The Newspaper's Use of Death Registers

Data that was gathered in the death (mortuary) registers were reported in detail for the public in the local St. Paul newspaper, The St. Paul Globe. The detailed information provided to newspaper readers showed deaths by disease, sex, age, and nationality; and the number of deaths in previous years during the reported months.

This was especially important to people in that era because they lacked the ability to prevent many of the diseases that could kill them, or that could cause lifelong disability. Many of the deaths they suffered were from infectious diseases, as the reports from September and October 1881 show. The vast majority of deaths were of people under the age of 20. In October's numbers, for example, only 10 of the 105 deaths were over 40 years old.

Among the overall causes of death, infectious diseases like typhoid and diphtheria rank high in their contributions to death. These disproportionately harmed the young. I specifically want to highlight the deaths by age in the table below.

The public reporting of causes of death per month is not something we would expect to see in papers now, with the exception of our experience during the first year or so of COVID—when we very suddenly had consciousness of a disease we didn't know how to treat, had no vaccine for, and that came with many unknowns.

That is probably the closest we've ever gotten to understanding what the daily onslaught of disease possibilities were like for the people living in Minnesota back then—except that we had grown accustomed to not thinking or worrying about what it was like to face a disease that spread out of control without a clear and immediate solution. Not mitigation. A clear, undeniable solution.

We would not have done well in 1881.

Definitions

Typhoid is a disease caused by salmonella bacteria in untreated water or in places without well-managed human waste disposal. It is rare in the U.S. now, but before antibiotics and improved management of water systems, it was more prevalent. It causes high fever and gastrointestinal symptoms. If you want a deep dive into a description of the disease in a pre-1900 text, the 1897 book "The Diseases of Infancy and Childhood," by Luther Emmett Holt, was recommended to me by a friend with expertise in the history of medicine. The section on symptoms of typhoid begins on page 1009.

Diphtheria is an illness that is still fatal 5-10% of the time today, which is why we are vaccinated against it early in life. It is caused by a bacteria that causes a membrane that covers the throat and tonsils, difficulty breathing, and fever. In Holt's 1897 book, an in-depth and lengthy section on symptoms of diphtheria begins on page 963. It's worth noting that in 1881, people still had all kinds of theories about what the cause of diphtheria was and correlated the disease with things like rotting potatoes in a cellar and other "bad air" types of explanations.