It is 130 years since consumption took the life of my great-great-great-grandmother, Roxanna Briggs Bennett, in Abbot, some three years before the tuberculosis bacillus was identified. Consumption was certainly no effort to find a gentle description for this wasting disease, which was believed to eat away the lungs of those afflicted.
And that’s what TB did, I learned some years ago from Dr. Edward Harrow, the Bangor pulmonologist who has been one of Maine’s top experts in the field. His medical experience with tuberculosis over the years came not only in Maine but in South Dakota, Haiti and Guatemala, the latter being the country where he also studied drug-resistant TB, in particular.
Tuberculosis could indeed cause holes in the lung that could be seen on X-ray, a condition called cavitation, Harrow said, but even that result could be cured with longtime antibiotic therapy.
Roxanna Bennett’s death, on the other hand, was in keeping with the fact that TB was the leading killer in Maine in the last half of the 1800s.
Drastic treatments were tried to heal tuberculosis, on occasion the application of wax or even ping pong balls inside the lungs. In France, it was said that “the touch of the king” might cure the disease.
One hundred years ago, one of Bangor’s two city nurses was devoted to tuberculosis. Members of women’s clubs such as Athene, Home Culture, Woman’s Republic, Schumann, Norumbega and Nineteenth Century Club raised funds for the Bangor District Nursing Association specifically for this purpose, and they also were vocal supporters of sanitation efforts in the city.
In 1946, there were 11 patients at the Bangor Anti-Tuberculosis Association Sanitorium, a kind of facility that found some success at curing the disease with rest and “fresh air” no matter the weather.
The state ran three sanatoriums for tuberculosis — centers in Hebron and Presque Isle that closed in 1959, and the last in Fairfield that closed in 1969, as treatment with antibiotics took over. But many older folks remember hearing of someone who stayed at a sanitorium years ago, and of the skin testing that was conducted among those who had frequent contact with the patient before the diagnosis.
I was prompted to think about TB by a brief story in the Bangor Daily News News Briefs The World column on page 3 of the Oct. 30 issue of the paper. For the first time, the article stated, the World Health Organization had reported tuberculosis as rivaling HIV-AIDS as a global killer — TB claiming 1.1 million lives, and HIV-AIDS 1.2 million lives, including 400,000 who had both AIDS and TB.
But not here, right? Guess again. More than 9,400 cases of TB were reported in the United States in 2014. That number includes 14 people in Maine, specifically in Androscoggin, Cumberland, Hancock, Kennebec and York counties. Maine had 15 cases in 2013 and 17 in 2012, with fewer cases reported in 2011.
TB is not as contagious as chickenpox or measles, but it does spread through close contact through water droplets spread by a cough, for example. Sanitation efforts such as water districts and waste treatment have contributed to the decline of TB.
But there have been outbreaks, such as one that happened in June 1989 at Bath Iron Works, with 35 people being put on medication.
A University of Maine student at what is now University College in Bangor was diagnosed with a serious case of active TB in late 1994, but even that student would have been noncontagious after two weeks into the medication regimen. More than 150 of that person’s contacts were tested, with 35 of them testing positive and requiring follow-up.
Five months later, one of that person’s contacts had active TB. The initial case from 1994 had been traced back to a likely source in Lincoln County.
TB also was known as phthisis pulmonalis. Archaic terms such as consumption can be researched on “Rudy’s List,” I learned some years ago from historian and professor Jack Battick. The website then was at www.antiquusmorbus.com, but I now find that the new one should be www.archaicmedicalterms.com.
Many deaths in 1917-18 were caused by grippe, or influenza, which is a respiratory ailment, and not the stomach virus we sometimes mistakenly call the flu. When my grandfather Steeves’ cousin Ralph Baker came to live with the family in Sangerville as a baby, it was because his mother, Lucy Given Baker, had died from influenza in Millinocket. John W. Barry has written an informative book on the Great Influenza Epidemic.
For i nformation on researching family history in Maine, see Genealogy Resources under Family Ties at bangordailynews.com/browse/family-ties. Send genealogy queries to Family Ties, Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor 04402, or email familyti@bangordailynews.com.