Health in the Family

                                                The Paul Family
                               Haskell, Bob, Homer, Wenonah, Kaliteyo

I want to do one more blog about the health and medical care of the past, and I thought I would use my own family as an example. My parents were members of the so called "Greatest Generation," the term coined by Tom Brokaw to describe the generation who grew up during the Great Depression and then fought in World War II. I was glad when Mr. Brokaw wrote his book because I had always felt that there was something special about my parents, my teachers, the people who were adults when I was a kid. They had a kind of toughness and self confidence that I knew I would never have, something that was forged by their experiences.  

In addition to facing the Depression and WWII, the Greatest Generation grew up in a world without effective medical care. Doctors back then didn't have the vaccines, antibiotics and other medicines that we take for granted. They were forced to sit  helplessly at their patients' bedsides as illnesses took their natural course. They may have been able to diagnose diseases, but they were rarely able cure them. In fact, most of the things they did actually made things worse.   

I don't know too much about my father's family, but I know quite a bit about my mother's because of the years I spent talking with her after my father's death.  

My mother said that my grandmother was obsessed with preventing disease. She always made sure plates and glasses weren't shared, and if one of her children was sick she immediately isolated them and washed their dishes separately. She placed heated bricks in her children's beds to protect them from chills. She soaked puncture wounds in coal oil (kerosene) to prevent tetanus, and she tried to provide her children with good nutrition.  

Doctors didn’t understand many things in those days, but they did understand contagion. When someone in a family came down with one of the dread diseases of the time - polio, typhoid, or meningitis, a big red quarantine sign would be placed on the door, to warn the neighbors to stay away.  

Many children died during childhood in those days. There were so many diseases that we no longer worry about that were then deadly threats: measles, mumps, chickenpox, scarlet fever, dysentery, typhoid, rheumatic fever, polio, dyphtheria, whooping cough. Grandmother's first baby died before his first birthday of pneumonia, and her oldest daughter died at the age of six with meningitis.  

One of my mother's older brothers had polio, whick has now been virtually ellimated by a vaccine. Then it caused many deaths and left many more paralysed for life. Furtunately my uncle Homer survived with minor weakness, and Grandmother was able to isolate him so that the infection didn't spread to her other children.  

My uncle Haskell was almost deaf from recurrent ear infections, and my mother suffered from chronic strep throats. both of these infections are now treatable with antibiotics.

 

My aunt Oteka was sick with typhoid fever for weeks, and grandmother thought she was going to lose her. My mother said that the Dr. would come over every evening after he had seen his other patients and sit for a while. His "treatment" amounted to purgatives, the theory being that purging the poisons would help the patient improve. Actually giving a laxative to someone with an intestinal infection is the worst thing you can do.  

Of course typhoid is completely treatable now, but it caused terrible epidemics back then. The doctor would watch for the "crisis," when the high fevers would start coming down, and they could start giving the family hope that their child would recover. Children would be weak and emaciated after a bout with typhoid. Aunt Oteka's hair fell out, and her sisters encouraged her by telling her that it would grow back in brown and curly. She didn't like having straight black hair.  

The recovery time for typhoid fever was long, and patients' had to be fed soft bland food. That's one thing my dad did tell me about his childhood. He had typhoid fever too, and he said that his mother fed him so much custard that she "burned him out" on it, and he never ate custard again.  

My aunt Kaliteyo was the "sickly" one in the family. She had pneumonia several times and also had a large abscess around the root of one of her teeth that finally drained under her chin. Without antibiotics the only treatment for a dental abscess was to pull the tooth so the pus would drain. During most of my mother's childhood there was no dentist in town, but at the time Kaliteyo's abscess broke there was a dentist who came to Pauls Valley in a railroad car. He had his office there, and he and his family lived inside. My mother told me that she got to go with grandmother when she took Kaliteyo to see the dentist, and the railroad car was very fancy inside. There were shiny felt curtains on the windows, and the pull cords had tassles on them.  

As careful as my grandmother was about contagion, she didn't pay much attention to dental care. About all she did to clean her children's teeth was to rub them with baking soda. I don't think any of them reached middle age without false teeth.  

One of the crises in my mother's family was when her sister took in a stray kitten. About that time her parents got news that someone in town had died of hydrophobia, or rabies. They knew there was no cure so they searched for someone with a "mad stone." Which was believed to be able to draw out the poison from an animal bite. They didn't find a mad stone, and Kaliteyo didn't get hydrophobia, but that was the kind of fear that people had of infection. 

People back then used many remedies like the mad stone that we would now consider superstitious. One of these was the asphidity pouch. It was a small packet of herbs that mothers would hang around their children's necks to ward off infection. My mother said that when she saw other children with an asphidity pouch she wanted one too, but Grandmother told her it was just superstition.   

One of my uncles had a chest deformity, and the doctor told Grandmother that it would make him susceptible to tuberculosis. He was skinny, which was probably normal, but the doctor recommended goat's milk to fatten him up, so Grandmother bought a goat. Uncle Tom also had asthma as a child, and there was no treatment. The doctor told Grandmother to keep him away from the chickens, and if he had an attack, not to pick him up, I suppose thinking that she might restrict his breathing. My mother described how her older sister physically restrained grandmother to keep her from picking Tom up during an asthma attack. 

One of my mother's uncles had a farm in the Mississippi River valley, and he had malaria, which was endemic in the area. Every year he would come down with fevers from malaria, and every year Uncle Tom would go to Hot Springs, Arkansas to sit in the baths to boil the fever out. 

Spring water, especially water rich in minerals was thought to be curative, and people came from as far away as Europe to visit natural springs. Places like Hot Springs, and Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and Sulfur, Oklahoma, were popular health resorts around the turn of the 19th century because of the springs there.

My mother had a cousin who had tuberculosis. At that time people with TB were sent to sanitoriums to keep them from spreading their infections, and many went to live in the mountains, believing that the mountain air was curative. Denver, Colorado, is still home to one of the most renowned centers for the treatment of lung disease.    

I think our family probably had it better than most because Grandmother was so careful to prevent the spread of infections, but they still suffered from a lot of illness. It must have been hard, living with the fear that every infection could be fatal, and having to tough it out when you were sick, knowing that there was no treatment.