Dying Before Germ Theory

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As RFK questions germ theory, and measles ravages unvaccinated children, Americans need to know what is at risk. Americans died at higher rates and younger ages before the introduction of germ theory in the late nineteenth century enabled preventative medicine, but mortality rates do not fully convey the harrowing experience of being powerless against illness and death. This truncated account explains what it was like to fall ill and die before germs were understood and lifesaving modern medical treatments were available.

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In the pages of her 1866 diary, thirty-one-year-old Celestia Webster chronicled the illness and death of her younger sister Wealthy, whom Celestia affectionately called Wet. The Websters lived on a farm in Conesus, a rural town in Western New York’s Finger Lakes, far from the burgeoning public health movement that was fighting a cholera epidemic in New York City. The Websters were a white, middle-class family of eleven siblings; Celestia was the eldest daughter, and Wealthy, the seventh child, was twenty-one when she fell ill.

Celestia first wrote about Wealthy’s health at the start of July, when the family visited a physician. After examining Wealthy’s foot, Dr. John Gray concluded she had erysipelas—what we now understand to be a bacterial infection between layers of the skin, though physicians did not yet know about bacteria and could prescribe no antidote. Wealthy tended her foot. It changed color and the swelling reduced, but standing still pained her so much that she could no longer teach.^[1]

Celestia, also a teacher, returned to her school in the town center, where she could not monitor Wealthy’s recovery. On July 31^st, their brother-in-law alerted Celestia that, “Wet was very bad off; her lungs are so bad, he said that she had a very bad day a couple days ago.”^[2]

Celestia walked the three hilly miles home to find, “Wet feeling badly.” It was barely a month since they visited the physician. Observing Wealthy’s state, Celestia feared “she will not live a great while.”^[3]

Celestia was right, but Wealthy suffered for two more months. By mid-August, Wealthy was experiencing “stomach cramps…and she coughs a great deal.” Stomach pain disrupted Wealthy’s sleep, so that in the morning “she looks as though she had a bad time.” Returning to school, Celestia sought cures. A friend shared a “receipt for the lungs” that included boneset, an emetic whose “intensely bitter” flavor was ameliorated by licorice root, gum Arabic, sugar, and liquor.^[4]

Celestia recorded no relief from the remedy. Instead, she found Wet “much weaker” each weekend. At the start of September, Wealthy was “burning up” with nightly fevers and taking medicines: “the physic she had taken began to operate and she commenced vomiting.” This physic was probably an emetic, a common tool of so-called heroic medicine that aimed to improve health by violently expelling everything from the body.^[5]

Celestia returned to school, anxious to visit a friend who “has been quite sick for a long time.” Finding Mary Wilder “better than I expected,” Celestia hoped Wealthy could recover. Further hope came from the physician who thought Wealthy improved. But their brother-in-law Nelson dashed Celestia’s hopes, reporting that Wet was “about the same” and now “her appetite was nothing.” Celestia ended her school term and returned home.^[6]

Wealthy had many a “poor day” when she was exhausted or her stomach troubled her. Observing Wet greeting visitors through her pain, Celestia thought her sister “is so ambitious that she cannot think of giving up.” But recovery required more than willpower. Days of vomiting depleted Wealthy. Then severe headaches began, confining a moaning Wealthy to her bed. Celestia lamented, “She is growing poor very fast…It makes my heart ache to see Wet so miserable.”^[7]

By the final week of September, Wealthy dominated Celestia’s diary. Celestia spent most of her days ministering to her sister through bad headaches, earaches, and extremely difficult breathing: “she…could scarcely get her breath for between two and three hours.” Celestia fanned Wealthy and someone again went to get the doctor. When the physician arrived after midnight, he explained “the bad spell” and “gave her something that helped her breathe easier.”^[8]

September 27^th was a “beautiful day but sickness makes us have sad, very sad hearts.” Celestia and her siblings had taken turns monitoring Wealthy overnight. During Celestia’s shift “four of us worked lively over her…for hours she could hardly get her breath.” Wealthy’s struggle continued into the morning: “sick at her stomach, headache, her bowels troubling her and her heart.” When the physician arrived, he ordered many treatments, including a mustard paste across her stomach. This longstanding practice tried to balance internal humors by drawing heat and blood to the affected body part. Mustard pastes were painful; extended applications caused burns and blisters. For Wealthy, “as soon as it commenced drawing she was taken with numbness in her tongue and left arm, her jaw was also affected.”^[9]

The next day, Wealthy’s symptoms were especially distressing: “She says she has not felt at all like Wet today. She has had such strange feelings that she cannot describe them.” The Websters spent the day by Wealthy’s bed, presumably awaiting her death. At this time, American Christians believed a “Good Death” involved families bearing witness to loved ones’ final moments, when the dying person should bid their families farewell and commit themselves to God.^[10]

Wealthy commenced a daily “fainting spell.” The physician remained overnight, monitoring Wealthy’s fitful sleep alongside her sisters Celestia and Sue.^[11]

In the morning, Wealthy was washed and fed by her sisters. Celestia used the passive voice, reflecting Wealthy’s weakness. They kept Wealthy abed and quiet, but “she was completely exhausted, she said tired was no name for the way she felt” after the doctor’s evening visit. It was Sunday, but spirituality eluded the Websters, the children of a minister. Celestia “read some in my Bible and tried to raise my thoughts to God in prayer.”^[12]

Wealthy clung to life for eleven more days. October 1^st was frightening, when Wealthy “said she must get up; her bowels were going to move.” Upon rising, Wealthy “became very faint” and had to be helped back into bed. “Her heart was in a complete flutter; she could scarcely get her breathe [sic]; thus she lay the remainder of the afternoon and during the succeeding night.” No one could find the doctor. Celestia stayed at her sister’s side; sisters Sue and Carrie washed soiled sheets.^[13]

Celestia continued her bedside vigil. On October 2^nd, Wealthy could only speak in a whisper and “lay in a kind of stupor.” Their mother thought Wealthy “would not live throughout the day.” When the doctor arrived, Wet asked “if he thought she would get well. He told her that her chances were small…” As she confronted death, Wealthy made amends. She told her siblings that “Jesus was her friend” and asked Sue to “think of her good deeds.” The Websters’ world was as much material as it was spiritual; in the same whispered breaths that Wealthy prepared her soul, she distributed her possessions among her siblings.^[14]

Wealthy survived another night.

