Through our history curriculum, Commonwealth students learn how to be historians rather than passive absorbers of facts. They read and analyze primary sources from a variety of voices in their historical contexts. They discover connections across continents and eras. And they graduate knowing that a single textbook could never tell the whole story. Core to this discovery process is an annual research paper, comparable to a college essay, that hones students’ analytical and writing skills and challenges them to dig deep into a variety of sources on any topic that interests them—whether it be debunking the "primitivist" myth around jazz, the effect of the breakup of the the AT&T monopoly, or evaluating the claim that the Wizard of Oz was a Populist tract. Keep reading for just one recent example.

Morality and Scientific Authority During the Progressive Era 

By Alex '22

Why I wrote it: For the U.S. history paper, Ms. Haber asked us to draw from a primary source collection for our research. I was a bit worried since I had already fallen in love with the idea of writing about Mary Hunt, an ex-chemistry teacher who became one of the most powerful figures in children's education during Prohibition. She required schools to teach children that "the majority of children die of dropsy," and basically made a lucrative textbook cartel; all textbooks needed to be endorsed by her before being used in schools. I only had secondary sources on her, so I looked at their bibliographies and discovered that most of her personal writings (letters, newspaper clippings of her speeches, and diaries) were stored in the Westerville Public Library. The only problem—it was in Ohio. So, I phoned the local historian at the library and found out that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they digitized their collection. I opened up PDFs to find Hunt's cursive letters detailing her expenses and feuds with publishers, something that I never thought I would see. 

Massive campaigns against alcohol consumption in the late 19th century may seem strange in the 21st century as drinking skyrocketed during the 2021 COVID-19 pandemic; alcohol distilleries saw a “54% increase in national sales of alcohol” in 2021 compared to the year before.¹ Yet almost 150 years ago, “Scientific temperance instruction” was being propagated in schools across the nation by Mary Hanchett Hunt, a chemistry teacher from Massachusetts. Her views resonated with different religious groups, and she collaborated with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in the 1870s. Hunt compared her work in promoting temperance to the self-sacrifice of Moses, saying “what matter if I perish in the trenches if the people be saved?”² After all, a quarter million earnest, educated, intelligent, Christian women, wives and mothers” made up the WCTU, she noted with pride.³ Women, she asserted, had the divine right to instruct their children in morality and to insist upon temperance, and “everyone acknowledges women's moral nature to be purer than man's,” Hunt argued.⁴ She believed that housewives and female teachers were superior in morality and scientific veracity compared to opposing male scientific authorities.A mother of one, Hunt mobilized women in a decade of activism from 1872 and 1881, organizing mass meetings, petitions, and letter writing to pressure school boards to include temperance education in their curriculum.⁵ When that proved ineffective, she turned her attention to state-level legislation, where her aggressive political lobbying earned her the moniker the “Queen of the Lobby.”⁶ One by one states acceded to her demands: in 1882, Vermont passed compulsory temperance education, and in 1884, notoriously “wet” New York restricted teaching certificates to educators unless they passed a “satisfactory examination in physiology and hygiene” relating to alcohol.⁷ Pennsylvania’s law of 1885 threatened to withdraw state funding to schools that did not espouse temperance education. Massachusetts declared that “special instruction as to the effects of alcoholic drinks and of stimulants and narcotics on the human system shall be taught as a regular branch of study to all pupils.”⁸ 

