Epidemic

by David DeKok

  Schurman worried about all the newspaper attacks but seems to have worried most about those from the New York Times. While the Times did not occupy quite the lofty position in 1903 that it does today, it was moving in that direction and its editorials carried more weight than most. A Times editorial on February 18 called the Ithaca epidemic “very much like a crime,” and one on February 20 blasted the university for its mismanagement of the Cornell Infirmary and the substandard medical care it provided to students.

  Ickelheimer, who in 1905 married Pauline Lehman, granddaughter of the founder of Lehman Brothers, was an 1888 Cornell graduate who may have been the only Jewish member of the Board of Trustees in 1903. It is difficult to make that determination with certainty today, but there is no doubt that Ickelheimer was Jewish and few other trustees were. Partly for that reason, Schurman turned to him for help in dealing with Ochs, who was also Jewish. Whether this was out of practicality or prejudice or both is hard to say. Schurman had not seen the Sunday Times on February 22 and wrote to Ickelheimer the following day asking him to pay a call on Ochs and “stop all those unwarranted attacks.” Schurman urged Ickelheimer to explain to Ochs that the criticism he was hearing about the Cornell Infirmary had a surprisingly simple explanation: professional jealousy on the part of Ithaca physicians who did not have as many students in their practices as other physicians did. This seems to have been grounded in as much fact as his belief that Gannett was trying to shut down the university. He was certain that if Ochs understood this salient point, “he would probably look at the matter with different eyes.”38

  Ickelheimer wrote back that he telephoned Ochs that afternoon and spoke to him at length. Ochs promised to help Cornell University if he could and asked Schurman to write him a letter if there were any particular facts he wanted brought to the public’s attention. The publisher advised Ickelheimer, though, that the information the Times had published from Ithaca seemed to have come from reliable sources. Nevertheless, Ochs promised to gladly run corrections if warranted. Ickelheimer wrote to Schurman, “Mr. Ochs is a fair-minded man, and means to do what is right, and if you have time, when you are in New York again I think it would be well worth your while to pay him a visit.”39

  But nothing seemed to change. The Times ran another editorial on February 26 that drove Schurman up a tree, saying that the organization of the Cornell Infirmary was “very inefficient,” especially when full of typhoid patients. The editorial criticized the Cornell faculty, especially the medical faculty, for not jumping in to help when the first typhoid case appeared. “If they were afraid of the displeasure of President Schurman and the Trustees, they showed a timidity which brave men cannot respect and frank critics of their course cannot commend.” The Times even recommended the indictment of Ithaca Water Works for maintaining a public nuisance. Schurman wrote to Ickelheimer two days later complaining that the Times had been “atrociously unfair” and again speculated that the newspaper was being deceived by Ithaca physicians with an ax to grind.40

  James C. Bayles, a journalist and sanitarian with a long and varied career, was probably the author of the Times editorials about the Ithaca epidemic. He joined the newspaper as an editorial writer in 1889 after spending two years as president of the New York City Board of Health. He was bothered by the contradictory information he was hearing about the typhoid epidemic and proposed to Ochs that he go to Ithaca, spend a few days there, and write a series of articles about what he found. Ochs was reluctant to send him, fearing that wading into the controversy would result in articles that “gave advice,” which he did not want his newspaper to do. Nor did Ochs want the Times to be seen as “a meddlesome journal.” But Ochs agreed to run the idea past Ickelheimer, whom he then summoned to his office for a meeting with himself and Bayles.

  Ickelheimer considered Bayles nearly a hopeless case when it came to the epidemic. He believed the editorial writer was paying too much attention to the opinions of “Dr. Biggs” but did not specify whether he meant Dr. Chauncey P. Biggs, a physician in Ithaca, or his brother, Dr. Hermann M. Biggs, who was the general medical officer of the New York City Board of Health and who had studied with Dr. Robert Koch in Germany many years earlier. More likely it was the latter Biggs. After a long conversation, Ochs decided Bayles could go to Ithaca as long as Schurman invited him. Ickelheimer, despite his doubts, thought it might be better to have Bayles see conditions for himself rather than continue to write editorials based on what he heard from Dr. Biggs or others. “Mr. Ochs tells me that he is more than favorably disposed towards Cornell, but thought that he was doing his duty by setting forth the facts, as they were presented to him, as it might in the end be in the interests of [Cornell University],” Ickelheimer wrote to Schurman.41

