Horace Currier died at age 48. Since I
was on vacation this week, I went to the Canaan town clerk's office
and looked up his death certificate. Horace died of Consumption. He
was the first person to die in Canaan in 1866, having died in early
January. As I looked down the page of entries, I was horrified to
see that the vast majority of people who died in Canaan in 1966 died
of either old age or Consumption. Eleven people died of Consumption
that year : Henry Chase, age 39, Sally Blaisdell, age 76, Calvin
Pressy, age 67, Clara Cilley, age 19, Caleb Bartlett, age 44, Herbert
Morele, age 27, Persis Homan, age 24, Levi Goss, age 35, Elisa Smith,
age 26, and John Stickney, age 30.
Most of these people were married.
Many of the men were listed as farmers. Henry Chase was listed as a
soldier. John Stickney was listed as a thief, as nearly as I could
tell. I really studied that entry, and I do think it said “thief”
as plain as day. After I went to the town clerk, I went to the
cemetery. When you look around the Canaan cemetery, you really get a
feeling for the leading families in the town, because people are
buried by family groups for the most part. These people who died of
Consumption in 1866 were representative of some of the leading
families in the town: Chase, Blaisdell, Currier, Pressy, Bartlett,
Goss, and Smith. Blaisdell and Bartlett are names that sound
familiar from the Noyes Academy story.
I found Persis Homan's grave. She was
married to Samuel Homan in 1863, and died 3 years later. Samuel then
married Persis' sister Ruth, who was 19 at the time of their
marriage. She died two years later on July 22, 1870. At the bottom
of her tombstone, there is another name: Mabel Homan, died August 2,
1870, aged 28 days. Ruth died in childbirth and her baby died less
than a month later. Samuel Homan's tombstone wasn't there, and I
searched the cemetery for it. Just by visiting a cemetery, you can
learn what people from long ago were like. Here is a guy who was 25
when he lost his first wife. He cared for her enough to pay for a
nice gravestone. Not everyone had nice gravestones – they were
expensive and not everyone could afford to buy one. He married his
wife's sister Ruth – and she died in childbirth and then the baby
died. This is so sad, I almost cried at the cemetery. Just four
years after his first wife died, Samuel bought another gravestone, with two names on it
this time, his wife's and his daughter's. When I looked on
Ancestry.com. I found that yes, Samuel did marry again. He married
Jennie Rowell and moved to Lebanon, New Hamphire, where he lived with
Jennie and her parents. They never had any kids.
Consumption was another name for
Tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in New
England in the 19
th century. Pthisis, white death, and
“the gentle disease” are other names for tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis patients had flushed cheeks, and bright eyes due to a
constant fever; loss of energy, loss of appetite and a constant
cough. The disease was called consumption because it consumed a
patient. The patient just gradually wasted away, getting sicker and
sicker until they were bedridden and finally died. This process
could take years. I believe that this is why Horace Currier didn't
continue running the store after his business partner, Mr. Wallace,
died in 1853. He was probabsly too sick to work, but it took him
another 13 years to die. This is why he is listed as a merchant in
the 1850 census but as a “gentleman” in the 1860 census. He was
an invalid at that time. It would be interesting to know if Mr
Wallace had “consumption” as well. I bet he did.
Horace and Emma had 6 children, and at
least three of them were born after Horace stopped working in 1853.
I can't imagine raising 6 children and caring for an invalid husband
at the same time. The other thing is, I am dying to know, how did
Emma pay the bills? Not only did she raise those kids, but several
of them grew up to be important people. Her son William Darwin has a
mausoleum in the Canaan cemetery. If you judge a person's status and
wealth by the quality of their gravestone, and I do to some extent,
this guy had plenty of both. Another son, Frank Dunklee, became a
Senator in Washington. It might have been difficult, I'm sure it
was, but clearly Emma did a good job raising her children.
Tuberculosis is caused by a germ –
specifically a bacteria called the mycobacterium toberculosis.
This bacteria lodges in a person's lungs, where it forms pockets
called “tuburcles”. These pockets harden, spread, and become
necrotic, causing a patient to become more and more sick as the
disease continues to progress inside the lungs. Tuberculosis can be
spread through the mucus that patients cough up, and it can also be
spread through infected milk. The practice of coughing into a
handkerchief, then keeping the handkerchief around for several days
until it was time to do laundry contributed to the spread of the
disease.