Hunt emerged victorious and temperance education became as important as arithmetic and English. For three decades beginning in the 1880s, twenty-two million children from elementary to high school took annual temperance lessons three times a week, for three to five months.⁹ Temperance education proselytized to schoolchildren the “narcotic and deadly” nature of alcohol, and by 1901, all children across the nation were reading textbooks that claimed “the majority of beer drinkers die of dropsy.” Other textbooks noted that “when alcohol passes down the throat it burns off the skin, leaving it bare and burning.”¹⁰ A drop of alcohol induced “an uncontrollable desire for more” and created “the confirmed inebriate, miserably deprived in body and brutalized in mind.”¹¹ Teenagers were warned that they could inherit “idiocy, insanity, weak mind[s],...perverted moral natures, and vicious instincts'' from alcoholic parents.¹² 
Many people from the male-dominated field of physiology, however, were opposed to the temperance propaganda and female authority wielded by Hunt and her allies. Hunt’s teachings received pushback from the Committee of Fifty, formed in 1903 by a group of hygienists, doctors, and physiologists, who charged that because scientific temperance education failed “to observe the distinction between...‘use’ and ‘abuse,’...[Hunt wrongly suggests that] terrible results of a prolonged abuse of alcohol may be expected to follow any departure from the strict rules of total abstinence.”¹³ Physiologists like Professor Winfield S. Hall from Northwestern University remained sympathetic to Hunt’s movement, although a subcommittee on the pathological aspect of drinking, led by college professors and renowned scientists, including General Francis A. Walker, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology  and Professor R.H Chittenden, Director of Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, lambasted temperance education as exaggerated and misleading.¹⁴ Hunt’s justification for temperance education through moral values clashed with the findings of respected male physiologists, revealing the revolving debate over scientific authority. 

Controversy did not dissuade Hunt, who pushed for the vilifying of alcohol and moral need for scientific temperance instruction. She wrote in 1884 that people “must first be convinced that alcohol and kindred narcotics are by nature outlaws, before they will outlaw them.”¹⁵ To achieve this, she authored physiology textbooks with sympathetic doctors to portray alcohol’s immense damage to the body. Children read that the circulatory system carried the poison of alcohol to all the organs in the body, destroying the heart and the lungs.¹⁶ Hunt’s 1889 textbook for elementary students affirmed alcohol as a “poison that deadens the nerves” and “shrink[s] the brain;” a formidable toxin that demanded immediate attention.¹⁷ Alcohol was “a poison[.]...  Enough will kill whoever.”¹⁸ A textbook written a year later, which Hunt endorsed, recounted an anecdote of “a boy [who] once drank whiskey from a flask he had found, and died within a few hours.” To drive the point home, the narrator affirmed that “his death was caused by alcohol in the whiskey.”¹⁹ While scientific temperance instruction may have been true for chronic abusers of alcohol, moderate drinking is not deadly. Hunt and the WCTU used fear mongering with gusto. They invented statistics where “nearly one-half of the crazy people [in asylums] were made crazy from” alcohol, and painted graphic pictures of “the tiny muscles of the blood vessels[,] weakened by alcohol and burst[ing], causing death.”²⁰ Oversimplifications that “people who drink beer grow very bad” morphed into urban legends, and the textbooks recounted an apocryphal story of “a noted murderer [who] was about to kill a babe, and the little creature looked up at him and smiled. ‘But,’ said he, ‘I drank a large glass of brandy, and then I didn’t care.’”²¹ Alcohol loomed like a shadow over the innocent faces of children, promising to turn everyone it touched into brutes and monsters. 

In portraying temperance education as the battle for the lives and souls of children, Hunt implied that women’s role in society was also at stake. “We mothers have the power to decide that our boys should be taught...the action of alcohol on the human tissues,” Hunt said at an 1880 speech in New York.²² Hunt argued that women played a crucial role in protecting and nurturing their children, and as a result knew what was best for them. The doubtful school superintendents who worried that temperance instruction was “filling the brains of the children at the expense of their health” stood as an affront, in the view of Hunt and the WCTU, to a woman’s knowledge of her own children and right to call for curriculum changes and temperance education.²³ 

Hunt exaggerated the addictiveness of alcohol too, claiming that “a little alcohol...[could] make a person want to drink more, until he drinks enough to ruin himself.”²⁴ Her rhetoric, which emphasized the horrible effects of alcohol upon children, garnered support among women who understood the moral and redemptive values of temperance education. In her lectures, she reminded her followers to “notice how they [the school children] are tempted and how they yield and early get the taste of beer[.]...Talk to them right out of your heart, and that will move them.”²⁵ Women were encouraged to rally and organize temperance education to save their children from the endless horrors of alcohol. Hunt’s warning that “children of the country must not be sacrificed to false teachings in favor of moderate drinking,” emphasized the importance of women in enforcing temperance education.²⁶ Her exaggerations simplified the need for compulsory abstinence, and her fanatical quest for complete abstinence was couched as the upholding of morals and righteousness. 