  Schurman responded to Ochs with alacrity, even inviting Bayles to stay at his home. Ochs telegraphed back thanking him for the invitation, but politely declined, saying Bayles would stay with relatives. Schurman fretted about Bayles’s visit, believing he would only write articles that supported his Times editorials. But he needn’t have worried. Bayles was not a physician and was only as good a reporter as the information people gave him. In Ithaca, Schurman could at least attempt to steer him to the right people.42

  Almost in spite of himself, President Jacob Gould Schurman had extracted Cornell University from a seemingly impossible situation. He had persuaded Ithaca Common Council to accept a plan for filtration of the town’s water that many of the citizens despised, preferring to drill for artesian water, and he had stopped much of the negative commentary in the press that might have killed the university. Yet the disease had not run its course and his students continued to die, often in the homes and hometowns they thought would be a refuge from the calamity in Ithaca.

  Chapter 12

  Going Home

  When the reality of the typhoid epidemic hit home in early February 1903, Cornell University students began fleeing Ithaca by train, hoping to escape the plague that was killing their classmates. They arrived by carriage at the downtown station with hastily packed suitcases or trunks, uncertain if they would ever be coming back.

  Some, still healthy, acted on their own fears or, more often, those of their parents. A few in this group audited classes at other colleges so as not to fall behind in their studies. Sixteen did so at Columbia University in New York City, where President Nicholas Murray Butler welcomed them, while others landed at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Some leaving Ithaca were already ill, sent home by physicians too burdened with typhoid patients who could not leave or wanting to remove them from the horrible student infirmary.1 For too many, fleeing to the supposed safety of their homes proved to be an appointment in Samarra. Death found them anyway.

  Graham B. Wood, the freshman from Camden, New Jersey, who had written to his father in the fall about the thrill of attending his first Cornell football game, contracted what seemed to be a mild- to moderate case of typhoid on February 6. For three weeks, Wood was cared for in his room at 220 Eddy St. by a local physician. His roommate, Charles Worthington Nichols Jr., soon decamped to Camden and escaped the epidemic. When Wood seemed well enough to travel, his mother came to bring him home, and they traveled by train to Camden. He seemed to be okay. His father, Jarvis A. Wood, an advertising executive with N. W. Ayer & Son, Philadelphia, thought his son’s troubles were over. But his seeming recovery turned out to be “but a lull in the battle,” the elder Wood wrote to President Schurman. Graham soon developed intestinal complications of typhoid, and surgery became imperative. His father hired one of the best surgeons in Philadelphia, a city famous for them. The surgeon “found his gallbladder full of the poisonous pus” and removed it. The wound seemed to heal, but weeks later, Graham suffered a relapse, bled out his rectum, and died. Jarvis A. Wood, an especially loving father, was prostrated with grief.2

  For others, the journey home itself could be fraught with peril. Frank A. Mantel, who had been captain of the Auburn
High School baseball team and was considered a top prospect to play second base for Cornell that spring, felt the symptoms of typhoid arrive and started for home. He arrived at the Auburn station in a driving snowstorm and could find no carriage to take him to his home on Garden Street. So as weak as he was from the typhoid, Mantel staggered home in the snow, arrived half dead, but in time began to recover. A fellow student, Fred W. Sieder, visited Mantel in Auburn while attending the funeral of Paul Wanke, twenty-two, a graduate student in Germanics who was one of the best handball players at the university. Six Cornell students were pallbearers, and Professor Waterman Thomas Hewett asked Sieder to represent the German Department at the funeral. It cannot have been entirely comforting to Mantel to receive a visit from someone attending the funeral of a fellow typhoid sufferer. But Sieder extended President Schurman’s best wishes and reported back to the Cornell president that it appeared “Mantel will pull through.” He did but did not play baseball that spring and did not return to Cornell.3

