Consumption in Canaan and New England

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.