A Counterbalance, Perhaps. to Nostalgia

There are the horrors of dropsy, consumption, cholera, and Bright’s disease. Bowels are being distinctly treasonous: Death by Inflammation of the bowels, Obstruction of the bowels, Paralysis of the bowels, Constriction of the bowels, Inaction of the bowels, and Strangulation of the bowels. Then, the deadly fevers arrive to extract their pound of flesh— scarlet, malarial, typhoid.

It seems God is on quite a recruiting drive for little Angels, and sends down Croup, diphtheria, measles, and plenty of Whooping Cough to enlist the little children, at 5 years old, 1 year and 3 months, seven days.

     1 year old girl congestion of lungs. whooping cough.
     dead before I got there.

Well, all this is from a database of Causes of Death in the 1880s, in a rural farming region of the Midwest. It is a beautiful place (I’ve been there) with rolling hills, and when perched on those hills, you look out on the quilted farms, grain silos, and church steeples. At every road junction is another Grover’s Corner.

La Grippe was there, and took the young and the old, without displaying any noticeable preference. And there is evidence of Despair in paradise: Suicide by hanging, suicide by gunshot, suicide by strychnia. Countless suicides.

     The contents of a loaded shotgun fired by his own hand.
     blowing out his brains. suicide.
     Body given to his wife and family.

Nostalgia is seductive, the irresistible dream of a better time and place.

     Too much whisky & froze to death
     some time between the hours of 7pm & 7 am
     on the night of the 20th Jan 1885

     uncertain & complicated. He took a heavy chill & died
     in it lasting 2 or 3 hr. He had only the one chill.
     It might be called congestive chill He had been
     drinking alcohol freely for 5 weeks

Maybe after a few drinks, folks could just not stay away from the railroad tracks, and the excitement that the train might bring in.

     Struck by engine. Thrown 80 ft. Picked up dead.
     Bones of legs, arms & shoulders all broken.

     Run over by the cars and cut into by the pelvis,
     both legs being cut off

And into this agricultural, Jeffersonian utopia, lots of good, traditional American violence:

     Drunk & killed by injuries inflicted by party or parties
     unknown. (Husband in pen.) brains beat out with
     a hammer & part of a nail murdered

     murder by being knocked down and jumped on

     some blunt instrument piercing his brain by one
     in the hands of Gerard Specht & Johnny Newman

In the march forward of highly dubious “progress,” for everything gained something is lost. And, let’s face it, vice versa:

  dysentery morphine habit of 40 years standing.
  blow on head from hay fork. kicked by a horse.
  run over by RR train No. 4 or struck by Engine & killed.
  suicide, shot himself with pistol.
  poison administered by his own hand.
  decay of nature from age.
  shot himself with a gun (& he died).
  tonsillitis tetanus coma & convulsions.
  Cut his throat When I found him with a razor.
  stuck with a club on right eye by hand of unknown person.
  poison, vegetable narcotic accidentally taken & name unknown.
  fell from flat car inside of track & run over by the cars.
  poison Took corrosive sublimate by mistake.
  burned by accidental explosion of blasting powder.
  Enteric peritonitis cause by violence. Gored by a cow.

  fell from flat car inside of track & run over by the car body

            given to her father & friends.