by David DeKok
Physicians had their favorite remedies. Dr. Stewart spoke highly of the “justly celebrated Brand method of baths.” Dr. Ernst Brand was a general practitioner in Stettin, Germany, in the middle of the nineteenth century. He did not originate the idea of breaking the high fevers of typhoid with cold baths, but he turned earlier ideas into a system of treatment that became associated with his name. Brand’s regimen called for fifteen-minute baths in sixty-five- to seventy-degree water every three hours, especially if the patient’s temperature was over 102 degrees. An obituary in the British Medical Journal upon his death in 1897 said the baths were responsible for reducing the typhoid death rate in German and Swiss civilian hospitals from 20 percent of patients to between 6 to 13 percent.8
Stewart lamented that the Brand method was difficult to use in private practice, where patients were often seen in their homes, because it was simply inconvenient. An attendant was needed to draw the bath, lift the patient in and out of the tub, give the patient a rubdown while in the cold water, and reassure him that he wasn’t going to die from the cold. Then there was the problem, he wrote, “of the prejudices of those near the patient, who cannot but look upon the cold bath in cases of illness as barbarous in the extreme, if not actually homicidal.” Some physicians scorned the Brand method for this reason. Dr. Luzerne Coville of Cornell University asserted that the cold baths “used up the energies of the patient” and did nothing to eliminate the typhoid bacilli from the intestines. Proponents of cold bath therapy acknowledged all this but pointed to reduced death rates nearly everywhere it was used.9
Interestingly, the homeopathic physicians claimed somewhat more success than their allopathic brethren in treating typhoid. An article in the Hahnemannian Monthly later in 1903 described the work of Dr. Elma C. Griggs, who is said to have treated forty-two typhoid patients during the Ithaca epidemic without a death. She employed very different medicines from those the allopaths used, prescribing the medicinal herbs baptisia, bryonia, and belladonna, as well as arsenicum, which is derived from arsenic. Used in very diluted form, it is part of the homeopathic bag of tricks even today.
Griggs administered saline enemas to typhoid patients twice a day and credited these for “the escape of [most of her] patients from the prevailing hemorrhages.” She gave them tepid baths instead of cold baths. None of her patients contracted pneumonia, the article asserted. “The doctor was careful not to wear out [her] patients, and they all recovered under [her] straight, old-fashioned homeopathic treatment.”10
Ithaca City Hospital normally housed twenty-six patients but packed in as many as sixty-five during February, of whom about forty-eight were undisputed typhoid cases. Cots were shoved into every available space. The Cornell Infirmary was meant to house twenty patients and had about three times that on February 24, even after the first annex in a house at State and Quarry Streets was opened. A second annex was opened later in the new Stimson Hall. Major Burdick at City Hospital put out regular appeals during the month for blankets, pillows, linens, flannel wrappers, slippers, men’s nightshirts, and screens, which were portable dividers to create privacy around individual beds in the wards. Other appeals went out for food, including oranges and lemons, and chickens to make broth. Many people sent flowers to patients in the hospital, finally prompting a plea from the major that notes of sympathy were far less work for the overburdened nurses. He also asked for cash to pay bills and to pay down the large debt the hospital had incurred, suggesting that not all patients could pay upon discharge.11
Many in Ithaca opened their hearts and wallets to the plight of City Hospital and their fellow citizens. Helen M. Baker, a local socialite, organized a euchre party at the Lyceum Theatre to raise funds. Rev. William Elliot Griffis, who had two children of his own ill with typhoid, appealed to the public to drop off cash, linens, or hospital supplies at his First Congregational Church. His own church ladies were busy sewing for the hospital, and so were church ladies all over town. Individual donors, mostly anonymous, gave $3,000 to the hospital. Among the known donors were Franklin C. Cornell of Ithaca Trust Company, who gave $100, and Jared Treman Newman, codeveloper of Cornell Heights, who gave $50. It is impossible to determine whether Morris or the Tremans donated to the hospital. There is no record that they did or didn’t.12
