Monthly Archives: October 2021

Smallpox: Diseases of Days Gone By

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Smallpox used to be feared like plague. And it became one of our first great success stories in the war against disease.
Unfortunately that success came too late to do much good for the Native peoples of the Americas, and the Pacific Islanders. With no previous exposure, and thus no genetics of survival, they died in millions.
With no understanding of germs, people of the 1600s did note that those who survived smallpox rarely got it again, and also that it could spread with close contact. With breathtaking daring they developed inoculation… giving someone a shallow cut, and then binding in pustules from a sufferer. The hope was to get (and survive) a very mild case, thus developing immunity.
It worked! But it seemed insane, and was violently opposed. In 1600s Massachusetts every single Puritan minister (the best-educated people in America) supported inoculation, and every doctor (no education required) but one opposed. Reverend Cotton Mather’s house was firebombed, but over time, people could see that it worked. Still, it was risky. Some got REAL sick, and a fair number died, including theologian Jonathan Edwards.
Until Edward Jenner went them one better, recognizing that people who got cowpox – a much milder disease – almost never got smallpox. Correctly concluding that the diseases were related, he created the first true vaccine (from the Latin “vaca,” or cow). It worked, and it did so without the crudities of inoculations that sometimes led to “overdoses.” That was in 1796, exactly 225 years ago. It would take two centuries, but smallpox is just about eradicated.
Not before killing an Egyptian pharaoh, an Aztec emperor, two Inca emperors, two Chinese emperors, two Japanese emperors, at least eight European monarchs, and a king of Buganda, plus millions and millions more. It also killed a lot of people here in the “Genesee Country” in the 1700s and 1800s.
Our Congress passed the Vaccine Act in 1813, placing smallpox vaccine under federal inspection and regulation, meantime taking steps, including free shipment by mail, to encourage its use.
Woodhull had a smallpox outbreak in 1860s, confining victims to a pesthouse, burying them separately, and burning the pesthouse afterward. Beginning in 1882 the state Board of Health asked everyone to get vaccinated, but Elmira and Watertown had cases in 1901, even as Corning had variola (a milder form of the disease).
Dense, aggressive rash, blisters, or pustules are the most obvious symptoms. For “normal” forms, it killed about 30% of those who got it. More powerful strains killed almost everybody. Most of us of a certain age recall the almost-universal childhood ritual of “getting your vaccination,” which is why for most of us smallpox is a matter of distant lands or dusty history. Good thing!
By the 1950s, eradication passed from a fantasy to a goal, with countries rich and poor, communist and capitalist, of every religion, race, and ethnicity rolling up their sleeves – to get the shots, but also to go to work. Smallpox now exists only in a few closely-watched labs. The last natural case was in 1978… fittingly, in Jenner’s homeland of England.
During the gigantic conflicts of the early 1800s, Napoleon rounded up and imprisoned British citizens who happened to be in his realms when war was declared. He refused all calls to release them, until told that one request came from Dr. Jenner. “In that name,” said the emperor who ruled almost all of Europe, “we can refuse nothing.”

Diary of a Civil War Marine

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From right here in our area we have several lengthy published first-hand accounts of the Civil War, telling of bloody battles at Gettysburg and the Wilderness, of postings as far afield as Missouri, New Mexico, and the Dry Tortugas.

None of them traveled as far as a fellow whose diary has just been published by his great-great granddaughter Christine Friesel. “The Boys of Bath: The Civil War Diaries of Pvt. Charles Brother, USMC” brings us an unusual view of the war. Local men marched off to the army in thousands, but only a handful joined naval service.

Charley Brother came from a prominent Bath family – his father, a former county sheriff, was a stalwart of the Agricultural Society (which puts on the County Fair). Father and sons alike were active in business, and they lived in the house still standing at 110 West Morris Street. In 1862 Charley’s pals Josiah Gregg, Theodore Harris, and Phineas Towle went to Brooklyn Navy Yard to join the marines. Eighteen year-old Charley quickly joined them.

Nowadays the Marine Corps prides itself on intensive training, but that was pretty sketchy in 1862. On the evening of his first full day, a sergeant “took me in hand and put me through a few motions. Said I am competent to go into a squad he has been drilling some two or three weeks.” On November 4 the Bath contingent put to sea in U.S.S. Vanderbilt, originally a steam passenger liner donated by the millionaire.

