Usually a minor complaint, nineteenth-century treatments included dabbing the canker with nitrate of silver, sulphate of copper, iodine, or, in persistent cases, mercury. Ĭanker > Commonly found in infants and children, a canker is an oral ulcer or sore located on the lips or mouth, which can cause the gums to swell and recede from the teeth. Cattle, too, can also die of Black Tongue. According to the The American Journal Medical Sciences, treatment included nitrate silver and “as much brandy as the patient can digest.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Black Tongue could also be a symptom of a fatal vitamin deficiency, commonly found among impoverished infants and children. As a highly contagious infection, individuals with “Black Tongue” were regularly quarantined. īlack tongue > Black Tongue, as the name implies, is a dark discoloration of the tongue, often indicative of typhoid or diphtheria. In some instances, atrophy was considered a fatal condition while in other cases it was labeled a “natural” component of aging. In the nineteenth-century, A Dictionary of Practical Medicine recommended that “vital energy” be restored to the atrophied body part by improved nutrition, tonic powders, or bleeding. Resulting from aging, malnutrition, illness, disease, or other causes, atrophy usually progresses gradually and is not always life threatening. As a broad category, it can refer to medical conditions as diverse as osteoporosis, heart disease, thyroid disease, or menopause. Ītrophy > Atrophy is the degeneration of tissue, muscles, organs, or bones. ![]() People having apoplectic attack were told to remove tight clothing, consume belladonna, and call for a physician. According to nineteenth-century doctor Egbert Guernsey, the illness was most prevalent in women, older adults, and those with “a stout short body, large and short neck, corpulence, dark, red countenance.” A fit of apoplexy, he believed, could be induced by sudden temperature changes, excitement, alcohol abuse, drugs, or, in men, tight neckties. ![]() In the nineteenth century, typical treatments included poultices and lancing.Īpoplexy > Apoplexy is a stroke or brain aneurysm, which results in confusion, unconsciousness, and partial or total paralysis. Found on both internal organs and external tissue, abscesses have multiple causes, including viral bacterial infections and as a side effect or symptom of numerous medical conditions. Other categories are so arcane that they need to be defined.Ībscess > An abscess, or a boil, is raised, swollen bump filled with puss. Categories like cancer, “heart, disease of,” and apoplexy (stroke or aneurism) map neatly to our own understanding of how people typically die. In many cases, the deaths by black tongue, chlorosis, jaundice, rickets, scurvy, and perhaps even dirt-eating could have been cured with a simple multivitamin or a more steady, sensible diet. Other categories, however, reveal something important about the nineteenth century-the fact, for instance, that many people were dying of simple vitamin deficiencies. The independent listings for “menses, excess of” and “menses, suppression of” reveal a typically male preoccupation with, and misunderstanding of, female biology. ![]() ![]() Certainly some of the categories reveal more about the data collectors than their world. Even so, what I find compelling about the 1850 nosology is not its medical accuracy but what it reveals about a people trying to discipline death to careful categories. More likely people died with these things not of them. Abscess, canker, carbuncle, cramp, eruption, hemorrhoids, spasms, teething, tetter, thrush, and worms do not normally kill. The nosology created for the 1850 Mortality Census, then, was inevitably crude: 300,000 Americans were reported as having died in 170 ways, many of which we wouldn’t recognize and some of which weren’t even deadly. In 1850, medical diagnostics were rudimentary, autopsies were rare and reliable data scarce. The global doubling of human life-expectancy-the most-important thing that ever happened-would not have been possible without dramatic improvements in nosology, the classification of human diseases.
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