Epidemic

by David DeKok

  Conservative faculty members didn’t much like it, either. Ever the priggish scold, Professor Burt G. Wilder, who had written a letter to the Board of Trustees in 1902 complaining about Saturday baseball games on the green near his classroom, now wrote to former Cornell president Andrew Dickson White (Schurman was in New York for his Cooper Union speech) complaining about the Junior Prom on hygienic and moral grounds. He said the dances “induce loss of self-control, breaches of decorum, and the use of stimulants.” Wilder lamented that behavior rules set by the Board of Trustees might be ignored by the students—he recalled an incident several years earlier when extinguishing the lights to end a dance was foiled by students who brought in portable lamps—but suggested turning the fire hoses on the rowdy youths and expelling them from Cornell if that happened again.38

  No one, neither Wilder nor anyone else, was publicly stating the obvious: that with a typhoid epidemic in Ithaca that showed no signs of abating, the Junior Week events ought to have been canceled. A typhoid death, possibly the first of the epidemic, had occurred that morning. Emma H. Smith, age thirty-six, a native of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who had lived in Ithaca for nine years, had died after two weeks of suffering. She left behind a husband, Edgar, and a son, Frank.39

  Bringing hundreds of young people to a city under attack by a disease with an affinity for young people seems beyond reckless today and clearly left people uneasy in Ithaca in 1903. The Daily Journal, in one of its rare expressions of concern about typhoid fever, published an editorial on February 2, “Danger in Junior Week.” Brainard Smith, the editor, warned students to be careful and not to overtax their bodies. Then he addressed an issue that must have been lurking in the background: “It is out of the question now to think of postponing or giving up the plans made for the festivities of Junior Week.” As with every big Cornell social event, the Junior Prom was as much for the adults of the Ithaca upper crust as it was for the students. Laura Hosie Treman, Robert’s wife, didn’t miss one for forty years.40 The Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper, finally awakening from its normal torpor of that era, reported that twenty-nine students suffering from typhoid were in the infirmary. On February 3, the Daily News, after a thorough canvass of local physicians, reported fifty new typhoid cases in the previous day.

  The city Board of Health held an emergency meeting on the evening of February 3 to discuss the epidemic. Dr. Veranus A. Moore spoke at length and answered questions from the board about typhoid. He had received a live typhoid fever culture from Boston that morning, which he needed to perform the Widal Reaction test. At the close of the meeting, the board ordered the drinking fountains in the city schools to be turned off immediately.41

  Already some in Ithaca were becoming nervous and angry about the Ithaca Daily News’s reporting of the epidemic. In an editorial, the newspaper acknowledged its critics’ point that the news was not good for the city but said that trying to hide the facts would do more harm than good. A majority of physicians called the fever typhoid, the Daily News argued, and anyone who doubted it should “see some of the patients who are delirious and close to death’s door.” It was time for action, not more words. “Ithaca today is not a fit place to live in,” the editorial concluded. Two days later, the Daily News published another editorial and added these words: “A paper which fails to print the facts when the situation is as serious as it is at present, fails to do its duty; it is cowardly and dishonest to its readers.”42

  Girls began arriving in Ithaca and were met by their beaus at the railroad station. A fleet of horse-drawn omnibuses hired from across the region ferried them from the Lehigh Valley Station to their rooms. The boys were not allowed to ride, but did jog alongside.43 Both newspapers printed warnings to the out-of-towners. The Daily News printed a blunt message in a box, “Guests in Danger,” advising student committees in charge of the various Junior Week events to make sure that no city water, unless first boiled, was served to guests. The Ithaca Daily Journal did likewise but softened the impact by headlining the warning, “Necessary Precaution.” Like the Daily News, it worried about the water that would be consumed at the dances. Unless precautions were taken, “there is grave reason to believe that this Junior Week will be followed by even more sickness than now prevails, and that those who come here to participate in the festivities will carry away with them seeds of typhoid that may develop in the most serious way.”44 Cornell University issued no warning of its own, and the festivities moved forward without pause.