Physiologists who opposed scientific temperance were hammered with the gavel of morality. Facing pushback from elite physicians, who questioned the scientific credentials of doctors who supported temperance, Hunt argued that a doctor’s opinions were “not to be discounted if he happens to be endowed with a heart and can sympathize with humanity’s suffering,” implying that the physiologists who did not agree with her were spineless and cold-hearted.²⁷ Perhaps Hunt and her supporters were indeed swayed by integrity and religious doctrines that associated moral decay with alcohol, losing themselves and the truth within their moralist propaganda.  Hunt’s demonization of alcohol and her unwillingness to compromise, insisting that alcohol was a poison, suggested that Hunt believed a rigid approach would strengthen her arguments. They believed that “alcohol in any form or amount is injurious” to thinking and clear judgement, black and white statements that missed the ocean of grey before them.²⁸

Hunt’s absolutist viewpoint was echoed by her followers and spilled over to the policing of textbooks. McDuffee, a secretary to Hunt, insisted to a teacher, Mrs. George Houghtaling, that she should only use books that contain Hunt’s endorsements, because “imperfect books result in imperfect teaching invariably.”²⁹ An example of an unendorsed book would be the Elementary Treatise upon Physiology, where alcohol is described as a “clear, water-like poison,” concordant with the views of Hunt. The author, however, also notes that “after a fit of intoxication, the brain restores to nearly its normal condition,” which would have been seen as confusing and dangerous by the WCTU due to its ambiguity over the dangers of alcohol.³⁰ In her letter to the Textbook Commission of Minnesota, Hunt explained her criticisms of Smith’s Primer of Physiologists, which asserted that “A little liquor makes a man feel comfortable and gay. She argued that such words acted as “ a warning against taking more liquor, and not against taking a little,” suggesting the pervasiveness of Hunt’s belief in absolute temperance.³¹ Texts that offered equivocal takeaways were denounced, including a book which stated that “in good beer are so many pounds of alcohol.” Hunt noted with contempt that “whatever he may mean there by ‘good’” was dwarfed by his failure “to add one word of warning anywhere in his book against beer.”³² Her dismissive warning suggested a belief in integrity and the need for clear warnings on alcohol. The emphasis on alcohol's destructive nature invigorated the temperance movement’s momentum and dramatic nature of their statements, which clarified alcohol’s problems to children. Hunt finished her letter with the rhetorical question of “what will we teach the children,” showing that morality and the need to protect children acted as primary motivation for temperance activists.

A remarkable aspect of Hunt’s arguments and temperance education laws were enacted during the Progressive Era (1896-1916), where the public paid special attention to scientific authority. Discussions of human efficiency and systemic management flourished during this time period, and led to the public’s newfound reverence for the ways in which the scientific method and regimented observation could solve societal woes. The validity of scientific temperance education, Hunt determined, could be proved in the laboratory and justified by morals. “There is now a teacher in temperance. We call her science,” Hunt declared in a lecture. She mentioned scientific authorities like Benjamin Richardson, who showed “the inevitable connection between strong drink and the deterioration of character.”³³ Moreover, in an article refuting alcohol’s benefits in moderation, Hunt recited a laundry list of famous physicians and physiologists who saw alcohol as a poison, including Alfred H. Allen and Dr. Austin Flint. Hunt also quoted Dr. William A. Hammond, who declared that “pure alcohol is a violent poison.”³⁴ In addition, well-respected physiologists like Christian A. Herter and Winfield S. Hall, both of whom boasted laboratory work on alcohol and were members of the American Physiological Society, also voiced their support in Hunt’s teachings.³⁵ This coterie of physicians and physiologists reflected Hunt’s attentive awareness of the impact of scientific authority on the public. By citing respected experts on alcohol, Hunt redefined scientific authority as a power that even lay people and women could wield, as long as they had well-versed researchers on their side.  

