Epidemics and Pandemics Are Not New
Epidemics and Pandemics of the Past
Our recent pandemic was not unique. There have been widespread infectious contagions throughout our local history. The numbers of Indians in the northeast may have dropped by as much as 95% in the epidemic of 1616-1619, originally described as smallpox but now considered an unknown virus of European origin. There were French and English fur traders, fishing fleets and some French colonists on the northeast coast, the Isles of Shoals perhaps, and inland along the St. Lawrence River. Any of these may have brought the disease but no one has been able to pinpoint a ship or a group responsible.
Evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from 1500 BCE. But it was Europeans bringing it here, apparently starting in New England and becoming an epidemic in 1633-1634. The indigenous population, already decimated by the unknown virus earlier in the century, was further ravaged by this outbreak.
Symptoms? High fever, chills, headaches, vomiting, severe back pain and the pustules (pox) that would appear everywhere on a person’s body. Nearly 25% of those who contracted smallpox died. In 1721 there were 6,000 cases in Boston, population 11,000. Some among those who survived were blinded, scarred, and weak the rest of their lives.
Smallpox continued among the colonialists as a particularly awful sickness and by the 18th century New Hampshire townships were given the power to isolate individuals and families who had contracted or been in contact with those who contracted smallpox.
Doctors in England and here began experimenting, giving injections of cow pox as a way of building antibodies to protect the individual from smallpox. In Portsmouth people receiving such an inoculation were sent to an island in the Piscataqua River. Isolated from the general population for four weeks, and becoming asymptomatic within 14 days, some, away from parents and prying siblings, evidently had a grand old time.
Edward Jenner, a doctor in rural England, also conducted tests of a vaccine from cow pox and successfully proved and wrote about its efficacy in 1796. He is considered the father of immunology.
Another disease lurked. In the summer of 1798 a yellow fever epidemic occurred in America’s three largest cities – Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The Aedes Aegypti mosquitos even reached farther north to Portsmouth, apparently by a merchant ship from Martinique. Two sailors had been sick. Then two men unloading the ship came down with the fever, as well as the ship owner’s children who died. The disease spread through the crowded Portsmouth neighborhood with death claiming more than one hundred people.
It seems likely that no one from North Hampton was visiting Portsmouth that summer unless they had to do so. But remember Post Road ran through town, heavy with traffic, including the mail, between Portsmouth and Boston. Wonder if the North Hampton taverns were so welcoming of travelers that summer.
In the late 19th century and early years of the 20th, the major cause of death in the U.S. became tuberculosis, also known as consumption. Other names include the “great white plague” because of the extreme paleness of infected Caucasians; and, due to its high mortality rate among young and middle-aged adults, the “romantic disease” named after the Romantic Movement in England and France (1800-1850). Found present in Africa and South America in thousands of years old human remains, it was a European strain of TB that had arrived on these shores.
Its incidence is thought to have peaked between the end of the 18th century and the end of the 19th century. Symptoms included feeling sick, weak, losing weight, fever, night sweats, and, if TB of the lungs, coughing, coughing up blood, and chest pain.
In 1864 French chemist Louis Pasteur had found out that it is sufficient to heat a young wine to only about 122–140 °F for a short time to kill microrganisms, and that the wine could subsequently be aged without sacrificing its quality. Now known as pasteurization, it is widely used in the dairy and food processing industry for food preservation and safety.
Pasteurization kills the tuberculosis pathogen. By 1917, it was mandatory for milk. After that, the incidence of tuberculosis contracted from milk fell dramatically and non-pulmonary TB disappeared.
Milk production was a major business in North Hampton beginning in the early 1850s when John F. French, one of the sons of the Reverend Jonathan French, began to specialize in dairy farming, along with other North Hampton farmers producing milk, cream, butter, cheese and ice cream for the Boston market. The arrival of the railroad had made it possible to transport such a perishable product quickly to a major market.
By the 1890s the John F. French Milk Company was producing over 1000 five gallon cans of milk shipped daily to Boston. The farm was the largest in North Hampton – 400 acres with a barn 200 feet long. When did it become necessary for both health and business reasons to inoculate our local dairy herds? As late as the turn of the 20th century one Little Boar’s Head family brought its own inoculated cow so that their children could consume milk safely each summer.
The flu of 1918 was the next pandemic that hit New Hampshire as well as other parts of the country and world. The Dover Public Library website recounts that city’s experience. The so-called Spanish flu appeared there in September. Most of the first patients worked at the Portsmouth and Newington shipyards. After the first death, Dover’s health board ordered the closing of schools, theaters and any kind of public gathering. Within ten days of the first outbreak, between 800-1000 residents were under the care of a physician. As doctors became overwhelmed, the Sisters of Mercy assisted with the sick and Red Cross volunteers worked at the office of the board of health answering the telephone, and obtaining help for medical emergencies including providing gauze masks for those attending the sick.
