Medical science has come a long way. So long in fact, that over the past 100 years formerly common medical terms for illnesses are no longer familiar to us.
Infant deaths, in particular, plagued 19th century Clevelanders. In an 1875 letter, excerpted below, my cousin Angela and I discovered the following:
This passage is about the infant death of Herman Harm, the fourth child of Michael and Elisabeth Harm, in August of 1874: “He was so healthy and happy, so well behaved. We rarely felt that we had a child. He woke up with laughing mouth and that’s also how he went to sleep. Until he went to the eternal rest after three days of being sick. He died of the childhood sickness Summer Complaint. His baptized name was Herman.” In that same time period, the letter goes on, a 2 year old girl of Uncle Jakob also died.
Summer Complaint? In the German, Michael uses the term der ruhr Krankheit (Sommer Complain). The modern term for it is “dysentery.” The term “Summer Complaint” came from the increase in frequency of dysentery in the summer due to poorer water quality in the warm months of the year.
A friend Bill Sherertz recently pointed me to a helpful site for sleuthing out antiquated medical terminology, which might appear on death certificates, in letters, or any number of genealogy documents. Rudy’s List of Archaic Medical Terms. Best of all, in addition to the English, there is an index for German and French medical terms.
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