Kansas Charlie’s Disease

An Incurable and Embarrassing Condition

Aug 14, 2006 Mary Trotter Kion

Kansas Charley is a bed-wetter. He is beaten at the orphanage for this. It is believed that circumcision can cure what he is told is a 'disease.'

Charley Miller, later known as Kansas Charley, had many problems besides being orphaned when, first, his mother died then his father committed suicide. But now he was just an insignificance little boy in a New York orphanage. But he had one other major problem. He was a bed-wetter. It was not a pleasant situation in an orphanage where cleanliness was stressed and numerous waifs lived in close quarters.

It is uncertain whether Charley had this affliction prior to the death of his parents and his surely frightening move to the institute. Bed-wetting was a condition that was little understood in the late 1800's. He had one other problem that surely no one recognized, in such an overflowing and busy establishment, that probably did little to help solve the wetting problem. However well meaning the orphanage matron was, after his sister Carrie was sent out of the orphanage little Charley had no semblance of a mother's love.

Victorian Era Medicine

The couple that ran the orphanage where Charlie lived demanded that his bed-wetting stop. But, of course, a mere demand did no good. It probably attributed further to what Charlie was told was a "disease." Some years later while Charlie waited in a Cheyenne, Wyoming jail for the end of his young life to be yanked from him he was asked how he was treated in the orphanage. His reply was that he was whipped very often because he had a disease, meaning bed-wetting, that he couldn't stop.

While still in the orphanage a doctor recognized that Charlie's problem was a "symptom of a condition known as enuresis or involuntary incontinence." At the time medical science believed that there were a wide variety of causes for the disease: "local irritations and infections; organic defects in the urethra, kidney, bladder, or penis;" even masturbation, then referred to as "self-abuse."

Passing Time Solves No Problems

Even as Charley neared his twelfth birthday, the time for normally being put out of the orphanage, the bed-wetting continued. The situation could become a total disaster were he placed with a family.

But there was one drastic medical procedure that had, at least in one single case, cured another boy of bed-wetting-circumcision, not regularly done, in the non-Jewish sector, in that day and age.

Kansas Charlie's Disease: An Incurable and Embarrassing Condition, , continues on August 21, 2006, with:

Kansas Charley Reaches Puberty: Will Drastic Surgery Cure His Disease?

Previous: Life at the Orphanage: Kansas Charley Goes to School.

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