Some time not too long ago I started following a person named S.J. Hurley on BlueSky who writs an occasional blog about 19th century Saint Paul, based on the death records of our city. It's called Syndicate & Hague, which is an intersection significant in their life and the life of their family.
I was going to write about the most recent post (about 50 children who died from cholera infantum), but then I got distracted by the previous post about the many tragedies of the Dittman family.
Hurley describes what can be known from their immigration, census, and death records, and I recommend it to you.
Near the end, she sums up with this:
All of the deaths make me angry—not about the past, but about the present and how vulnerable our perception of the past is to people who want to make money off an image of a perfect, healthy, better life that only existed before modern medicine and public health. It was not better. Emilie’s life is such an example—she married a physician and seems to have had access to anything money could buy. However, it couldn’t buy a life free of illness....
So much of what this family suffered would have been prevented or treated now: water sanitation to prevent typhoid, vaccines to prevent diphtheria, antibiotics to treat tuberculosis, medication and therapy to support people who are struggling with mental health, and so on. We don't have to imagine the past—the records are right there, showing us what things were really like.
MAHA like the Dittmans, RFK.
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