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Thursday, December 6, 2012

Seldom Seen

The thing I'm talking about is diseases in the last half of the nineteenth century. Doc Halliday had tuberculosis and everyone knows it, showing up nearly every time his name is mentioned in a book. But there were several other illnesses that are barely mentioned, excluding TB, small pox, and cholera. Small pox appears regularly in the journals and diaries of travelers heading west, especially during the Great Migration. Cholera is mentioned in many of these journals, too.

One of the worst plagues on the children of the western settlers was diphtheria and along with that scarlatina or scarlet fever. Both these plagues killed many children. And then there were typhoid fever and whooping cough. No cures were available for these illnesses until after the turn of the century or just before. When I was growing up in the 1930's, there was dipththeria in the neighborhood and my mother was always telling me about typhoid fever that could be caught from drinking out of contaminated streams, one of our main sources of water. The 1918 typhoid epidemic ravaged our little town, killing many of the young residents. Scarlet fever was around in the 1940's, but I didn't hear much of it in the 1950's and -60's.

There are a few novels where one of these sicknesses is mentioned, but it didn't seem to be a very popular subject for inclusion in the stories people wrote back then or now for that matter. I'm just guessing but  TV shows like Little House on the Prairie had episodes where some kid was dying from one of these diseases and someone was sent for a doctor who showed up just in time to save the patient.

I haven't read anything recently where illness makes up part of a story in a Western, unless it's TB (consumption). I'm not saying that there should be more of it, but that these diseases killed a lot of kids and grownups and maybe could have been included in more stories to make a more complete picture of social and family life. Maybe it's just too gruesome a subject to consider.  

7 comments:

  1. One out of 10 Americans died of TB at the turn of the last century. In the early westerns of that time, readers are often being reminded of "lungers" who have come West to benefit from the dryer air.

    In the 1920s, when my mother was a girl, she nearly died of diphtheria, which is how I know of the disease.

    In Elmer Kelton's novel THE DAY THE COWBOYS QUIT, his central character contracts small pox. Doc Holliday's TB is given prominence in Mary Doria Russell's DOC. I take your point, though, that death by accident and disease is rarely given its due in western fiction.

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    1. With the lack of medicines to protect one's self or a cure from these diseases, they were a threat to about everyone. They don't show up much in the western novels.

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  2. I remember seeing mention of small pox in some stories of the west back in the day, but not much now. Makes me think that I need to put this in my next work.

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  3. I read of a few sick from hangovers or from lack of sleep but little else. In the western fiction I read, you are correct, I see little of any type of sickness. But then again they are a bunch of young guys, that must have helped.

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    1. Many of the cowboys and ranchers were isolated by virtue of their work and didn't catch these diseases. But a visit to town could result in bringing back an illness unknowingly.

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  4. Wyatt Earp's first wife died in a typhus epidemic (according to some biographers, anyway). Infectious diseases were probably common on the frontier, due to unsanitary living conditions.

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