There were no public appeals to aid the Cornell Infirmary, where sloppy care contributed to a higher death rate among students who sought treatment there as opposed to City Hospital. Dr. Coville calculated that as of February 20, the death rate at the Sage infirmary (but not at the Stimson Hall infirmary annex) was 19 percent, significantly higher than at City Hospital, where it was 6 percent. Coville, who visited the infirmary regularly to treat students, was highly critical of how it was being managed by a three-member university committee that included no physician. Coville believed the terms of the Sage endowment of the facility prohibited the university from using its own medical school physicians to operate the infirmary. The committee did not appoint a medical adviser, Dr. Abram Kerr, a member of the medical school faculty, until February 17, by which point several students had died. Kerr’s suggestions for improving care were ignored, and he quit the following day.13
Coville painted a stark picture of incompetent nurses and foul conditions in the Cornell Infirmary. On February 24, he wrote, some sixty ill students were crammed into space intended for a third of that. There was little ventilation, and the air was foul. Some nurses could not give proper baths or take a temperature or pulse correctly, a problem witnessed by a woman who visited Zella Marie Clark at her sickbed. Coville heard reports of thermometers being used on multiple patients without sterilization in between. Patients in one ward were bathed from the same bowl and with the same washcloth until one of them complained. Some nurses came back to the infirmary drunk from evenings out. There were no male orderlies, so if a stretcher needed to be carried or a bed moved, whoever happened to be there was drafted, be they physicians, college deans, parents, or students. One day the infirmary ran out of broth. Another day it ran out of clean artesian water, and more than fifty typhoid patients were without water for over five hours, Coville wrote. Desperate thirst is a hallmark of typhoid.14
For hundreds of other typhoid patients, home was where the hospital was. Of the approximately 1,350 typhoid cases during the Ithaca epidemic, many were treated at home by visiting physicians and nurses. One physician told the Ithaca Daily News that he made seventy-two patient visits on February 10. Medical personnel were bone tired, staggered by both the sheer number of patients and the shortage of trained nurses in Ithaca, which was only partially remedied by the importing of nurses from other cities. “Patients suffer for want of the many attentions which only a professional nurse can give,” the newspaper noted.15
But even with regular nursing, some typhoid patients died. Edwin Besemer was one. A widower, he lived with his ten-year-old daughter, Ethel, at 138 Giles St. When he fell ill at the beginning of February, father and daughter moved to the home of his brother, Arthur, who was a homeopathic physician in Dundee, New York. He stayed there until his death on March 3. A nurse attended Besemer during his four-week illness. Because an itemization of the costs of his treatment was filed with his estate in Tompkins County Surrogate Court, we know the methods his brother and a consulting physician, a Dr. Bryan, used to treat him.
Here is the list of purchases: February 4, nightshirt, bedpan, medicine, brandy, package of chloride of lime (a strong disinfectant, probably used to kill the typhoid germs in his excrement, clothing, and linens); February 7, nightshirt; February 11, medicine, brandy; February 12, bottle of grape juice, telephone call to Dr. Bryan, brandy; February 16, extra washing; February 17, bottle of grape juice; February 19, package of lime chloride, twenty yards of cheesecloth, which was probably used to hold the brandy against Besemer’s skin in an effort to reduce his fever, and a bottle of some sort of homeopathic remedy; February 22, cheesecloth, brandy; February 23, cheesecloth; and February 24
, one package chloride of lime and a bottle of Eucalyptol, a medicine with a variety of uses. After Besemer died on March 3, there were expenses for telegrams and telephone calls, rail fare for taking his remains back to Ithaca, and rail fare for Ethel, his daughter, to return to Ithaca for the funeral. The carpet in his room was burned, according to the itemization, as were four bed quilts, eight new sheets, and the mattress. Everyone seemed aware of the public health dangers of anything that came in contact with him.16 Young Ethel, now an orphan, lived with her uncle in Dundee for a time and does not appear to have returned to school in Ithaca. She was one of many students in the Ithaca public schools who were hit hard by the epidemic, either through contracting the disease or by losing a loved one or a teacher.
