Last week I stated
that poisons will be my blog topic series for the near future. I’m sorry, but I
have to interrupt myself. I want to share a discovery that will indirectly tie into a discussion of poisons. It might also be useful to an historical writer.
Approximately
twenty years ago, my grandmother and I were going through a box of old photos.
I came upon one picture of a baby (see photo), and my Grandmother said, “That
was Mabel. She was born two years before me and died when she was eight months
old.”
“How did she
die?” I asked.
My
grandmother shrugged and said, “Something called phantom.”
I questioned
her further, but she remembered nothing else. No clues to find out what this
disease or illness was. I assumed the word phantom
was her interpretation of something she’d heard as a child. Kids often hear
words wrong.
My
grandmother died a few years after that discussion. With her passing, I lost the
only person who remembered little Mabel. I entered her into my family tree,
then wrote down the few facts I knew on the back of the cardboard picture and
tucked it into my genealogy notebook.
Forward
about ten years. . .
I got a
computer and internet access, and tried to research the disease. I used the
spellings “phantom,” “fantum,” and “fantom,” but found nothing in the online
lists of old diseases available at that time. Eventually I stopped looking, and
Mabel’s memory and her picture were once again relegated to my genealogy
notebook.
Forward to
the present. . .
My husband
and I were watching Marshall Dillon
(the show that preceded Gunsmoke) on
the Western Channel, as we do every evening lately—him on the couch, and me in
the chair with my computer in my lap. During this broadcast, Doc Adams
diagnosed a cowboy with “brain fever.”
What exactly was brain fever? I
wondered. I’d heard of it before, but didn’t know the details. So, I Googled it.
One thing led to another, as often happens with internet exploration, and I found one site
that contained a long list of old-timey diseases and the modern disease
equivalents.
Out of
curiosity, I glanced down the list. That’s when I discovered what probably
happened to Mabel.
Cholera Infantum. In all likelihood, as a youngster, my grandmother heard
about Mabel’s death, and her child’s mind remembered only the last portion of
the disease. . .fantum. Now I have a likely cause of death to put in my photo
album with Mabel’s picture.
Cholera
infantum isn’t related to cholera at all, but the symptoms are similar. It was
a ruthless, brutal summertime killer of babies. I’m not sure where the word infantum comes from. Maybe from the
Latin word infantia, which means
infancy? But while reading about the disease, I found some information that’s
worth sharing, in particular treatments that probably killed more babies than
saved them. That will be my discussion next week and will segue beautifully into
a discussion of poison.
Does anyone
else have a story like this to share about a long ago family member?
