Recently in this space, we looked at three mostly-gone diseases that loomed huge in the lives (and deaths) of our ancestors: polio, tuberculosis, and “Genesee Fever.”
This week we look at four more killers from the “good old days” – dysentery, cholera, typhus, and typhoid fever. These four together took a huge death toll in the Civil War, when sickness killed more soldiers than battle causes. On top of that, the men who survived… or at least hadn’t died yet… spread the diseases wherever they went, including home.
These diseases meant not just death but very ugly deaths. We can be glad that they’re largely gone from developed countries, but millions still suffer world-wide.
Cholera is an intestinal disease caused by bacteria. It gives you watery diarrhea that may go on for days. Remember – in days gone by there was nothing to cure such diseases, and very little to treat them. Former President James K. Polk probably died of cholera.
It’s often spread by unsafe water, unsafe food, or contact with the feces of sufferers. Well, food preservation was terrible in those days. When a whole army was in camp or on the march, men took their water where they could find it. Not many Americans knew about germs, and even fewer believed that they made you sick. On top of all that, American soldiers were notoriously cavalier about where they sited the latrine, or even about whether they bothered strolling all the way over there.
Cholera’s treatable nowadays, but more to the point it’s preventable, with food inspection, water treatment, handwashing, and good sewage systems. Sometimes it’s just that simple. Your government at work!
Typhus was another old-time killer, also bacterial but marked by fever, headache, and rash. Since it’s easily spread by lice, fleas, mites, and ticks it felt perfectly at home at 19th-century army camps. It may gave been what killed George Washington’s stepson in 1781. Once again, cleaning things up (clothes and bedding to be sure, but also our own persons) stops a lot of cases that might otherwise kill.
Typhoid fever, caused by salmonella, brought a lot of our forebears to the grave, including Prince Albert, Willy Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, William Henry Harrison, and Wilbur Wright. Fever, headaches, constipation, and exhaustion are common… sometimes delirium occurs, which must have horrified parents. Transmission is usually through fecal contamination, once again making 19th-century armies and slums superb breeding grounds. We’ve got vaccines now, and better public health, and more capability to manage symptoms.
Dysentery (sometimes just called diarrhea) was likely the biggest single killer of the Civil War, but it carried off millions of our civilian ancestors too. Outside the tropics it’s mostly caused by bacteria, and once again (WE know), spread through fecal material. The diarrhea is copious and often bloody, and dehydration kills. Public health and personal vigilance can prevent it, or limit it. We can treat it now, but the patient might need to be hospitalized to get the treatment.
According to one figure I read, during the Civil War there were two million men in the Union army, and one-million, nine-hundred thousand of them got dysentery. That’s 95%.
When we look into people of the past we find these diseases on army rolls, gravestones, obituaries, and family Bibles. Sometimes epidemics would devastate entire communities.
Horribly, they often carried off children. Nineteenth-century parenting guides warned mothers not to get attached to their children before their first birthdays. The odds of losing them in the first 12 months was very high, and if you got too attached it would be too heartbreaking. The routine expectation was that each family would lose at least one child – just ask the George Washingtons, the Abraham Lincolns, the Glenn Curtisses, the Winston Churchills, the Franklin Roosevelts, the Dwight Eisenhowers, and the Calvin Coolidges. The “good old days” were not at all what they’re cracked up to be.