In July of 1881, fifty infants and toddlers in St. Paul died by the same cause: “cholera infantum.” This is not “cholera,” the illness caused by the Vibrio cholerae bacteria, but rather a general term for any number of illnesses that presented with similarly severe gastrointestinal symptoms that occurred more
When you are sick, you want a reason—you want a cure. If my child has a sore throat, I try to angle my phone’s flashlight so that I can see—how red is it? are there white spots? how many days has it been?—I have a sense
Until I started researching family histories, I couldn't name any symptoms of diphtheria thanks to the routine vaccinations that made the disease irrelevant in my life. It was just another illness with a weird name that made me think of Little House on the Prairie. Books from the
Data that was gathered in the death (mortuary) registers were reported in detail for the public in the local St. Paul newspaper, The St. Paul Globe. The detailed information provided to newspaper readers showed deaths by disease, sex, age, and nationality; and the number of deaths in previous years during
The old mortuary registers have a surprising amount of information in them. Even 150 years ago, data helped health officials know when to sound the alarm about outbreaks of illnesses. This was especially important because of how lethal or permanently harmful these illnesses could be. Mortuary registers for St. Paul
It is something of a joke in my house that I look at death records so much. Genealogical work requires you to bear witness to unnecessary deaths as you piece together the details of the lives of our ancestors. In the U.S. today, we are protected from much of