A rising tide of opposition against Scientific Temperance Instruction appeared under male superintendents and teachers, who dismissed temperance instruction as unscientific and damaging to children. Superintendent of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, Geroge H. Martin, warned that “dangerous reactions may occur as a result of the exaggerated details.”³⁶ Teachers argued that while youth were “deiceive[d] for a special, supposedly moral, purpose,” adolescents also found books or recounted personal experiences, including parents who drank alcohol, that contradicted the teachings of scientific temperance.³⁷ The Science Teachers Association of New York State (STANYS) urged for “state law to be modified as to give more freedom to the writers of textbooks and the teachers of physiology,” while one teacher complained that “any mentions of alcohol and its uses [are] a subject of ridicule” by students.³⁸ Another physician Dr. Fitz rejected “the idea that frequent repetition of exaggerated statements develops character;” he demeaned temperance education as useless and counterintuitive.³⁹ These complaints suggest teachers’ and superintendents’ backlash against the restrictive control of Hunt and the WCTU. In a study sent to 83 superintendents that represented a quarter of all schools in Massachusetts, almost 72% reported little to no benefits in scientific temperance.⁴⁰ The surveys and testimony of teachers that originated from the Committee of Fifty as well as the report from STANYS, however, consisted of college professors from elite universities like Harvard and Cornell, as well as acclaimed physiologists. Why then, would these elites, not directly influenced by Scientific Temperance Instruction which concerned itself with early education and related teachers, be such vocal antagonists against temperance education? 

Physiologists and disgruntled experts disagreed with Hunt’s definition of alcohol as a poison,  reflecting a difference in the definition of “scientific authorities.” The Committee of Fifty mocked Hunt’s praise for scientists supportive of the movement “with such appellations as ‘greatest living authority,’ ‘foremost scientist,’ when they are not seen as authority figures by the scientific community.”⁴¹ These opposing physiologists viewed the temperance movement as a threat to their authority due to the redefining by Hunt and the WCTU, a group of women no less, of what constituted as scientific. Misogyny played a role too, and one Connecticut critic argued that “the effort of these reforming women is interfering with what is none of their business, ” and the WCTU’s lack of “credential knowledge” meant they should refrain from using ‘scientific evidence’ to determine alcohol usage.⁴² Although the Committee of Fifty reported that scientific temperance instruction was “not in accord with the opinions of a large majority of the leading physiologists of Europe,” their responses showed a wide spectrum of ideas within the scientific community.⁴³ Dr. Fick Wurzburg replied that he considered “instruction upon the effects of alcohol very advantageous,” while Professor A. Foel reaffirmed that “alcohol is a poison, and not a food,” mirroring the views and claims of Scientific Temperance Instruction.⁴⁴ So, in many ways, while the backlash against Mary H. Hunt and the WCTU originated because of fallacies in her arguments—scientific discourse on alcoholism was diverse and varied—it was also because of Hunt’s reestablishment of scientific expertise. 