  Charles S. Langworthy, twenty-two, a young farmer from East Valley outside of Alfred, New York, was at Cornell that winter for an agricultural short course. He developed symptoms of typhoid, as did his Cornell roommate, Edward V. Green of Alfred, and was advised by his physician to go home. Leaving at the beginning of February, Langworthy missed his connection to the Erie Railroad train at Elmira, New York, and was forced to stay overnight, whether in the waiting room of the train station or a hotel, we do not know. In any case, the exertion and cold were not good for him. By the time Langworthy reached home the next morning, his symptoms had worsened. For a time, like Graham Wood, he seemed to be recovering. But his condition abruptly deteriorated, and he bled to death on February 21 in the usual way. Green, his roommate, came home to Alfred on February 11 and eventually recovered from his own case of typhoid.

  Word of Langworthy’s death was passed from “one to another” in East Valley, according to the obituary in the Alfred Sun. He was popular, admired for his character, and his neighbors and friends packed his funeral at the Second Alfred Seventh-Day Baptist Church, where his father was a life deacon. Charles had been one of six children. His only brother died of diphtheria at a young age, and his four sisters eventually married and moved away. With no surviving son to take over the land the Langworthy family had farmed since 1825, his elderly parents sold it in 1928.4

  Even if students made it home without incident, there was no guarantee their parents would make the right decisions about their medical care. Lewis K. Hubbard went home to Middletown, Connecticut, with symptoms of typhoid that soon developed into a full-blown attack. Instead of calling a regular physician, his father, Robert P. Hubbard, had him treated by Flavia A. Thrall, a renowned clairvoyant healer from Windsor, Connecticut. Her supposed gifts of prophecy and healing first manifested themselves at age fourteen, when she laid her hands on a neighbor’s sick child and the youth recovered. Thrall’s parents, perhaps not surprisingly, feared she was mentally ill. Thrall would go into a trance, diagnose the disease, and prescribe a cure, usually an herbal medicine concoction. That was what she did for Lewis K. Hubbard, who wasted away and finally died on the day after Thrall left for Florida. There was talk of prosecution, but Thrall continued to practice her unique brand of medicine until her passing in 1910. Hubbard’s good friend, Quincy A. Hall, who lived with him in a boardinghouse at 203 Stewart Ave., collapsed upon hearing news of his death and was taken to the infirmary.5

  President Schurman eventually admitted that the number of students who fled Ithaca was nearly a thousand, or a little over a third of the university’s enrollment that spring. Samuel D. Halliday, chairman of the Board of Trustees, said the number was “at least a thousand.” There indeed may have been more: The Ithaca Post Office reported on February 17 that more than a thousand change-of-address forms had been filed by students to date, and they were not the last to leave.6 Many agonized about missing classes, fearing they would fall behind or be penalized, but they were filled with dread over the deadly typhoid.7 Schurman at first tried to downplay or even criticize the departures, terming many of them grade- or laziness-related and praising the stalwart women of Sage College who seemed especially reluctant to leave.8 But after a student census conducted on February 13, he conceded that 21 percent of the student body, or about five hundred students, had gone home. That number doubled in the next week as death followed death.

  Parents in 1903 proved no less concerned about their children away at college than they are today. The Western Union office in Ithaca was swamped with incoming telegrams, mainly from parents urging their children to leave Cornell and come home at once. Even that relatively new communications technology, the long-distance telephone call, received a workout during the epidemic. New York and Pennsylvania Telephone and Telegraph Company, which eventually became part of AT&T, reported that during the first twenty-three days of February there were more long-distance telephone calls into and out of Ithaca than at any other city in its territory. Long-distance telephone service began in 1885 for AT&T but did not become widely available until 1899, when loading coils were invented, which boosted the signal and allowed construction of longer telephone lines. A call between New York and Chicago cost $9 for the first five minutes, an enormous sum at the time.9