They were enforcing the blockade of the Confederate coast, and searching for the commerce raider Alabama, getting trained in handling the ship’s guns (cannons) en route. Up till then Charley’s diary had included Bath, Corning, Elmira, Port Jervis, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. Now he sprinkles the names of Bermuda, Spain, the Azores, Jamaica, St. Thomas, Martinique, surely making him the most widely traveled of our Civil War diarists. What he does NOT mention is going ashore at any of these very interesting destinations. Warships were generally allowed only 24 hours in neutral ports, and many sailors liked the dream of tropical isles far better than they liked the reality of navy life. The smart captain kept well offshore, if he wanted to keep his crew.

In February Vanderbilt captured a blockade runner and Brother was told off to join the prize crew (even leaving his coat behind), and take the vessel into Key West. Now separated from his ship, he wound up back in Brooklyn, and was still there in July when “A great riot in opposition to the draft broke out… Twenty of us marines were ordered to fall in… with our belts and muskets. Were given thirty rounds of ball cartridges and marched over to New York.” The genocidal riot ran several days, but Brother’s detachment only needed bayonets once, to clear a park.

By August 5, 1864 he was aboard Admiral Farragut’s flagship, the Hartford, charging though a minefield into Mobile Bay. He was a message runner that day, giving him too good a view of “Men blown to pieces… Killed and wounded in every form…. Our cockpit looked like a slaughterhouse.” By sunset their sacrifice, and Farragut’s audacity, had closed one of the south’s few remaining ports.

On October 24, 1865, with the war almost six months over, Charley got off the train in Corning for breakfast. When he arrived in Bath, a walk of three or four minutes took him to his house, where “Mother and Father were at home.” The war would cast a shadow over the rest of his life. But all in all, it was a happy ending.

(“The Boys of Bath” is available in hardcover from Steuben County Historical Society at $33, plus $5 shipping if needed. Cash or check only – by mail or in person at One Conhocton Street, Bath, 14810. We’re glad we could help Christine in preparing the manuscript!)

Korea: (A Few of) Those Who Served

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Seventy years ago, we were in the middle of the Korean War (1950-1953). Or in other words, thirty years MORE will take us to the centennial – hardly possible to believe!
Bath’s George Haley, a Tuskegee Airman fighter pilot in World War II, returned to air combat for Korea, stayed in that time, served again in Vietnam, and retired as a lieutenant colonel.
Sharing the air with him were John Glenn (90 combat missions and four enemy planes shot down, not counting World War II), Buz Aldrin (66 missions, two “kills”), and Neil Armstrong (78 missions, shot down once). Aldrin and Glenn each got two Distinguished Flying Crosses.
Glenn sometimes partnered as a “wingman” with baseball great Ted Williams (39 missions, mostly attacks against ground targets). Williams had served during World War II, in non-combat roles.
Jolly TV host Ed McMahon, who also served stateside in World War II, flew 85 combat missions in Korea, all of them right on the spot, using an UNarmed Cessna, controlling either artillery or bomber attacks.
Two Hammondsport men who died in Korea had also fought in World War II. Each of them had brothers who died in World War II. You can find all four fellows on the Gold Star Memorial in Hammondsport Central School.
Actor James Garner was wounded twice as a National Guard rifleman in Korea. (His “Rockford” TV character was also a Korea vet.) Fellow actor Sir Michael Caine fought in Korea with the British Royal Fusiliers. After facing a human-wave attack (foreshadowing his film “Zulu”) he wrote, “The rest of my life I have lived every bloody moment from the moment I wake up until the time I go to sleep.” His first movie role was for “A Hill in Korea.”
The active Korean War was “only” three years long, but some of our future public leaders shouldered responsibility there. Our military was theoretically desegregated by then, and the Air Force did it pretty well, but the army was dragging its feet. Future U. S. Representative Charles “Charlie” Rangel was a segregated field artilleryman near the Yalu River when a tidal wave of Chinese troops swept southward. His division was surrounded as it tried to withdraw, and broke apart when it was attacked by night, with no U.S. air cover. With the temperature below zero, a wounded P.F.C. Rangel led 40 men on a breakout, and got them safely back.
“Pete” McCloskey, a fellow future Member of Congress, was wounded twice as a Marine Corps officer in Korea, where he earned the Navy Cross (excelled only by the Congressional Medal of Honor). An angry McCloskey spent almost half a million dollars documenting that Reverend Pat Robertson’s claims to be a Korea combat veteran were false – Pat’s father, a senator, apparently pulled strings to get him out.
A couple of times as a teenager I met John H. Chafee, who went into Guadalcanal as a Marine Corps private, into Okinawa as a second lieutenant, and into the Chosin Reservoir disaster as a captain… also taking time in there to finish Yale, graduate Harvard Law School, get married, and see the birth of their first child (two days before he left for Korea). He would later be a governor (six years), Secretary of the Navy (three years), and senator (33 years, until his death).
As a company commander at Chosin, habitually armed only with a walking staff, he led his men through struggles with the terrain, the subzero weather, the Chinese, and a clueless high command headed by Douglas MacArthur. He led them out, too, through a fighting retreat that threatened constantly to become a catastrophe.
Chafee was one of that now-extinct species, the liberal Republican (natural habitat, the northeastern U.S.). But like his politics or not, hear what author James Brady, who served under Chafee in Chosin as a completely green platoon commander, wrote: “Nowhere, at any time, did John Chafee serve more nobly than he did as a Marine officer commanding a rifle company in the mountains of North Korea. He was the only truly great man I’ve yet met in my life.” I think those who knew him would mostly agree.