Hunt’s deep dive into new standards for scientific authority also suggested a broadening shift in society as more women entered the field of physiology and public health. The Ladies Physiological Institute (LPI), founded in the 1848 in Boston, suggests that even before Hunt’s involvement in the 1880s —her office was in Hyde Park, also in Boston—women were already positioning themselves as keen on accessing scientific veracity.⁴⁵ Harriot K. Hunt M.D.—not to be confused with temperance leader Mary H. Hunt—earned her degree from the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, and presided as the president of the LPI. Their 1875 meeting celebrated the increased presence of women in public health, where members held weekly meetings on hygiene “spreading abroad a knowledge of Physiological Laws,” established a women’s hospital in New York City, and accrued membership among the thousands.⁴⁶ These women believed that they stood “as a Physiological School, professing to teach scientific truth” and immerse themselves in “the study of the body—to learn its structure, its functions, its derangements.”⁴⁷ The wide variety of topics given including physiology, the treatment of maladies like cholera, and their large repertoire of books and journals like The Boston Medical portrayed womens’ increasing credibility as scientific authorities.⁴⁸ Similar to the WCTU, the LPI also harnessed morality and religion in their educational crusade, directing members “to love mercy, to do justly, and to walk humbly with thy God.”⁴⁹ While the meeting never mentions temperance, focusing on the dissemination of “seeds of truths” and healing “diseased humanity,” the LPI’s work characterized women’s involvement in public health as early as the 1850s.⁵⁰ By the 1880s, the Ladies Physiological Society enjoyed relationships with other groups too, including the Moral Education Society and the Female Samaritan Society, intermingling with the scientific temperance work of Hunt.⁵¹ The LPI’s instruction and devotion to physiological education ran from a similar vein to the WCTU, and portrays a broader picture of women perfecting their scientific knowledge. 

Hunt, perhaps empowered by the actions of the LPI, questioned the credentials of the Committee of Fifty, establishing her own scientific clout. Hunt dismissed claims that the majority of well-respected scientists rejected the teachings of Scientific Temperance. She cited a petition signed by 800 well-respected physiologists across Europe and America for total abstinence to strengthen her argument.⁵² Hunt also questioned the credentials of opposing scientists, arguing that the opposing medical practitioners' expertise was not compatible with the subject; three out of the eleven physiologists admitted their little knowledge of endorsed textbooks, and three others do not even discuss the books. Hunt wrote that two other physiologists conceded their little knowledge of alcohol, while one uses an unendorsed book to condemn the WCTU. “Such ignorance is the more inexcusable since four of these physiologists are themselves members of the Subcommittee,” Hunt wrote in a scathing response to the Committee of Fifty.⁵³ Her evaluation implies a new understanding of scientific authority among temperance activists; instead of only pointing to relevant scientific evidence and expertise, women now critiqued and determined the validity of the opposition’s scientific knowledge. Hunt also rejected the claims by the Massachusetts Medical Society that her endorsed textbooks espoused lies, writing in her reply that “after four years of deliberation, with some thirty books to examine, the above samples are all they [the Massachusetts Medical Society] have been able to cite. Only two of these alleged errors have any grounds for the criticism and of these two only one is on the subject of alcohol.”⁵⁴ While Hunt acknowledged the possible need for revisions and changes within textbooks, Hunt also implied that the opposition cherry picked information and were deliberately misleading. Her discrediting of “experts” reflected Hunt’s increased scientific authority and the introduction of women into positions of power; she now felt validating or invalidating evidence based on their veracity and ability to be applied to Scientific Temperance Instruction. 

Hunt’s pioneering attitude towards science, as well as the efforts of the LPI encouraged women to join medical universities and take on careers in science in increasing numbers. In 1893, women were enrolled in “three of Boston’s four medical schools, [where] 37% of Boston University students were women,” Historian Walsh notes. This trend was also reflected nationwide, and “women made up 10% or more of student enrollment at eighteen regular medical colleges” by 1893.⁵⁵ As a result, many cities saw a huge jump in licensed female physicians and doctors, and in 1900, “women physicians accounted for 18.2% of [Boston’s] doctors,” twenty years prior to white women getting the right to vote. The work of the LPI and of Scientific Temperance Instruction, organizations which were headquartered in Boston, no doubt encouraged more women in Boston to become involved in the sciences and temperance work. 
The increasing flow of women into the medical and educational arena incited backlash from their male peers, and Hunt assuaged teachers’ apprehensions while mocking male superintendent’s elitist and misogynistic ideas behind their backs. Hunt reminded her followers to “study your men,” and noted “the exceeding sensitiveness to [superintendent’s] own dignity which comes with [their] ‘little brief authority.’”⁵⁶ The adjectives “exceeding” and “brief” demean the superintendents to power-hungry oligarchs, and while Hunt may have disliked them, she understood the need for compromise to pass temperance education. Likewise, Hunt warned against patronizing teachers, organizing receptions and events for temperance reformers and teachers to intermingle.⁵⁷ She advised her secretary Mary F. Lowell to “tell these gentlemen, members of the [Pennsylvania Education] Board, that I am sorry they feel ‘bored’ by our importunity in behalf of an honest enforcement of a righteous law; but as consensus women we should keep right on boring until the children were all being taught from proper text-books.”⁵⁸ Her veiled mockery of the pretentious superintendents and sarcastic remarks reflect the dual tactics that Hunt used; forceful compliance and reminders as well as persuasive rhetoric. Hunt saw through the feet-dragging excuses of superintendents and physiologists and wielded morality like a sword, embedding her ideas into the flesh of her enemies.  

