Neither
my wife nor I have to go back very far in our family trees to find direct ancestors
who died of Phthisis, more commonly known as tuberculosis: Mary Elizabeth (Pearson)
Shepheard, my great-grandmother, died in 1891; and Elizabeth (Walker) Cooper,
my wife’s grandmother, in 1922. The dates are far removed and the origins of
the disease are quite disparate. Both left young children behind, though, as
well as husbands who I believe had difficulty coping with the care of those
children in addition to the loss of their partners.
Tuberculosis
is one of those diseases that have been around the world for a very long time.
There is probably not a family that has not had someone afflicted and/or died
because of it. One can find a great deal of information on tuberculosis on the
Internet, starting with Wikipedia, which notes that it has gone by names, consumption,
phthisis, scrofula, Pott's disease and the White Plague at various times in
history. The disease appears to go back thousands of years, to the Neolithic period.
It was certainly around in Greece in the 5th century, apparently one
of the most common causes of death there. It was present in India in 1500 BC,
Egypt in 2000 BC and possibly in China in 4500 BC. Europe was plagued by the
disease for hundreds of years. It was present there during the Middle Ages and as
widespread epidemics (the Great White Plague)
into the 19th century. Some researchers have estimated that tuberculosis
in all of its forms have killed over a billion people around the globe over the
last two hundred years. In 2013, according to the World Health
Organization, 9 million people fell ill with it and 1.5 million died.
The
first record in Cornwood parish, Devon, (which parish I look after as on Online
Parish Clerk) burial records was in 1770. That was a period when the then vicar
made an effort to record causes of death. Not all ministers did so in the past
so the record is incomplete. In that year and the two following there were also
many deaths from small pox. Adjacent parishes do not have this kind of detail
however statistics show there was a substantial increase in the number of
burials during this time period; so there must also have had many residents die
of consumption as well. The disease hit all ages and all socio-economic groups.
I
do not know how My Great-grandmother contracted TB. It was certainly easily
spread by contact with others who had it, primarily through the air. She was
probably already in the early stages when my grandfather was born, seven months
prior to her death. She may have caught it in a medical ward, a crowded tramcar
or even at church. We won’t likely ever know.
The
manner in which my wife’s grandmother was affected is a bit clearer. She was admitted
to an asylum just a couple of years after the birth of her last child. At the time
she was suffering from what was described as “a state of wild maniacal
excitement” and “hallucinations of hearing” (possibly schizophrenia?). Asylums
in Scotland through the early 20th century were also places where
people sick with tuberculosis were confined. In the less-than-hygienic
conditions, highly contagious diseases like tuberculosis spread rapidly. Many patients,
originally hospitalized for mental illness actually died of other causes such
as phthisis.
Phthisis
is a particularly nasty sickness, originally defined by Aelius Galenus, a
prominent Greek physician, as the "ulceration of the lungs, thorax or
throat, accompanied by a cough, fever, and consumption of the body by
pus."
Effective
treatment of consumption was virtually unavailable well into the 20th
century, until the discovery of Streptomycin which came into use in the 1940s
and isoniazid in the early 1950s. The antibiotic drugs offered hope that the
disease could be eradicated. That did begin to happen within a few decades –
cases in Britain dropped from around 117,000 in 1913 to about 5,000 in 1987.
With the emergence of other diseases which impaired the immune system, the
appearance of more drug-resistant strains and the reduction in public health
services, the number of reported cases rose again. In the undeveloped world,
the contagion is still widespread.
There
may have been many more family members who became sick with and even died of
tuberculosis. The lack of records prevents us knowing for sure. We might be
able to track outbreaks of the disease in certain areas and see if any deaths in the family corresponded with times of outbreaks. That might tell us whether tuberculosis might have been a cause.
Wayne
Shepheard is a volunteer with the Online Parish Clerk program in
England, handling four parishes in Devon, England. He has
published a number of articles about various aspects of genealogy and is a past
Editor of Chinook, the quarterly
journal of the Alberta Family Histories Society. Wayne also provides
genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated
