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September 2005: ON GETTING SICK!
My editor, Jane Cady, told me about Franciska Rassmunssen’s article on epidemics and wondered if I’d like to write something along this line. I said “why not?”, so we’ll declare this “let’s consider getting sick” month and proceed from there.
We’ve mentioned some of this in previous columns. One reflection on the health of our forebears is that even though the birth rate was very high (a woman could expect to be pregnant 12-14 times in her lifetime), only half of the babies would live to maturity.
Part of the reason for the high death rate was sanitation. We often think of our ancestors as living in a very pristine environment, and it could be if you lived away from a city, but cities were far from pristine. Few cities had sewage disposal until after the Civil War. We rarely consider it, but the world we live in smells a lot better than in the past. Even in the country, swamps and bogs were not drained, and at times could be very, very, stinky. The effluvia emanating from the decaying material was thought to be the cause of diseases. They called it miasma, though that was just a name and not an explanation.
Epidemics were common and often devastating. We hear horror stories about the bubonic plague and others, but even in more recent times waves of disease swept over the land. A web site on the subject lists 59 epidemics in the US since the 17h century. Some were world wide, some local. Measles reached epidemic proportions in the 17th and 18th centuries. New York was paralyzed by yellow fever in 1690. In 1775-76 as the American Revolution was starting, the whole world suffered a terrible influenza epidemic.
Sometimes we are able to identify what the epidemic disease was, sometimes not. In 1783 there was an “extremely fatal” bilious disorder in Delaware, Philadelphia, and New York. 1793 was a bad year for epidemics: they had “putrid fever” in Vermont, Virginia had an influenza epidemic that killed 500 people in 4 weeks, Philadelphia lost 4000 to yellow fever, Harrisburg, PA had many deaths, the cause unexplained.
Yellow fever came into its own in the early 19th century. About this time cholera hit New Orleans, killing 3000. In 1857 the whole world was hit by influenza in one of the worst epidemics ever. This one was repeated in 1918 in the last really huge world-wide epidemic which we described a few months ago.
We have improved sanitation and developed agents to combat the various ailments. Still, authorities are no more than cautiously optimistic about future epidemics. We keep coming up with things like West Nile encephalitis which scare us. So far, so good. At least we’re better off than a century ago when we had mostly patent medicines which contained a high percentage of alcohol and sometimes morphine or cocaine. They made us feel better but not because they were curing the affliction.
My mother-in-law, Mary Ellen McNeal (she celebrated her 95th birthday August 10) survived a siege of typhoid fever when she was a girl in Coal Valley around 1923. She was in 7th grade and was ill for the better part of a year. She was quarantined for 6 weeks. Quarantine was about the only means of preventing a disease from going epidemic. It was not totally effective but was about the only way of doing it at the time. She relates how she was helpless for a long time and lost her hair. She has a picture of herself when her hair had grown to the length of the average boy. Whatever she touched or used had to be either destroyed or disinfected.
I have an old elementary school health textbook, copyright 1915. It belonged to my brother, his name is in it (so is mine, I guess I thought I’d take possession of it, since he didn’t need it). One of the authors was J B Kellogg. He was Superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. We remember him today as the man who put his views on healthy food to work and created the Kellogg Cereal Empire. The book gives an interesting perspective on the health ideas of the day.
I had a sister. Emily Caroline Nelson, born March 24, 1911, died January 16, 1913. I always feel a sadness when I think of her. She died of diphtheria. I always wonder what she would have been like. I think she would have been nice to her little brother. My parents talked about her often. My Dad was furious at the doctor who had refused to use that new-fangled anti-toxin on her.