RIP little cousin
He was just a little boy, just two days past his sixth birthday.
And he died a horrible death.
What today would be a preventable death.
Ralph Livingston of Hollister, Oklahoma, was The Legal Genealogist‘s first cousin twice removed: his father Arthur Carlton Livingston was the brother of my great grandmother Eula (Baird) Livingston Robertson.
I had photographed his grave at the Frederick, Oklahoma, City Cemetery years ago, and knew from family that this little boy — Arthur’s first-born child — had died of blood poisoning on 17 March 1927.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story. That I found yesterday in the stunning collection of newspapers held by the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City, the fabulous research library and museum of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
The Society was founded in 1893 by members of the Oklahoma Territory Press Association, in large part to collect and preserve the papers they had published.1 Its Oklahoma History Center, which houses that newspaper collection (and so much more), opened in 2005.2
And it is there that the rest of the story was told, in the pages of the Frederick (Oklahoma) Press issue of 22 March 1927:
“Funeral services were held at the First Baptist Church in Frederick Friday afternoon for Ralph Livingston, 6, son of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Livingston of Hollister, who died at the Tillman County hospital Thursday night, after an illness of several weeks. Rev. T. P. Haskins, pastor of the Frederick Baptist church, and Rev. J. F. Curtis, pastor of Hollister Baptist church, were in charge of the funeral.
“A large number of friends of the deceased gathered at the church to pay their respects to the boy, and a beautiful floral offering was made.
“Ralph died as the result of blood poisoning and erysipelas and other complications, which began with a diseased leg and followed his body to his face.
“Burial was made in the City cemetery.”3
Oh ouch.
It turns out that erysipelas is a streptocaccal bacteria infection that often starts with some sort of cut in the skin. It occurs on the legs most of the time.4 The disease has been “traced back to the Middle Ages, where it was referred to as St. Anthony’s fire, named after the Christian saint to whom those afflicted would appeal for healing.”5
In untreated or severe cases, “(t)he bacteria may travel to the blood … This results in a condition called bacteremia. The infection may spread to the heart valves, joints, and bones.”6
When erysipelas does spread that way, it causes pain. A lot of pain.
When treated with modern antibiotics, the disease can be cured. A solid round of penicillin could knock out most erysipelas. But penicillin wasn’t available for widespread use until the 1940s — years after Ralph’s illness.7
And in those days before penicillin and other drugs became readily available, erysipelas killed.
Those believed to have died from erysipelas include Norborne Berkeley, a royal governor of Virginia; John Stuart Mill; and Pope Gregory XVI.8
And one little six-year-old cousin.
For the want of something we take so very much for granted today… a simple antibiotic…
SOURCES
- “History of OHS,” About : History, Oklahoma Historical Society (http://www.okhistory.org/ : accessed 27 Mar 2015). ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- Frederick (Oklahoma) Press, 22 March 1927, p.1, col. 7; digital images, Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City. ↩
- “Erysipelas,” MedlinePlus, National Institutes of Health (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ : accessed 27 Mar 2015). ↩
- Loretta Davis MD, et al., “Erysipelas,” Medscape (http://emedicine.medscape.com/ : accessed 27 Mar 2015). ↩
- “Erysipelas,” MedlinePlus. ↩
- Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.com), “Penicillin,” rev. 24 Mar 2015. ↩
- Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.com), “erysipelas,” rev. 17 Mar 2015. ↩
Yes this bacteria (Streptococcus pyogenes has been responsible for much illness over the centuries. It can cause quite a range of clinical conditions from this sad case to necrotising fasciitis, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, impetigo, post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis and peurperal fever (also known as childbed fever). One plus today even with the range of diseases caused by this bacteria it is still currently sensitive to penicillin.
Thanks for adding that, Helen! Your expertise in disease is a big help!
I love their newspaper collection!
I do too, Fran!
I will be making my own “pilgrimage” to the OHS later this year and I was happy to read about their newspaper collection. After attending your presentation in Carlsbad last week, I am trying to become more prepared for my trip to Oklahoma and hitting those courthouses! Thanks again.
I’m sure you’ll be terrific in your research, Bill! Good luck — OHS is amazing!
I have a great-aunt who died from erysipelas in 1918. She was 29 and left a husband and 9-year-old son. It’s sad to see a child die, sad to see a mother die and leave a child behind. And it’s hard for us “moderns” to imagine the speed at which some diseases in earlier times felled the living.
We sometimes forget how good we have it with modern medicine, don’t we?
I had a family member that was diagnosed with erysipelas about two years ago. Treated with antibiotics and it cleared up rapidily.
Hard to believe that what can be cleared up rapidly today is the same thing that killed this little boy less than 100 years ago, isn’t it?
So sad! These stories of the little ones and ancestors-gone-too-early remain in our hearts, and we grieve for our ancestors who lost them.
My brother at 16 became very sick, very quickly from this, after removing a splinter with a needle that wasn’t disinfected, on his after-school job. I took him to the ER at 1am, when checking his fever and seeing red streaks going up his arm. He was hospitalized with IV antibiotics and released on the second day, but would have died soon without the antibiotics.
This is one reason we all must be careful to not overuse antibiotics when not necessary, the way drs used to prescribe them everytime someone went in for something minor. Thank goodness they are all much more careful these days.
However, we are getting antibiotics in much of the meats we eat from some American processors, and particularly now that so many companies have been bought out by the Chinese and other oriental countries where expired antibiotics are used unregulated on animals. Also from getting antibiotics (and many other types of medications) through our tap water because of the meds being secreted into the public sewers from the urine of people taking them and from people flushing expired meds down their toilets. Please collect all expired meds from family members and turn in to the law enforcement departments for proper disposal, when your local communities have days when this service is available.
Our bodies become impervious to antibiotics if they are misused. A nurse once told me that her father died of something fairly simple because he had misused antibiotics by never finishing his prescriptions, which allowed the disease to mutate. There was nothing available at the time he died that could kill out the stronger disease, because of his poor choices.
Talk to your drs/medical personnel about how your family can use antibiotics correctly and so that we will have them when we need them. Lets all work together to get our politicians & govt agencies to propertly regulate the use of antibiotics in livestock and to prevent harmful meats/products from entering the US from overseas.
Poor little sweetie!