  Parents wrote frequently to Schurman requesting updates on the epidemic or the condition of their children, and from an examination of the university archives, he must have replied to nearly all of them. Orris B. Dodge, a plow manufacturer in Dixon, Illinois, who had just donated land and money for a public library where a new arrival in town, the nine-year-old Ronald Reagan, would obtain library card #3695 in 1920, wrote to the Cornell president on February 18 after reading in the Chicago papers that morning that the number of typhoid cases in Ithaca was increasing. His son, John O. Dodge, was a junior at Cornell studying mechanical engineering. “While I would regret exceedingly to have his work interrupted, it does not compare with the risk of life that may occur any day,” Dodge wrote. “I, therefore, wired him this morning that I thought he better return home at once.” He wasn’t sure how John’s course work or tuition fees would be handled if he came home, so he asked Schurman to send a messenger to his son and ask him to call on the president for a chat. “I am aware that at a time like this you would have a great many calls upon your time but would esteem it a great favor if you will give this matter your personal attention,” Dodge concluded.10

  George B. Rose, a partner in the law firm of Rose, Hemingway & Rose of Little Rock, Arkansas—which became famous as the “Rose Law Firm” during the American far right’s obsession with Bill and Hillary Clinton’s failed Whitewater land deal in the 1990s—wrote to Schurman on February 24. His son, Clarence E. Rose, was a sophomore at Cornell studying mechanical engineering. Young Clarence had become ill with typhoid earlier in the month and returned home to Little Rock. Rose told Schurman that his son wanted to return to his studies “as soon as his health and the sanitary conditions at Ithaca will permit. Kindly let me know the prospects of an early abatement of the typhoid fever epidemic.”11

  Not every parent who wrote to Schurman was a wealthy executive or lawyer. Hattie E. Cochrane of Newington Junction, Connecticut, was a widow inquiring about the condition of her only child, a son who is not identified in the letter. She asked when he became ill with typhoid, whether he was delirious, if his case was considered serious, and whether she could come to nurse him during the day. “I have had typhoid fever myself and know that much depends on the use of water in nursing. Frequent sponging is a great comfort to the patient, and I could do that as well as a trained nurse,” Cochrane wrote. Schurman telegraphed back two days later, reporting that her son had been admitted to the infirmary on March 10 and that his maximum temperature had been 104.2 degrees. “Case rather severe, but responds well to treatment,” he wrote. “You may come and assist.” There is no record of a Cochrane from Connecticut in the 1908 Cornell alumni directory, suggesting that he never comp
leted his degree.12

  George G. Cotton, an executive in charge of worker training at the Solvay Process Company in Solvay, New York, a chemical manufacturer, wrote to Schurman to tell him that his son, Donald Reed Cotton, a second-year law student at Cornell, was being treated for typhoid in the Hospital of the Good Shepherd, an Episcopal hospital in Syracuse, New York, then considered the city’s best. Donald was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity at 1 Central Ave. Former Cornell president Andrew D. White was a Psi U member, as was his grandson, Andrew White Newberry. Cotton said his son had no idea how he contracted the disease. The fraternity had been paying for artesian water, known as Slaterville water, since the fall. He told Schurman his son thought he might have gotten some city water in his mouth while taking “shower baths” at the fraternity house.

  Cotton wrote his letter after hearing from his wife that morning that Donald had spent a comfortable night in the hospital and had been “tubbed”—given an ice bath—every three hours for the past three days. Another second-year law student from Syracuse, Warren S. Barlow, was in the same hospital with typhoid acquired in Ithaca, but he was not doing nearly as well. Barlow, although somewhat improved that morning, was in his third week of the disease and had a severe case. His temperature had soared to nearly 105 and his pulse as high as 150, Cotton wrote. Both young men survived.13

  A mother of a Sage College coed wondered how her daughter could have contracted typhoid to begin with given the university’s bragging about the safety and good health of students who lived in the women’s dormitory. Mary D. Huestis, whose husband, George, was a shirt and collar manufacturer in Troy, New York, complained to Schurman that her daughter, Edna, a freshman, had come home from Cornell on February 18 and was soon bedridden with typhoid. Other than three days in the Cornell Infirmary in mid- to late January with tonsillitis, she had consumed only the food and water served to her at Sage College. What was going on, her mother wanted to know.