  At the Cornell Infirmary, Oliver Shumard’s condition became critical. He suspected from the start that the typhoid would kill him and telegraphed for his father, William Shumard, to leave his farm in Bethany to come to Ithaca. He arrived by train in time to reach his son’s bedside and take down his last good-byes for his mother, brother, and sisters.45 Then the death watch began. Zella Marie Clark, also in serious condition, had been joined as a patient in the infirmary by her sister, Annie Sophia. By the end of the week, nearly forty students with typhoid were in the Cornell Infirmary.

  On the morning of the Junior Prom, the first outside news article about the Ithaca typhoid epidemic appeared in the New York Sun, one of the many daily newspapers then published in New York City. Most likely telegraphed in by a student stringer, the small article contained a blunt warning: “There is as yet no check in the typhoid fever epidemic, which is raging in this city.” Walter McCormick, acting mayor of Ithaca, and Dr. Hitchcock, the health officer, worried about the impact of the story on Cornell University. They fired back a telegram: “Today’s Sun contains an article on typhoid fever in Ithaca that is likely to cause anxiety to many parents of students at Cornell. That your readers may know the exact situation from official sources, we desire to say that there do not exceed 100 cases of typhoid fever in Ithaca, of which only forty-five cases are among the students, and that in our opinion there is nothing in the situation which can in any sense be characterized as an epidemic or which should unduly excite the public.” It was an amazing and mendacious statement.46

  By all accounts, the Junior Prom on Friday, February 6, was an event to remember. Carriages pulled up two at a time in front of the Armory to discharge the young men and women, and some not so young. Nearly seven hundred guests came in all. No expense had been spared on food for the sumptuous banquet or the elaborate decorations. Isabel Dolbier Emerson of Brooklyn wrote in her scrapbook, “Oh, that blissful night.” Most of the boxes inside the Armory had been purchased by fraternities, but one of the few that wasn’t had been purchased by Charles H. Blood. His guests included Rob and Laura Treman, Charlie and Mary Treman, William T. Morris, and some of Laura Treman’s relatives from Detroit. Not for anything would they have missed this gala.

  There was even a fountain on the center buffet table gushing water and illuminated by colored lights, in what today seems almost a deliberate affront to students dying of typhoid. The revelers danced the night away to the music of Patrick Conway and the Ithaca Band, unmindful of the suffering of their fellow students in the Cornell Infirmary further down East Hill. The scene brought to mind Edgar Allan Poe’s story, The Masque of the Red Death, about a European prince and a thousand of his closest friends who lock themselves away in his palace and hold a decadent revel, thinking they have escaped the plague raging outside. Death finds them anyway.

  At 11 p.m. that Friday night, as dinner was ending and the couples were preparing to move out to the dance floor in the Armory, Oliver Shumard died in the Cornell Infirmary, his father by his side. He was the first student to die in the epidemic, but not the last. The Junior Prom continued until morning, with the last revelers departing around 4 a.m. On Saturday morning, William Shumard paid $87 for a casket and embalming for his son and $15 for a hearse to carry the casket to the station. The fare home to Bethany was $80.74, covering both the father and the casket, plus $2 for a special transfer at Union Station in Chicago. At the funeral service in the unfortunately named Morris Chapel, six miles
north of Shumard’s home, an “immense audience” gathered. Flowers sent by his teachers and classmates at Cornell and by Dr. Frank Thilly brightened the gloomy chapel. The young man was laid to rest in the church cemetery.47

  That Sunday, the church bells in Ithaca did not ring so their tolling would not disturb the suffering typhoid patients throughout the city. They would not be rung again until the end of the epidemic.48 Anyone who thought the suffering in Ithaca had peaked was wrong. It had barely begun.

  Indeed, between January 24 and 29, eight inches of snow fell in the Six Mile Creek watershed and quickly melted, most likely causing a new invasion of typhoid bacilli into the water supply. It seems the most likely explanation for the many new typhoid cases in February that developed long after the original germs in the water supply should have died out.