As well as a distrust in the increasing power of women, pushback against temperance education alluded to greater fears that masculinity in America was drying up, giving way to the strong-headed women at the forefront of the temperance movement. People worried that scientific temperance acted “chiefly to fear” as opposed to maintaining “manliness and moral nature.” Their anxieties that temperance was too emotional reflected the influence of negative tropes applied to women; a school superintendent criticized the teaching of scientific temperance, where “the trembling hand, the thick speech, the dull senses, the poisoned blood,...[and] the misery of the drunkard are hysterically held up to the gaze of the children.”⁵⁹ Children were not fit to hear the horrific effects of alcohol, and physiologists argued against women’s involvement in the curriculum due to their little to no doctoral education and experience. 

Hunt’s continual promotion of scientific temperance education through moral pressure aided by conflicting accounts of scientific authority reflected the complicated question of expertise and control on children’s education. Power corrupts, and while Hunt probably believed in the teachings of temperance, her animosity towards ‘rogue’ publishers and textbook ‘cartel’ implied intolerance towards education they could not control. In many ways, scientific temperance education was completely controlled by Hunt; she recommended people onto the Advisory board, which determined textbook endorsements, and supervised almost everything, so much so that she was attacked as an “autocratic character”  by disgruntled physiologists and doctors.⁶⁰ Hunt abused her power in relation to publishers, regulating the temperance textbook industry to only publish her own books, while also threatening to revoke such endorsement if the publishers did not meet her demands.⁶¹ Her actions showed that confidence only in the WCTU’s work and morality and belief in total abstinence compelled Hunt to crack down on textbooks that interfered with scientific temperance’ work; increased revenue and power arrived as beneficial consequences. Hunt’s shenanigans even angered people in the WCTU like Clara Hoffman, superintendent of the Pennsylvania branch. Hoffman lamented that Hunt did not give any due credit to Ms. Willard, organizer of the WCTU, but instead, in “the booklet An Epoch of the 19th Century[,]...has two pictures of herself, one of her sister and several pictures of” other beneficiaries helping with her campaign.⁶² Her nepotism and moneyed interests reflect the intrinsic issues within the temperance movement, where a tyrannical Hunt struggled to maintain power. 

