Old disease names frequently found on death certificates

> I have to wonder how the author decided on the list.

The same list is found here [0], and I assume it started at the university and then was borrowed by the genealogy site. I assume it's things the OSU history department has found in Civil War letters.

[0] https://ehistory.osu.edu/exhibitions/cwsurgeon/cwsurgeon/med...

We often also use "Breakbone Fever" to try to communicate just how painful a case of Dengue can be to those who haven't had it.

I find Bills of Mortality fascinating, and am somewhat disappointed that my favourite inscrutable-sounding cause "Rising of the Lights"[0] didn't make it into the list posted.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_of_the_lights

"Teeth" might be some kind of infected abscess. In pre-antibiotic days you could easily die from that.

Cholera is still the preferred name for infection by Vibrio cholerae.

I’ve travelled enough to hear urban legends slightly distorted

Basically anywhere you go in the world there is a group of people that “has genes that dont metabolise alcohol” and this is presented as scientific fact with no study existing whatsoever, and masquaraded as the tolerant way of acknowledging problems integrating with that group of people

“But I heard from” doesnt matter who you heard it from, show the study and show why it is a good study, or drop the idea completely (or fund the study)

It can be the US, the UK, Central Europe, Asia, people repeat the same thing about another group of people in that area. Maybe its true in one of those places about one of those people. Or not.

It was only 150 years ago that consumption was the preferred medical term.

To put it into a little perspective: the Brooklyn bridge was built while this was still in general accepted use.

Love those books. Not often I encounter someone else who's read them. Which is maybe a little unusual as it's not like they're unknown or rare. I guess Napoleon-era naval warfare is maybe a bit of a niche nowadays.

>What a terrible way to die.

This is the 1800s we're talking about, a time when people routinely died from infections and sepsis. Organ failure over a couple days is a walk in the park by comparison.

Yeah they both look like crap from a comfy 21st century office chair in an air conditioned building but so does practically every other reality of 19th century life.

Note also that that could be a euphemism (or simply a cause of) suicide. As suicide was considered a sin (and also often considered scandalous by the surviving family) it was rarely mentioned on death certificates.

Sort of like the precipitous decline of alcohol-related deaths during prohibition: clearly prohibition must have prevented (or delayed!) some alcohol-related death, but out of respect for the family another cause of death was commonly used instead during that period.

Until I read the part about "insecticide" I thought that might have referred to drinking too much of the Green Fairy. After all, absinthe was banned there.

It was also used as a pigment. They made it for paint.

I believe when I learned about Paris Green, in some documentary, it was mentioned that it was also briefly used for consumer goods. My association of Paris Green is a picture of a rich green notebook cover and the narrator saying that scholars have to wear gloves to read its contents. Name of the Rose vibe going on there, but the theory is that it was used to keep rodents from chewing on the books.

Also if you're collecting old books, be careful of the green ones. It seems they started with Paris Green in the 1600's but continued using arsenic for green colors all the way into the 20th century: https://daily.jstor.org/some-books-can-kill/

My aunt and uncle both died of this, together with around 5 or 6 more people in the early 90s when one of their neighbors, an old lady, baked a cake for a birthday and mistakenly used Paris Green. She managed to poison all these people and, none survived, while she didn’t manage to have any of the cake and lived. Wanted to see if I can find anything online about this, but there’s not much saved from newspapers in Bucharest, Romania from that time.

Is anything with arsenic in it ever not toxic?

If I’d been forced to guess what Paris Green was, I would have gone with Absinthe

"Griep" is still the Dutch word for influenza.

"Gripe" is used to describe gastrointestinal illnesses affecting infants and small children.

There is tonic/patent medicine called "gripe water" still used widely in the Commonwealth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gripe_water

Clearly you’ve never played “Trauma Centre” on the Nintendo DS for the entire duration of a LHR to LAX flight

A lot of occupations from early 1900's census are fairly weird and awesome.

from https://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/06/13/great-slocum-disaster-j... :

    The PS Slocum, built in 1891, was a paddle boat or sidewheel passenger ship. On June 15, 1904, the ship carried 1,358 passengers, plus crew.

    Chartered by the St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church for $350.00, the passengers came mostly from the German-American community of the Lower East Side. 

    Most of the passengers were women and children. As the ship made its way up the East River, good times turned bad very quickly. There have been varying accounts of how the fire started, but it spread rapidly within a half hour of leaving dock around 9 a.m. The panic was horrific among the passengers as they faced death by drowning or being burned alive on the ship. 

    ... Only 321 passengers survived from a total of 1,358 passengers. The final death count totaled 1,021. The next largest death toll in the United States would come decades later with 2,974 dead from 9/11.

Rubeola (measles) and Rubella (German measles) are two separate diseases caused by different pathogens.

Congestive chills might have been meaningful at one point but now I doubt anyone would recognise that that's the name for Malaria.

"excited delerium" is not a medical term and has only been invented fairly recently by law enforcement authorities so don't expect it to appear on historical medical documents.