Diphtheria, Scarlet Fever, Whooping Cough: Diseases of Days Gone By

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Tuberculosis; polio; Genesee fever.
Typhus; typhoid; cholera; dysentery.
In history and genealogy, we spend a lot of time looking at death. Again and again we see infectious diseases racing across the land, wiping out families, devastating towns and army camps.
Thanks to modern health care, and modern public health, many of those horrible mass killers are mostly memories today. We turn them up on gravestones, death records, news reports, diaries, family Bibles. And from time to time in this space we’ve been looking at these mass murderers – now, we’re glad to say, exceedingly rare, at least in “developed” countries such as ours.
Scarlet fever used to be a great killer of children. There was no vaccine to prevent it, no antibiotic to cure it, only the feeblest of means to treat the symptoms.
Streptococcus is often the starting point for scarlet fever, but of course you can catch it from somebody else. A red rash develops, often including the tongue. Fever follows, too. The kidneys may be affected, and so may the heart. Arthritis may develop for survivors, even in the very young.
We still don’t have any preventive, but we can treat it with antibiotics. We can also fend it off with the usual round of quarantine, masks, handwashing, and milk inspection. It’s still around, but our behavior can vastly reduce the numbers of cases, and our medical science, even in cases were it can’t cure, can do a much better job of treating the symptoms and pulling the patient through.
Composer Johann Strauss died from scarlet fever. Thomas Edison and Helen Keller survived, but lost much or all of their hearing.
Diphtheria is a bacterial disease, usually spread by air. Sore throat and fever are often the earliest symptoms, but they can become aggravated, leading to trouble breathing, and/or inflammation of other bodily organs or symptoms. This one’s been around a long time. Hippocrates had it identified (but couldn’t do much about it) 2,500 years ago, and in our lifetimes there were often a million cases a year.
Ruth Cleveland – daughter of the president, and namesake of the Baby Ruth candy bar – died of diphtheria when she was 12 years old. Queen Victoria’s daughter Alice and six year-old granddaughter Marie both died of it, and were buried together. Eleanor Roosevelt’s mother died of diphtheria, and so did Elisha Otis the elevator man. Killing up to 10% of victims is commonplace, but it can go to 40% for children and the elderly. We can PREVENT it with a vaccine. We can TREAT it by managing symptoms, and with an anti-toxin, IF it’s administered early enough.
Diphtheria vaccine is often given as a DPT shot, also providing protection from tetanus and pertussis, or whooping cough. Whooping cough is just what its sounds like – starts like a cold, but can go on into uncontrollable explosive coughing, often lasting for months – assuming you live.
It used to be that we’d get almost 200,000 cases a year in the U.S., and just about that same number, mostly children, still die every year from pertussis. Antibiotics are a big help nowadays, in countries that have them.
Fwoof. I’m not ashamed to admit that this has been a very depressing series. And it still has at least one report to go. I think it’s important, though. So I’m sticking to it.