The Websters still sought recovery, turning both to physicians and to prayer.

Neither worked.

Wealthy’s stomach and lungs “commenced paining her” so badly that her siblings soaked cloths in smartweed, a “hot herb” recommended as an antidote for “cold swelling.” Celestia had to take a break, sleeping in a different room. Despite the smartweed, Wealthy’s “countenance looks decidedly worse today and she has been suffering acute pain.”^[15]

Wealthy reported that the abdominal pain was killing her, “that she cannot see what she has done that she should suffer so.” She asked Sue to pray for her recovery. Celestia took another break. Unable to sleep, Celestia immersed herself in the physically taxing labor of laundry.^[16]

Celestia returned to Wealthy’s bedside, tending her sister through “gripping pains through her stomach and bowels.” Celestia and Libbie, another sister, applied smartweed again, but the herb “was too heavy for her.” The Websters called in more physicians, bringing both Dr. Joel Hulbert, who lived nearest, and Dr. Charles Brown from two towns away. Alas, “neither of them thought she would get well.”^[17]

Wealthy endured six more “bad day[s]” of pain, vomiting, diarrhea, and exhaustion. Her sisters tended to Wealthy and to each other. One night, seventeen-year-old Carrie woke Celestia; Carrie was “having a hard time of it,” and asked Celestia to relieve her. Celestia prayed, “Oh my God, give me faith and restore my sister to health I beseech of thee.”^[18]

On October 9^th, the doctor left morphine powders for the first time. Even with this strong pain relief, Wealthy “suffered much.” Finally, on October 11^th, “Sue came down and said…that Wet was dying.” The family gathered around Wealthy, who “spit up quantities of putrid matter.” She gave away more of her things; “she said she was resigned to the will of God;” she “breathed her last” at 6:30 that evening. Celestia noted that Wealthy “didn’t appear to suffer as much when dying as she had at other times. Oh! What a sad sad time we are having.”^[19]

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TL;DR? That’s the point. Illness and death absorb time and emotion. You may have skipped ahead; Celestia and Wealthy could not. Unable to reduce Wealthy’s fevers or arrest her diarrhea or help her breathe or calm her stomach, her family and physicians watched Wealthy suffer for three long months. The Websters and physicians did everything possible. Wealthy probably died from tuberculosis, the deadliest disease of the nineteenth century. Had she fallen ill a century later, after Koch’s 1880s discovery of the tubercle bacillus ushered in germ theory and led to the twentieth-century development of effective antibiotics for tuberculosis, the Websters would have saved their sister.^[20] RFK Jr. calls vaccines and antibiotics “patented poisons,” but these are the cures for which Celestia and countless others prayed.^[21]

When Wealthy died, the Websters’ suffering began anew as grief. Celestia rose on October 12^th “with such a feeling of loneliness that I cannot describe.” We need not repeat Wealthy and Celestia’s suffering.^[22]

Notes

1. Celestia A. Webster Diaries, Cairns Collection of American Women Writers, Special Collections, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 7/1-3/1866; 7/5/1866. ↑
2. Webster Diaries, 7/22/1866; 7/31/1866. ↑
3. Webster Diaries, 7/30/1866; 8/3/1866; 8/5/1866. ↑
4. Webster Diaries, 8/18/1866; 8/19/1866; 8/29/1866; Samuel North, The Family Physician and Guide to Health; Together with Some Remarks on Surgery… (Waterloo, NY: William Child, 1830), 257-8. ↑
5. Webster Diaries, 8/31-9/3/1866. ↑
6. Webster Diaries, 9/4/1866; 9/6/1866; 9/8/1866 ↑
7. Webster Diaries, 9/18/1866; 9/22/1866 ↑
8. Webster Diaries, 9/24-25/1866 ↑
9. Webster 9/27/1866; North, 216; Lydia Maria Child, The Family Nurse; Or, Companion to the Frugal Housewife (London: Richard Bentley, 1837), 125; Wooster Beach, The American Practice Condensed. Or the Family Physician: Being the Scientific System of Medicine: On Vegetable Principles, Designed for All Classes. (New York: James M’Alister, 1848), 674. ↑
10. Webster Diaries, 9/28-29/1866; Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). ↑
11. Webster Diaries, 9/28-29/1866 ↑
12. Webster Diaries, 9/30/1866 ↑
13. Webster Diaries, 10/1/1866 ↑
14. Webster Diaries, 10/2/1866 ↑
15. Webster Diaries, 10/3-4/1866; North, 252. ↑
16. Webster Diaries, 10/4/1866. ↑
17. Webster Diaries, 10/5/1866. ↑
18. Webster Diaries, 10/6-8/1866. ↑
19. Webster Diaries, 10/9-10/1866. ↑
20. I suspect tuberculosis because Celestia fell ill with a respiratory ailment a few months after Wealthy’s death and appears in the census as sick with consumption. ↑
21. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2021), 285. ↑
22. Webster Diaries, 10/12/1866. ↑

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Featured image caption: A depiction of the “germ theory of putrefaction,” c. 1909. (Courtesy Wellcome Collection)