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Childhood Illness

This article was written by J. Earl Clauson and published on December 9, 1936, in the Evening Bulletin newspaper of Providence, Rhode Island, under the heading “These Plantations.” The piece is untitled but tells about the realities of childhood illness in Exeter a century and a half ago.

 

 

            Physicians top the list of the various classes of mankind, not too many, whose aim is to work themselves out of a job. Their ultimate goal, only dimly seen, is first to cure human ailments, next to prevent them, and finally to prolong life indefinitely.

 

            When their final achievement has been registered they will have lost lucrative employment, and this terrestrial sphere will promptly become so over-crowded that either one in every four persons will have to be ploughed under or this proud species in which we have membership will be compelled to seek other planets for occupation. By that time, of course, stratosphere expresses will be running to Mars and similar near-by places which, for all we know, may be even more delightful abiding places than Rhode Island.

 

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            This line of thought began when the other day we pressed through the dark forests of the Woody Hill section of Exeter and come on the burying ground of the Bliven family. It is a lovely, lonely spot, high, dry and secluded, where the partridge may drum undisturbed in the spring and the wild deer crop the sweet herbage of early summer.

 

            Just the place for a philosopher’s grave, you would think. The nameless effluent of Deep Pond sings at the foot of the slope and a little below joins Parris Brook. That in turn, encouraged, splashes soon into Wood River, which the Narragansetts knew as Ashawaug.

 

            The Bliven homestead is a mile or so away, now the quarters of the Mount Tom Club, which holds title to all that solitude.

 

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            It was not because the Mount Tom Club is largely composed of doctors seeking sanctuary from telephone calls the train of reflection started that eventually they will work themselves out of a chance to get disgustingly rich, but the sight of four small graves of members of the Bliven family. They died at various times within a period of 16 days. The headstones read as follows:

 

            “William Bliven, son of John and Hannah C. Bliven, died April 12, 1860, aged five years, 11 months and 18 days.”

 

            “Harriet N., daughter of of John and Hannah C. Bliven, died April 20, 1860, aged six years, six months and 11 days.”

 

            “George L., son of John and Hannah C. Bliven, died April 23, 1860, aged seven years, 10 months and 21 days.”

 

            “Mary, daughter of John and Hannah C. Bliven, died April 28, 1860, aged two years, six months and 16 days.”

 

            The legend of the countryside, still preserved by old-timers, is that the little ones were wiped out by diphtheria. It was known then as membranous croup, which at that time was the terror which walked the night to the bedsides of parents.

 

            A racking bronchial or laryngitical cold was then, and in our own childhood, which was later than 1800, simply croup. It was when the membrane formed, choking the patient to death, that it became membranous croup. Physicians differentiate more closely today.

 

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            When the membrane formed there wasn’t much that could be done except wait developments. The doctor was a long way off; father had to hitch up and go after him (from the Bliven home probably to Wyoming or Hope Valley) while mother remained at home rubbing the patient’s chest with liniment or skunk oil, wrapping heated red flannel around the throat and carrying the load of worry.

 

            There were other rough and ready treatments, last resorts when the child was rattling and choking, and as likely to kill as cure. If the membrane could be lifted until doctor came there might be hope.

 

            In the case of the four Bliven little ones evidently there wasn’t. One after another over a space of 16 days they were carried to the lonely graveyard on the knoll, and the big house which now on occasion swarms with doctors who would have known just what to do must have seemed strangely silent after the last had been laid away.

 

            The point at which we arrive gradually, trusting it wouldn’t elude us altogether, is that diphtheria has been practically wiped out as a terror of childhood. Physicians take credit for their profession (and we have no doubt justly) for elimination of a profitable branch of practice.

 

            In the weekly report of the State Department of Health nowadays you seldom find a single case. The explanation, say the doctors, is that anti-toxin injections have proved sovereign over membranous croup, and that such a tragedy as swept away the four Bliven children could not recur.

 

            Epidemics of the disease have been traced back to Homer’s day. In England in the 16^th century it was called “sweating sickness.” It was known also as “malignant angina,” the word angina meaning almost any sort of choking.

 

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            In 1860, the year of the Bliven tragedy, Dr. Daniel D. Slade of Boston won the Fiske Fund prize of the Rhode Island Medical Society for an essay on diphtheria. The men of science were studying it closely then because in that year and for a few years before it had been especially malignant in New England. But a long time yet was to elapse before effective treatment was discovered.

 

            Now, as we have noted, it seldom appears, and parents have stopped lying awake nights worrying about croup. They have learned the difference between that and a sore throat.

 

            As for the Bliven family, it is pleasant to know that other children helped fill the gap the loss of four had left. In 1865 , a daughter, Amy, was born. She died in 1890. Another daughter, Hannah, was born in 1866 and died in 1913.

 

            The bereft father and mother survived to ripe ages. John died in 1895, aged 71 years, and Hannah, his wife, who had been a Barber (Woody Hill is populated by representatives of the Barber family) carried on until 1906, when she was 83 years old. Her dust mingles with that of her babies on the lovely, lonely, sweet-scented knoll, beyond the nameless brook.

Original story by J. Earl Clauson, originally published in the Providence Evening Bulletin under the heading "These Plantations". Later collected into a book of the same name that was printed in 1937 by The Roger Williams Press (E. A. Johnson Company).