  Contrast the water samples collected by Dr. Emile M. Chamot at East Hill School and City Hall on January 27 with those collected at the same locations by Dr. Veranus A. Moore on February 10. The school sample contained 325 colonies of colonic bacteria per cubic centimeter on January 27 and 12,510 on February 10. For the City Hall samples, the count was 600 colonies per cubic centimeter on the first date and 28,980 on the second. “There are undoubtably fecal bacteria in both specimens,” Moore told the Ithaca Board of Health, referring to the February 10 samples. “Bacteriologically, the water is very bad.”49 We don’t know for certain there were typhoid bacilli in the February 10 samples, but the presumption is that there were.

  Chamot and Moore believed they had found two active typhoid cases in Brookton, New York, further upstream on Six Mile Creek. The cases had been contracted in Ithaca early in the epidemic, and patient excrement was thrown in the snow at creekside.50 Even if the contaminated excrement of the workers had all been washed downstream during the early January thaw, the sloppy handling of these cases might have been enough to reinvigorate the epidemic when the late January thaw occurred. It was Plymouth, Pennsylvania, all over again.

  Some Ithaca residents began to shun the water or boiled it before using it for drinking or cooking. But others ignored the warnings or did not understand them, and so the epidemic lived on, gaining new strength and ferocity.

  Chapter 10

  Apocalypse

  The true horror of the Ithaca epidemic was not in the total number of citizens afflicted with typhoid, but in the percentage of the population who became ill—one in ten by the time it was over. That percentage gave the real picture of how hard the community was being hit. Even in a city with a more favorable doctor-patient ratio than any in New York, the physicians, nurses, and medical facilities in Ithaca were strained to the breaking point and beyond. Typhoid erupted in Ithaca like nothing it had ever encountered or imagined in its worst nightmares.

  Newspapers outside of Ithaca did the math and were horrified. The Philadelphia Press looked at the numbers early on, when only 342 people in the town of just over thirteen thousand were ill with typhoid, and calculated that one in thirty-eight Ithaca residents were battling the deadly disease. If Philadelphia, then the nation’s third-largest city with about 1.3 million people, had been hit by a typhoid epidemic of similar intensity, some thirty-four thousand people would be ill. The New York Evening World, which sent two reporters to Ithaca in mid-February, was more sensational: “Confined as this fever pestilence is to so small an area and so limited a population, it is nearly as sweeping in its destruction of life as the ‘Black Plague’ of India.”1 Actually it wasn’t—bubonic plague typically claimed far more victims—but it probably sounded right.

  The fact that nine-tenths of typhoid patients recovered in that era was misleading in a couple of senses, because some survivors took months, even more than a year to regain their health and ability to work, and others became semi-invalids. One pioneer of typhoid research, Dr. William Budd of Great Britain, wrote in 1873 how typhoid took a terrible toll on the families of patients as well, since they could do little but wait and worry as their loved ones hovered between life and death. “The dreary and painful night watches—the great length of the period over which the anxiety is extended—the long suspense between hope and fear, and the large number of cases in which hope is disappointed and the worst fear is at last realized, make up a sum of distress that is scarcely to be found in the history of any other acute disorder,” he wrote. “Even in the highest class of society, the introduction of this fever into the household is an event that generally long stands out in the record of family afflictions.”2

  From the patient lists published in the Ithaca Daily News, and to a lesser extent in the Ithaca Daily Journal, we cannot help but be drawn to the unfortunate homes where more than one person was ill with typhoid. One of the worst hit was the Theta Delta Chi fraternity house at 15 South Ave., where eleven of the brothers lay ill, including Ernest H. Greenwood, chairman of the Junior Prom committee. The Phi Delta Theta house at 125 Edgemoor Lane had five ill brothers, and the Chi Phi fraternity at 107 Edgemoor, to which William T. Morris and Ebenezer M. Treman of Ithaca Water Works still belonged, had two cases. The boardinghouse operated by Richard Wallace at 409 Huestis Street had five ill students and went out of business after the epidemic.

  The mind reels at the calamity that struck the George family of 308 Lake Ave., where six members of the family were ill. They all survived, but what their lives were like afterward remains an uncomfortable mystery. At 408 N. Aurora St., Misses Claire, Helen, and Margery Chapman were all ill. Misses Alice and Lillian Van Zoil and their Cornell student roomers, Charles A. Williams and William H. Snowden, were bedridden at 101 Eddy St. At least they survived; at 201 Hazen St., student Otto Kohls, who had emigrated from Germany with his parents at age two, died on February 17, while John Vernon, a freshman from the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, died a week later. Their housemate, Austin F. Stillman, contracted typhoid but survived.

