rape, as he should have been, and as a consequence served only two years at Lansing Prison before being pardoned. Instead of making him serve hard time, the authorities just slapped the backs of his hands. On 27 March 1902, the Chandler News reported  “arraigned on charge of attempting suicide, plea of guilty entered and defendant asked leniency of the court.  Sentenced to two years in territorial prison. On 13 November 1903, the Chandler Daily Publicist stated, “Among the citizenship pardons granted by Governor Ferguson last week was the following citizen of Lincoln county:  John Coffield, attempting to commit suicide, sentenced to two years March 25, 1901.” So he served about a year and a half. 

He cannot be found in the 1910 census, but he shows up in the 1920 census supplemented by two records from homes for old soldiers, the first in Leavenworth, the second in Sawtelle California near Montebello, Los Angeles County. From these we learn not only his rather predictable ailments--heart condition, rheumatism, etc.--but his height and complexion: 5’ 9”, blue eyes, light complexion. The first covers the period from November 1920 until his transfer to Sawtelle in January 1926, while the latter is from his reception at Sawelle until December 1926. His next of kin at the latter home is given as Mrs. Fred Dulaney (unidentified). He died on 18 March 1929 near Montebello in Los Angeles County and is buried in the Los Angeles National Cemetery, where his Find-a-Grave memorial has no family links, no flowers, and no obituary. Though it is my usual practice in doing genealogical research to supply these decorations, in the case of John Coffield I have deliberately omitted them. I remember what he did and how he got away with it. Instead I’ve posted a newspaper clipping about the wrong he did Mary Fry. I do not see him resting in peace. I imagine his restless spirit tormented by the memory of Mary Fry.

We can now return to Ms. Turpen and recall that her grandmother was Mary Fry’s younger sister Minnie Mae, also in the house when Coffield was carrying on with Mary. She would have known all that there was to know, and yet she maintained a stiff upper lip. Lies, secrets, silence--a woman’s life according to the American poet Adrienne Rich. I will conclude with a few words from Ms. Turpen. “My grandmother never talked much about her mother” [Rachel Alleger Fry Coffield]. When asked about her sister [Mary Fry] she said, ‘she just died.’"