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.