  In the week following the Junior Prom, deaths occurred almost daily. The earliest patients were approaching the crisis phase of the illness, when their stricken bodies either began to recover or gave up the ghost and died. On February 9, Rev. John Frederick Fitschen Jr. of First Presbyterian Church in Ithaca conducted back-to-back funerals for typhoid victims Dean G. Robinson, twenty-one, and Edna Fulkerson, thirty-five, his own church secretary. A day later, Charlotte E. Spencer of Jasper, New York, became the second Cornell student to die. Her mother was at her side in the Cornell Infirmary when the end came. Two days later, another Cornell student died, Harry C. Francis Jr. of Philadelphia. So did Ithaca High School student Ruia Coon, eighteen. Her mother, Kate Coon, ran a boardinghouse at 142 S. Aurora St. Word of her death brought an abrupt end to the eleventh annual banquet of the Ithaca Cycle Club that night. On February 13, it was George A. Wessman, a Cornell junior from Passaic, New Jersey, who was a Pulitzer Scholar majoring in mechanical engineering. His mother helped with his nursing during the last week of his life. The youngest known victim of the epidemic, five-year-old Esther Howell, whose father, Charles C. Howell, was a member of Ithaca Common Council, died at home that same day after sixteen days of suffering.

  Death from typhoid might come from intestinal perforation, intestinal bleeding, or even pneumonia. Perforation was agonizingly painful and led to death from septic poisoning as fecal matter escaped into the peritoneal cavity. Charles E. Helm, forty-six, a former carriage builder who had been a blacksmith on South Aurora Street in Ithaca since 1891, died at City Hospital of perforation. Dr. Robert T. Morris operated, but it was too late. He found a large intestinal perforation and evidence that septicemia had set in.3 Similarly, if the typhoid bacilli ulcerated their way through an intestinal blood vessel, the victim could bleed to death, expelling half-clotted blood from the rectum. Physicians could sometimes save bleeding typhoid patients if they operated quickly, and nurses tried to be alert for symptoms. There might be a sudden drop in the patient’s temperature, or a complaint of faintness or a sinking sensation. But if the bleeding was profuse, the patient m
ight die from shock almost simultaneously with the gush of blood from the rectum.4

  James C. Vinton, twenty-two, a senior mechanical engineering student from Canal Dover, Ohio, bled out in the early morning hours of February 14. A law student, Henry A. Schoenborn of Hackensack, New Jersey, died that way three days later. He had been the first law student to win a university scholarship. Already displaying symptoms of typhoid during exam week, the last week in January, Schoenborn struggled to complete his tests and then collapsed. He had been at the Cornell Infirmary since around February 3.5

  It seemed like a demonic lottery, with the names of 10 percent of the patients picked to die horribly. Physicians in Ithaca and elsewhere had a variety of methods they used to treat typhoid, but there was no cure. Dr. David Stewart wrote in 1893 that “careful nursing is the one great essential” in management of a typhoid case. The nurse’s duty was to keep the patient fed and clean and comfortable. Complete bed rest was essential, he wrote, and the patient’s diet should be mostly liquid, especially diluted milk, to avoid further irritation to the intestines. Beef broth was highly recommended.6

  Hattie M. Greaves, a typhoid nurse from Elmira, New York, wrote in 1906 that “the constant attention to all of the little things always gives the best results.” Typhoid patients should have a large, well-lighted, and well-ventilated room kept at a cool temperature, clean sheets every day, plenty of cold water to drink, daily sponge baths, and a proper diet that did not irritate their damaged intestines. She stressed the need to always treat the typhoid patient kindly and with patience. “Typhoid patients are frequently in a dreamy state of partial consciousness, from which a harsh word might arouse them to the wildest frenzy.” It was important, Greaves wrote, to keep typhoid patients in bed and lying down, especially during the critical third week of the disease when strain on the lower body caused by abruptly sitting up or standing might be enough to tear the damaged intestinal wall.7