On February 17, Frank David Boynton, the young and dynamic superintendent of schools in Ithaca, taking note of four deaths of students or recent alumni, urged students not to panic but rather to be cautious. He was referring to the deaths of Dean G. Robinson, twenty-one; Ruia Coon, eighteen, Jennie Berber, twenty-one, a 1901 graduate and now a teacher; and Willis J. Dean, seventeen.
Dean’s funeral was held at his home at 436 N. Tioga St. Many of his classmates attended. The Ithaca High School Student Congress, of which he had been a member, sent flowers, as did the Philomathean debating society of Newfield, of which he was a member. Among his pallbearers was Stanton Griffis, the future U.S. ambassador to Argentina during the time of the Perons. But for now he was just a high school student doing a final service for a friend on a cold winter day. He and his fellow pallbearers, most of whom were Student Congress members, carried the lavender casket to its final resting place in Brookside Cemetery in Newfield, where graveside services were held.17
Four other members of the Student Congress at Ithaca High were ill with typhoid. Five teachers in the public school system were ill and had been replaced by substitutes, one of them Sarah Griffis, wife of Rev. William Elliot Griffis. Despite having two ill children of their own, they did not slack off on their social work.
Superintendent Boynton took immediate action when it became clear the city water was contaminated with typhoid germs. The Board of Health ordered some of these moves, but he required little urging. On February 3, after Professor Chamot’s report to the Board of Health on the poor state of the water in East Hill School, Boynton sent a plumber to implement the board’s order to cut off city water to all public schools except what was needed to flush toilets. The plumber, at Boynton’s direction, even cut the pipes to drinking fountains and wash basins so there would be no accidents. The superintendent arranged for clean artesian well water to be brought in daily in new six-gallon tin pails with faucets.
Despite his precautions, many parents kept their children home from school, which frustrated him to no end. “There is less danger from infection from city water at school, where all fountains are closed, than at home, where a child can get water from any faucet,” Boynton pleaded.18 The Ithaca Daily Journal reported, without specifics, that some children were daring others to “drink a few germs” and that those who did were now ill with typhoid.
Parental panic was understandable. Children were still dying of typhoid. Not long after Boynton urged students to return to classes, Katherine Caveney, eleven, a student at the Catholic school, and Cesar Larrinaga, seventeen, an exchange student from Puerto Rico attending Ithaca High School, succumbed to the disease. In the last week of February, an average of ten people contracted typhoid each day, the legacy of that additional infusion of typhoid germs at the end of January. Rev, Griffis wrote in his journal on March 2, “The air is filled with farewells for the dying.” They were not his own words—the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote them—but they perfectly captured the mood of Ithaca. No one seemed able to stop the epidemic, neither God nor man.19
Among the ill young people in late February was Louise Zinck, twenty-four, daughter of Theodor Zinck, owner of the popular Hotel Brunswick in downtown Ithaca, and his wife, Emelie. Lula as she was known, was their only child, and they idolized her. She was a talented piano player, a skill certain to warm the hearts of any middle-class Franco-German family, as the Zincks were. Lulu was the accompanist for the Ithaca High School choir at graduation ceremonies. She had a wide circle of friends, traveling as far as Syracuse for parties. Zinck’s name first appears in the Ithaca Daily News as one of 449 typhoid cases on February 18. Her temperature reached 103 degrees on February 20. On February 21, she was “not as well today.” Her cousin, Edmond Zinck, was reported critically ill with typhoid on February 23. Lula’s condition did not improve and the next day she was dead, dead in the home at 416 E. State St. where she grew up. Theodor Zinck’s world fell apart. He and Emelie buried her in Lake View Cemetery, and he went to see about his will. Louise Zinck was little different from many other typhoid sufferers in Ithaca that winter, but she became a symbol of all of them because of her father and his inconsolable grief.20
Chapter 11
The Fixer