Buried in this clash between factions within the WCTU and opposing physiologists, however, was also the idea of what children should read and learn. Much before Prohibition, in 1845, children read books like Struwelepeter, which promised slow and painful consequences for any child rash enough to disobey their parents. One passage cheerfully recounts in rhyming couplets an girl who played with matches, “ burnt, with all her clothes, / And arms, and hands, and eyes, and nose; / till she had nothing more to lose / Except her little scarlet shoes; / And nothing else but these were found / Among her ashes on the ground.”⁶³ Facing streams of rhetoric from the scientific temperance instruction, physiologists pushed back and worried about its implications, with one doctor noting that “Textbooks are written with a deliberate purpose to frighten the children...an attempt fraught with danger on account of the natural reaction of healthy children, boys especially, to such exaggerated statements.”⁶⁴ Superintendents like George H. Martin argued that the “physiological details are not suited to young children.”⁶⁵ Even teachers who were supportive of temperance education seemed surprised that their students were not negatively affected. One teacher responded after being asked if temperance education positively affected children’s views of alcohol with: “Yes. When Children are taught what alcohol will do to their insides they are not at all anxious.”⁶⁶ The change in tone and increased anxiety for children’s well-being reflects the far-reaching effects of the debate on scientific temperance instruction, and characterizes a shift to “safety-ism,” the modern preoccupation with protecting children from the world’s dangers at all costs. Organized women like Hunt asserted that women had the moral, divine, and scientific authority to change school curriculums and laws for complete abstinence; physiologists and superintendents pushed back as the women’s agitation infringed upon their power. Their arguments raged on and went to such extremes that the question no longer became not who was correct, but who alone could wield authority over the infinite masses of children. 