The Union Leader in 2020 republished a 2008 column by John Clayton describing Manchester’s experience. Within a week of the first cases, the city’s Board of Health ordered all schools and theatres as well as the public library be closed. That same day, every bed in every hospital was filled. Other organizations offered space and the mayor urged furniture dealers to provide beds. Owners of private automobiles were encouraged to help transport the sick to those overwhelmed hospitals to assist the Fire Department.
As the flu continued, instructions for making gauze masks were published (8 layers measuring 6x8 inches) and the city ordered more businesses to close – bowling alleys, ice cream parlors and coffee houses – and the street cars to keep all windows open no matter the weather. No public funerals were allowed and only outdoor church services were permitted. Retail stores were ordered closed over the Columbus Day holiday weekend. Absenteeism at the mills was as high as 30 to 40% and even the Amoeskeag mills stopped production.
In Boston, nearly 1000 people died within a three week period. Across the country individual towns enacted similar bans as the ones in NH, including New Orleans nixing Halloween celebrations. The Colorado Springs Gazette included a warning from the U.S. Surgeon General that there was no specific cure for influenza and that “many of the alleged ‘cures’ and remedies being recommended by neighbors, nostrum vendors and others do more harm than good.”
What were some of those remedies? An old one for the grippe -- quinine and whiskey; an aspirin of Dover’s Powder (it included a bit of morphine and opium); Oil of Hyomei, sold with an inhaler; and Vick’s VapoRub. Vick’s VapoRub was relatively new to New England then but by mid-November supplies had been wiped out and the company was asking pharmacists to conserve their stock. This pandemic ended as quickly as it started and by the new year, some normality returned.
A long-lived epidemic, however, hovered in the background for more than a half century. In 1894 Otter Creek, Vermont experienced an outbreak of polio (paralytic polymyletis). Dr. Charles Caverly, a Dartmouth College graduate, diagnosed the strange disease as described in the New England Historical Society website. Over the next half century it killed tens of thousands of American children.
Polio had existed for who knows how long – certainly the 1700s. A virus, it enters the digestive system through droplets from nose and mouth and contact with contaminated feces. Most people have no symptoms. In fact, as polio became more prevalent in the 20th century, it was thought improved sanitary conditions and better hygiene actually encouraged its survival and revival. Children when exposed no longer had built-in immunity from their maternal antibodies to lessen polio’s effect.
In 1910 a severe epidemic hit North America killing 2500 people; Massachusetts was especially hard hit. New Hampshire? In 1916, beginning in a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York City suffered 2800 deaths, 80% children under the age of 5. Cats and dogs were blamed and authorities killed 72,000 cats and 8,000 dogs. As polio began to spread, some cities and towns in the Northeast barred outsiders, having police patrol train stations and roads to make sure no stranger crossed state borders.
In 1921 the 39 year old Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted polio. Five years later, he founded the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, later renamed the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. In 1938, as President, he kicked off its March of Dimes campaign. The public sent 2,680,000 dimes to the White House.
Scientists at major universities in the U.S. and elsewhere worked on a vaccine or cure for many years but it was not until April 1955 the Salk vaccine was proven effective and the government began a massive public health campaign to vaccinate every child.
But not quite in the nick of time. In 1955 a polio outbreak occurred in Boston. Boston Children’s Hospital dealt with over 2500 cases that summer and admitted more than 650 children. Some could not breath without the assistance of an iron lung machine, an undoubtedly scary apparatus for anyone, let alone a child.
As described in Wikipedia, an iron lung is a negative pressure ventilator, enclosing most of a person's body, that varies the air pressure in space to stimulate breathing. It assists when muscle control is lost, or the work of breathing exceeds the person's ability. It was reported in March, 2023 that Paul Alexander, age 77, is the longest iron lung patient. Placed in one at the age of 6 when he contracted polio, and was paralyzed from the neck down. Used daily for the past 70 years, he now spends most of his day inside the machine in his house. He graduated from high school, law school and passed the bar exam. Alexander published an autobiography written by mouth and pen a few years ago entitled Three Minutes for a Dog: My Life in an Iron Lung.
As for Covid, over 3000 people in NH have died out of the 381,000 cases. The state’s population in 2020 was about 1.4 million. In North Hampton, more than 1000 cases were reported and they continue weekly, usually in the 1-4 category of the state’s weekly statistics posted by WMUR.
What epidemic or pandemic is next? And when?