The Ithaca Board of Health concluded that the typhoid must have come into the city in the drinking water supplied by Ithaca Water Works. An order went forth the evening of February 3 that all water used for drinking or cooking in the city must first be boiled for five minutes to kill typhoid germs. The board snubbed the optimism of its own hapless health officer, Dr. Edward Hitchcock Jr. He professed to believe that people were already boiling their water and that as a result, the epidemic would soon be over. Joseph Utter, chairman of the Board of Health, did not believe the danger would go away until a water filtration plant was built in the city.1
Utter and his board set out to determine the cause (as opposed to the delivery vehicle) of the typhoid epidemic. They had no doubt that water from Six Mile Creek had poisoned the city but wanted evidence of how it became contaminated. One board member, Dr. Walter L. Williams, a professor of veterinary surgery at Cornell, decided to take a walk up Six Mile Creek to the dam site and have a look at the Italian camp. He reported back that the single latrine available to the workers sat on sloping ground barely twenty paces from the edge of Six Mile Creek. It was in filthy condition. After Williams’s findings were publicized in both city newspapers, Shirley Clarke Hulse, the twenty-two-year-old engineer who had failed to enforce camp sanitation, flew into a rage and confronted the professor at his home. Hulse claimed in a letter to the Journal that Williams retracted his accusations. He hadn’t. In a letter to the Daily News, Williams said his account was correct in every essential particular and called Hulse “a disgruntled official of the water company.” Technically, Hulse wasn’t, but he did work for Gardner S. Williams, the architect of the dam, and Tucker & Vinton, the construction firm.
The Board of Health hired two inspectors to patrol the watersheds of Buttermilk Creek and Six Mile Creek and determine if unsanitary conditions were polluting Ithaca’s drinking water. They inspected Buttermilk Creek first and brought back an eye-opening report that showed how lackadaisical Ithaca Water Works had been under the Tremans and Morris in policing its watershed, an important duty for any water company. John R. Woodford and R. T. Conover told of farmyards that came to the water’s edge, outhouses that drained toward the creek, manure piles by the water, and every other frightening aspect of early-twentieth-century farming. The conditions, which seemed to truly shock Ithaca’s citizens, may have explained the mild intestinal disorders experienced by Cornell students when they arrived as freshmen, and Professor Emile M. Chamot said conditions in the Six Mile Creek watershed were as bad or worse. But the barnyards did not explain the typhoid epidemic.2
“Now that the conditions have been brought to light, will the citizens do something?” the Ithaca Daily News demanded to know. “The public will never again feel safe in drinking water that has come from such a source. There must be a radical change. . . . The city of Ithaca must take action and prompt action. There should be no halfway business.”
The Daily News demanded pure water for Ithaca,
preferably from artesian wells. Duncan Campbell Lee gave an impassioned speech at a public meeting against the idea of “filtering sewage,” arguing for “a radical change in the source of supply.” Lee said the only way to restore public confidence in Ithaca and calm public fears and anger was “to secure pure water and secure this water from the bowels of the earth.”3 This had been one of his crusades since buying the newspaper in 1899.
Ithaca Water Works fought back, beginning an aggressive campaign to persuade the public that the typhoid epidemic was not as bad as the Daily News claimed, and that in any case, the company was not responsible. Thomas W. Summers, who ran the water company for Morris, offered soothing words for the public, telling the Ithaca Daily Journal that the company took the epidemic seriously and was searching hard to find “any possible information that will throw light upon the cause of the epidemic. The investigation will be pursued vigorously until definite information is procured.” Morris was not admitting—and never would—that the water he sold to Ithaca residents was killing them. But they would keep searching for the real killer.4
Morris sent an Ithaca Water Works agent to the homes of typhoid sufferers and subjected family members to questioning about how their loved ones contracted the disease. Meanwhile, the agent was on the lookout for anything in the house to blame for the sickness, such as water in the basement. The agent claimed that of the forty-eight homes he visited, only twenty-two had “real” typhoid. Ithaca Water Works rushed this spurious finding to the Daily Journal, which published it. Given the difficulty trained physicians had in making the typhoid diagnosis, one wonders how an untutored water company agent could do so with such certainty and without conducting any laboratory tests.