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Endnotes

1. Michael S. Pollard, Joan S. Tucker, and Harold D. Green. “Changes in Adult Alcohol Use and Consequences During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US.” JAMA Network Open. 2020;3(9):e2022942. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.22942
2. “An Able Women,” Daily Journal, Nov. 28, 1997, accessed in Lecture Method 2, folder 278910-013-0008, Proquest, Ohio Historical Society, 6. 
3. Senate, Reply the Committee of Fifty, 8. 
4. Jonathan Zimmerman, "The Queen of the Lobby: Mary Hunt, Scientific Temperance, and the Dilemma of Democratic Education in America, 1879-1906," History of Education Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1992): 7. 
5. Zimmerman, “The Queen,” 3. 
6. Okrent, Last Call, 20. 
7. John S. Billings.,  W. O. Atwater, H. P. Bowditch, R.H Chittenden, and H. W Welch, Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem, Vol. 1., (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1903), 113; Okrent, Last Call, 20. 
8. John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, 107. 
9. Okrent, Last Call, 21. 
10. Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, (New York: Scribner, 2010), 21. 
11. U.S Congress, Senate, Reply to the Physiological Subcommittee of the Committee of Fifty, written by Mary H. Hunt, February 27, 1904, 19; Mary H. Hunt, A Temperance Physiology for Intermediate Classes and Common Schools, (New York: A.S. Barnes & Company, 1884), 170. 
12. Hunt, Physiology for Intermediate Classes, 171. 
13. John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, 44. 
14. Jonathan Zimmerman, "When the Doctors Disagree: Scientific Temperance and Scientific Authority, 1891–1906," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48, no. 2 (1993):181; John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, xi. 
15. Zimmerman, “The Queen,” 6. 
16. Mary H. Hunt, Physiology and Health No.1 for Primary Class: Studies of the Human Body and the Effects of Alcoholic Drinks and Narcotics on Upon Life and Health, (New York: Iveson, Blakman, and Company, 1889), 51; Ibid., 61. 
17. Hunt, Primary Class, 33; Ibid., 35. 
18. Hunt, Primary Class, 33; Ibid., 27. 
19. Orestes M. Brands, Good Health for Children: in Easy Lessons Upon Food, Drink, Air, and Exercise, Revised Edition, (Boston: Leach, Shewell, and Sanborn, 1890), 20. 
20. Brands, Good Health for Children, 40. 
21. Hunt, Physiology for Intermediate Classes, 171; Brands, Good Health for Children, 37. 
22. National Temperance Advocate, June, 1880, New York, accessed in Lecture Methods 2, folder 278910-013-0007, Proquest, Ohio Historical Society, 5. 
23. Ibid. 
24. Hunt, Primary Class, 35. 
25. Scientific Temperance Instruction, Mary Hunt Biography, Defense of Textbooks, 1879-1963, accessed in Lecture Methods 1, folder 278910-013-0006, Proquest, Ohio Historical Society, 7. 
26. Senate, Reply to the Committee of Fifty, 17. 
27. Senate, Reply to the Committee of Fifty, 10. 
28. Senate, Reply to the Committee of Fifty, 18. 
29. Letter from McDuffee to Mrs. George. Houghtaling, Oct. 4 1897, Scientific Temperance Federation; Letterbooks Folder 278910-005-001, Accessed in ProQuest, Ohio Historical Society. 
30. Brands, Elementary Treatise upon Physiology, (New York: Leach, Shewell, and Company, 1883), 187. 
31. Letter from Mary H. Hunt to the Gentlemen in the Temperance Text-book Commission of Minnesota, April 23 1887, accessed in Mary Hunt Biography (IV), Preparation of Textbooks, Proquest, Ohio Historical Society, 53. 
32. Letter from Hunt to the Text-book Commission of Minnesota, 54. 
33. Scientific Temperance Instruction, Mary Hunt Biography, 1879-1963, 7. 
34. “Reply to Mr. Day’s Northampton Paper, ‘Difficulties of Teaching Scientific Temperance,’” Our Message Supplement, 1889, accessed in Defense of Methods, folder 278910-017-0000, Proquest, Ohio Historical Society, 9. 
35. Zimmerman, “Doctors Disagree,” 181. 
36. John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, 39. 
37. John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, 31. 
38. Franklin W. Barrows, Lyman C. Newell, Richard E. Dodge, Mary Rogers Miller, and Henry R. Linville, “Sixth Annual Meeting of the New York State Science Teachers Association,” Science 15, no. 384 (1902):729; John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, 44. 
39. John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, 26; Ibid., 44. 
40. John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, 26; Ibid., 39. 
41. John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, 26; Ibid., 23. 
42. Zimmerman, “The Queen,” 20. 
43. John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, xxi. 
44. John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, 83. 
45. Martha H Verbrugge, Able Bodied Women: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 51.
46. Ladies Physiological Institute, Ninth Annual Meeting of the Ladies’ Physiological Institute, (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1857), 7; Ibid., 9. 
47. Ladies Physiological Institute, Ninth Annual Meeting, 11.
48. Verbrugge, Able Bodied Women, 52. 
49. Ladies Physiological Institute, Ninth Annual Meeting, 8.
50. Ladies Physiological Institute, Ninth Annual Meeting, 9.
51. Verbrugge, Able Bodied Women, 93. 
52. Senate, Reply to the Committee of Fifty, 8. 
53. Senate, Reply to the Committee of Fifty, 7. 
54. Mary H. Hunt, The American People Say the Rising Generation shall be taught the laws of Health, An Open Letter to the Physicians of Massachuetts, May 9, 1990, No. 25., Accessed in Mary Hunt Biography (V), Preparation of Textbooks, from Proquest, Ohio Historical Society, 33.  
55. Mary Roth Walsh, Doctors Wanted, No Women Need Apply: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835-1975, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 128. Retrieved from the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/doctorswantednow00wals/page/n135/mode/2up
56. Zimmerman, “The Queen,” 9. 
57. Zimmerman, “The Queen,” 19. 
58. Letter from Mary Hunt to Mary F. Lowell, Jan. 22, 1890, Scientific Temperance Federation; Mary Hunt Biography Folder 278910-013-0006, Accessed in ProQuest, Ohio Historical Society, pg. 63. 
59. Zimmerman, “The Queen,” 18. 
60. John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, 22-23. 
61. Zimmerman, “The Queen,” 29. 
62. Letter from Clara Hoffman to Lowell, 9 January 1902, Ohio Historical Society.
63. Heinrich Hoffmann,  Struwwelpeter, 1809-1894, English Translation, (United Kingdom: Dover Publication, 1995), 9. 
64. John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, 32. 
65. John S. Billings et al., Liquor Problem, 39. 
66. Scientific Temperance Federation, “STI Survey: Questionnaire A-D,” April-May 1902, Distributed by Scientific Temperance Federation, Special Topics File, S.T.I Survey, Folder 278910-011-0022, 37. 

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