Hue Jackson’s Hall of Fame Scammers: C. L. Blood

Welcome back to another exclusive sneak preview of the Hue Jackson School of Scam Artistry!

The US is ripping through vaccines these days! It’s been booming business at vaccine clinics across the country, and I’ve been seeing lineups around the block – even outside my own personal mobile clinic I’ve been running out of my RV. The nice part is that when you use saline, you never run out of supply – unlike other places around the world. When you also allow for a VIP line-skip option – for a reasonable fee, of course – you can make cash hand over fist. Best part is that the CDC is waaaaaay too busy to come check me out – they’re got their hands full enough as-is. Can’t give away too many of my best secrets, though – even though you’re paying for this exclusive content, every man has his limits. Guess we need to chat a little more about fraudulent medical practises, no?

CHARLES LEWIS BLOOD: QUACK AND MURDERER?

BORN: September 8, 1835, Groton, Massachusetts

DIED: September 27, 1908, Manhattan, New York

Nobody shuts up about COVID these days, though with the speed of vaccine programs ongoing in these fifty states of ours, there’s hope on the horizon that we’ll be able to find some better topics of conversation soon enough. That said, as we’ve learned over this past year, there’s still much to discover about the exact nature of airborne viruses. Virology as a serious field of study only really kicked off in the 1920s due to the aftermath of the Spanish Flu pandemic – the last time we saw an airborne virus of this caliber.

Prior to the desperately grim years of 1918-1920, it was really a huge crapshoot to much of how illness actually spread. Louis Pasteur and the promulgation of germ theory was one of the most important scientific discoveries in the history of mankind… but at the same time, due to the lack of understanding about the nature of viruses, it didn’t tell the full picture. This allowed room for quacks like C. L. Blood to make fortunes off of scamming ill people. That’s great hustle!

This week’s subject was all about big promises – as I’ve mentioned in some of my other lessons from before, sometimes the art of the con comes in the form of the big lie. He was a master of it – trumpet your talent nonstop, and after a while, some marks are bound to believe you. Charles Lewis Blood, born in rural Massachusetts, claimed from an early age that his father, Lewis Blood, was a doctor – and that inspired him to follow in his footsteps. In reality, his father was a farmer, lumberman, contractor, and figure of note in their small community. At no point did he ever have any medical training – and neither did his son.

The presence or absence of a medical degree had virtually no effect on C. L. Blood’s determination to practise… and he ended up travelling across the country, working out of a number of different locations – most prominently in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. He moved a number of times in his life – sometimes to evade authorities, and other times to develop markets for his “services” in new cities.

During one of his stints in Boston, Blood learned about a relatively new medical treatment pioneered by Gardner Quincy Colton, a former medical student turned travelling showman, in the 1840s… specifically, the use of “laughing gas”, or nitrous oxide. While it continues to have legitimate medical applications into the modern age as an extremely effective anaesthetic, during the late 19th century, laughing gas was so cutting edge that it seemed almost unreal. In a stroke of luck for Blood, he figured out the production method of the gas; a relatively simple procedure where ammonium nitrate gets heated to 250 degrees Celsius and then decomposes into water vapour and nitrous oxide. With this knowledge in hand, he was able to start producing his own laughing gas, which he renamed “oxygenized air”. Blood’s sales of oxygenized air, as well as the franchising rights to others to distribute it in various American regions, allowed his medical “practise” to flourish in later years. He hired a series of shills to drum up additional business for him, and even hired a page in his Boston offices to take calls of inquisitive customers or practitioners.

All the while, C. L. Blood feuded with others – including many real doctors. In one case in the winter of 1866-67, a rival Boston doctor, Jerome Harris, was also using a re-named nitrous oxide in his personal practise. A “patient”, secretly hired by Blood, was treated for a bronchial condition with a hit of NOX… and fell down, “frothing at the mouth”. In a second opinion by the patient’s own physician – “Doctor” Blood – he was fine… but the apparent “poisoning” made newspaper headlines, and the patient’s lawsuit against Dr. Harris was essentially just blackmail. Harris knew it, and refused to pay… but left Boston all the same, in fear of retribution. In 1884, Blood attempted to blackmail another man by claiming he’d hired a doctor to perform an abortion on a woman who Blood was now dating. Blood and a co-conspirator were arrested this time, and found guilty, serving several years in prison.

C.L. Blood faced off against the law on a few other occasions for such crimes as tax evasion and fraud, but things really took a turn for him in 1890, when he was implicated in a murder-for-hire plot. Earlier, while in prison for those blackmail charges, Blood met Isaac Sawtelle, who’d been imprisoned for a series of rapes. When both of them were released, Isaac plotted to kill his brother, Hiram, who was managing a property left to their mother by their deceased father. Isaac, wanting control over the property, worked with C. L. Blood to abduct Hiram’s daughter Marion, in order to lure him to a remote location and force him to sign over the property. Somewhere along the way, things went really, really awry, and Hiram was shot four times, decapitated, dismembered, and left in a shallow grave. Isaac Sawtelle was busted, and despite singing like a bird that C. L. Blood was really the man responsible for killing Hiram, and that he’d had no knowledge his brother had even been murdered until the next day, the cops never questioned Blood at all. He got off scott-free on the charges. Sometimes it pays to be charismatic and dashingly handsome.

When C. L. Blood died at age 73, he was interred in his family plot back home in Massachusetts, but his widow and his sisters elected not to add his name to the memorial marker – possibly due to the fact that they were so embarrassed by his sordid past of swindling, scamming, hustling, and law-breaking. When you don’t have a monument and your name is still remembered, THAT’S when you know you’ve made it as a Hall of Fame scammer.

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Remember – like most things in this great nation of ours, you can turn a great profit by being bold and loud with it. You don’t even need to be the first – and your solution doesn’t even need to work, necessarily! The most important value of the scammer is that which entrenches our great Constitution – the pursuit of happiness. This, of course, is really just a stand-in for money, because that, to me, is what makes me happiest of all. Don’t forget to call 1-900-FAST-BUX today to book your COVID-19 vaccine appointment – it’s quick and easy, and won’t even break the bank! Pay no mind to the free locations that the media mentions – you don’t really want to camp out in line all day, do you?

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Information from this article taken from here, here, here, and here. Banner image by The Maestro.