Tuberculosis most often affected young adults, rarely affected young
children, and young women got it more often than young men. This may
be true nationally, but in Canaan, in 1866, more men died of
Consumption than women, and the age of death seemed to be distributed
among all age brackets except young children. The theory of todayis
that young women did laundry and cleaning, inside, so they would have
been more exposed to the germs that carried the disease.
Back
then, there were many theories about how the disease spread and who
caught it. Many people believed that Consumption was caught from a
vague “something in the air” - not that far off. However, they
believed that it was caught from damp night air, so people shut their
houses up tight, trapping the germs inside where people could become
infected more easily. Some believed that Consumption was a disease
of the poor, because the Irish in tenements seemed to be particularly
afflicted. Others believed that it was a disease of the well-to-do,
affecting the charming and delicate daughters of the upper middle
class. In rural areas such as Canaan, New Hampshire, families that
were better off lived in town, on Broad Street (Canaan Street) or in
the village. Young people would have stayed inside more, and spent
more time shut up in schools than their rural counterparts, who were
outside helping with farm chores, and were more often absent from
school. In this way, young people living in town would have been more
likely to get sick. In cities, tenements with overcrowded conditions
and very poor sanitation would have been perfect breeding grounds for
the disease.
Another
prevalent belief was that since tuberculosis seemed to run in
familes, it must be inherited. It's easy to understand why people
believed this. The disease seemed to run in families because it was
contagious, and once you caught it, it would be a while before you
started to have symptoms. Once the bacterium was in your house,
successive people would fall ill from the disease.
Sometimes
Consumption was called the “romantic” disease. Young people
would become ill just at the age they should have been courting and
marrying. Many times people would marry, knowing full well that
their new husband or wife didn't have long to live. It seems
sensible that Samuel Homan knew that Persis was consumptive when he
married her, because she died two years later. There was a theory
that Consumption caused people to become melancholy (depressed) moody
or overly sensitive. I'm sure it did, actually, but this happened
because these poor souls with Consumption were sick and dying.
Many
artists and writers had Tuberculosis, leading to the thought that the
disease somehow caused people to become more creative. Robert Louis
Stephenson, Frederick Chopin, Lord Byron, John Keats, Anne and Emily
Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Stephen Crane, Robert
Burns,Stephen Foster, Henry David Thoreau, the list of artists and
authors who had consumption goes on and on. Again, I can see how
people would think that somehow Consumption stimulated the brain to
be more creative. We know, however, that that wasn't the case, and I
think it was the enforced leisure time that caused these artists to
write and compose music. They couldn't lay there day after day with
nothing to do, so they wrote books and composed music. Similarly,
consumptive young women were thought to be good models for paintings.
They had good color, with pink cheeks and bright eyes, and they were
thin with high cheekbones and long necks.
The
first scientific knowledge of Tuberculosis came when doctors began
using stethoscopes to listen to the lungs and hearts of their
patients. They soon picked up on the fact that the lungs of
consumptive patients had a distinctive sound. Medical students who
dissected cadavers (which was illegal, but that's a another subject
altogether) observed and documented the diseased condition of many
dead lungs. Gradually, the medical community began to understand
Tuberculosis as a lung disease.
The
real breakthrough occurred in 1882, when a Prussian physician named
Robert Koch isolated, identified and named the bacteria that causes
Tuberculosis by examining the mucus expectorated by a patient under a
microscope. Doctors started advising families to undertake sanitary
precautions to avoid spreading the disease, especially isolating and
boiling the handkerchiefs of the patients. Public Health agencies
disseminated information about how to keep people healthy. Still,
people insisted on believing that you could get Tuberculosis from
going ouside without a coat on, or by dancing too much too late at
night.
Although
the tuberculosis bacteria wasn't discovered until 1882, folks must
have figured out how to prevent the spread of the disease to some
extent before that. Frank Currier died of an apoplexy in
1889. That year, one person died of Consumption, Anne Goldthwaite,
age 32. Interestingly enough, many sources list apoplexy as one of
the main causes of death in the 1800's after Consumption. High Blood
pressure and atrial fibrillation were unknown at the time. No matter
what, people are going to die.
I also discovered some interesting trivia when I watched the Canaan History DVD - I think it is entitled "A Tour of Canaan 100 Years Ago". The pipe wrench was invented in Canaan. Also, another fun fact - the very first recipient of a diploma from Cardigan Mountain school - the first boy in line at the first graduation - was F. Lee Bailey - famous lawyer during the '60's and '70's.
