I just learned from a site about Thoreau that his brother John had died of tuberculosis a couple years before Thoreau lived in the woods. I wonder if by that time he was aware that he had tuberlosis also, and if awareness of his impending early death sought isolation to think.
The site below has a lot of information new to me.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/poet/thoreau.htmlI long ago wondered why Thoreau never married. At first I thought it was for economic reasons. Then I found his father had a successful business making pencils,which Thoreau took over. And he was a skilled surveyor. So then I wondered if he had a problem with gender. So now it is clear that he must have known he had tuberculosis and a markedly shortened life expectancy. I wonder if he was the source of infection of Emerson, who also died of tuberculosis. In those days so many people thought things like tuberculosis and cancer were punishments for sin, that families concealed them.
Dr. Bill, I found these; apparently Thoreau did know he was dying, according to
http://www.literature-web.net/thoreau:
Aware that he was dying of tuberculosis, Thoreau cut short his travels and returned to Concord... And this, from a site on Emerson:
On April 27, 1882, the great thinker died of pneumonia, caught some weeks before after a rain-soaked walk through his beloved Concord woods. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/poet/emerson.htmlThis place also said
...he experienced a religious crisis after the death from tuberculosis of his first wife... and that he left the church in 1832; the Thoreau site said
He was a member of Emerson's household from 1841 to 1843 So it looks like Emerson would have been exposed to TB by his first wife, I should think, more than a decade before Thoreau came to live with him. And Thoreau died in 1862, two decades after his stay with Emerson, so perhaps he had not developed it at the time.
Um--TB isn't always fatal, is it? So maybe Emerson had a mild case of it, which could have left him more susceptible to pneumonia than he might have been?
Dear Jackie: thanks for that article about Thoreau.It is hard to tell from it when he first learned he had tuberculosis. Another site I saw a long time ago, about tuberculosis in famous people, said Emerson died of tuberculosis, but may well have been in error. With pneumonia, the type of causative organism makes a big difference. Emerson presumably had one of the virulent types.
tuberculosis is a terrible, nasty disease... it is often fatal..
if you once contracted it, you have it forever...--in theory, today, that is no longer true.. but the 'treatment (with intense antibotics) still takes years! unfortunately, because it takes so long, many don't complete the antibotic treatment, and many strains of TB are drug resistant.
-in otherwise healthy individuals, TB can often be keep at 'bay' by the bodies natural immuno/defence systems--so while often fatal it may not become a serious problem for 20 to 30 years.
but, if you become ill with something else, TB will 'take the opportunity to 'break out'-- before drugs, people would have 'acute attacks', get 'better'(show fewer symptoms) on and off over the course of many years, but each 'attack' tended to leave them weaker. it was a chronic, debilitating disease.
TB(bacterium) love 'oxygen' which is why it most commonly 'infects' the lungs, but it can infect the brain/spinal cord, (and commonly does when contracted in-utero-- the 'hunchback of ND' might well have been born to a consuptive mother.)
TB is/was called 'consuption'-because (in constrast to cancer that causes tumors) it 'eat away' tissue.-- the lung tissue TB destroys reduces 'oxygentation' of the blood, so it make those with disease weak, (tired)
one 'pre-(effective)drug' cure was to collapse a lung -- a 'cure' they discovered when a TB 'ate' a hole through a lung wall and caused the lung to collapse on its own (it is rather painful)-- the collapse often helped 'cure' the disease.
we now know that the TB bacterium can't survive UV light-- so fresh outdoors and sunlight were another effective cure (Dr's didn't know why, but they knew that staying indoors, and darkness made TB more 'contagous', and sunlight made it less so.. many hospitals, today, (especially the ER area) have UV lights to help 'clean the air'--since TB is on the rise again in urban area's.
my grandfather had TB, and when we went to ireland to see grandparents, my sister 'caught'TB--she was young, healthy, we played out in the sun (no one else caught it, and to be fair, it should have been me, i spent more time with Grandfather).
we all had to be tested, once D's test/xray came back. my mother, was frantic, and to say she was upset, and felt guilty is one of the understatements of the last century!-- i don't think there is enough server space in universe to detail her reaction.
Pleased to oblige!
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