Several weeks before Christmas in 1959, while living in Fayetteville, I got sick with a sore throat and rash. I believe I was already out of school for the holidays.
Even though I was feeling bad, I remember my parents taking us all to Beckley so they could go shopping for some Christmas gifts. I suppose they already knew where they wanted to go and what they wanted to buy, but they left all of us kids in the car for what seemed an eternity. I was 10 years old, and I had to “take care of” my younger siblings, ages 5, 2, and 10 months as we waited in the car. I was miserable. Now, parents these days would not do that, but back then it did not seem like a risky thing to do. I was very responsible and well able to handle the kids. The only problem was I felt so bad.
We lived through that and made it home, but I kept getting sicker. Somehow, my mother had heard that a kid in town had gotten scarlet fever, so she figured out that I had it, too. It was determined that I had contracted it while visiting Santa Claus at the Ben Franklin store around the corner from our house. If you are not familiar with scarlet fever, do take a look at the link to Mayo Clinic.
The doctor came to our house and prescribed antibiotics. The memory is coming back—-I was in bed when he came. I remember the weirdness of my skin peeling later. I don’t know of any other illness in which that happens. The antibiotics, of course, were effective, and my recovery began. Scarlet fever, if untreated, can cause major health problems down the road such as rheumatic fever or heart problems.
Not too long after I came down with scarlet fever, my mother and sister came down with “scarlatina,” which was referred to as a less serious form of scarlet fever. My father came down with the flu. On top of that, a couple of the kids had impetigo, which I was told is caused by the same bacteria that causes scarlet fever. We had a jolly old time of it. Everybody was sick for Christmas.
Because of my illness, the health authorities quarantined us. We could not go anywhere, and no one could come into our house. Our groceries were dropped off at the front door. The sign below is an example (from Connecticut).
The fact that this was in December is very interesting to me. What is it about December? I looked at death records for 1853 in Greenbrier, Monroe, and Kanwaha counties and found that all of the deaths from scarlet fever were among children, and many of those occurred in December, or toward the end of the year. In some cases the date of death was missing. Unfortunately, one gets the feeling that many cases were misdiagnosed—such as several cases where children died of “hives”. Or, sometimes, the cause of death was simply “unknown”.
These records, if you remember from my earlier posts about West Virginia vital records, were transcribed by volunteers in Utah. The death records are hard to figure out because they are not in alphabetical order, nor are they in time order. So, how did they do the transcriptions? I came to the conclusion that they had a bunch of separate papers for each death and just picked them up randomly and recorded them in the death register. You may want to take a look yourself. It becomes clear that there could be many discrepancies and/or incorrectly stated diagnoses, depending on who reported the death.
These were the 15/100 reported deaths from scarlet fever in Greenbrier County in 1853. I noticed Martha Jones, age 2, who was the sister of my great-great grandmother Virginia Louise Jones (Skaggs), who later married Thomas Anderson Skaggs. Do you recognize any relatives in this list?
Ward Comer, 3, July
Agnes, slave of John Livesay, 3, Dec.
Mary Jane Hanby, 6, Sept.
Joseph Riley Nanna (?), 3, April
Nancy Walkup, 3, June
Wm. R. Kingan, 3, Dec.
Sally McClung 2, Oct.
Martha Jones, 2, Oct.
Mary Puckett, 7
John Huggins, 3, Dec.
Elizabeth Ann Patterson, Oct.
John Dickson, 4, Aug.
Ro. N. Harrah, 8, Nov.
Sarah Harrah, 3, Nov.
Catharine Sweeney, 3
There were only 8/148 deaths from scarlet fever in Monroe County, so that raises the question: What explains the difference from Greenbrier County? Maybe I missed some.
James Selvey, 3, Nov.
Jane Kearns, 1 mo., Dec.
Wm. Ballard, 6 mo., Dec.
Parthena Clower, 3, Dec.
George Dillion, 2, Oct.
Jane Faudree, 4, Dec.
Mary Humphreys, 6, Dec.
Samuel Humphreys, 4, Dec.
In Kanawha County, there were about 10 scarlet fever deaths listed in a row of children from different families. I found that a little weird. It seemed like the transcriber deliberately picked up all the papers with scarlet fever and transcribed them consecutively. There were additional scarlet fever deaths, for a total of at least 20 children. With 107 deaths in all listed, that is a high percentage (18%) who died from scarlet fever. I did not write down the names of the children because the record was very light. It was a struggle to read the names.
20 children, illegible
I don’t know why children were so predominantly affected by scarlet fever. I don’t know what parents did to try to treat their children. I don’t know how many children had scarlet fever and survived. I don’t know how many of them were incorrectly diagnosed. Was there a doctor around? There are just so many unanswered questions about the statistics in regard to scarlet fever in these counties, I feel like we can’t even begin to draw conclusions.
We can take comfort from the fact that we have antibiotics available now, and the incidence of scarlet fever seems to be much less than it was in 1853 in Southern (W) Virginia.
In the comment section, I have posted links to a couple of videos that purport to be recipes for natural antibiotics. I have found other recipes for antibiotics in the book Home Doctor, by Dr. Maybell Nieves, Dr. Rodrigo Alterio, and Claude Davis. Dr. Nieves has served the health needs of many Venezuelans in the jungle, and has learned a lot about natural medicines. The ingredients may be hard to find. I cannot publish the pages, but I will share them in our private Facebook group.
If that was the year the 'Barbie" doll came out, I sat on Santa's lap in Ben Franklin's and looked at him and said, "Hi Gary." I didn't have any health concerns. (I bought my cousin a 10 ¢ doll that she could hold in her hand and her mother bought her a 'Barbie'.} (Little girl preferred little doll.) (Aunt was not happy.} I had saved up all of $2, so I shopped at Rahall's store and Sayre Bros. . Thanks for the memories.
I enjoyed this story very much, probably because it brought back memories of when I got the flu at the age of ten. Dr. Collins (from Fayetteville) came to our house and treated me. I was off school for 3 weeks, and when I went back, I took a back-set and was out another week. I missed the whole month of January. I was the only one who came down with it. I remember that my brothers and sisters played rock and roll music and I hated it. My mother made them stop when I requested she do so. Like you, I also helped take care of my younger siblings when the need arose. I'm not sure how good I was at it, but they did survive, as did I.