What Did People Die of 140 Years Ago?
Can laryngitis be fatal? What exactly is a “Fatty Heart”? How many synonyms are there for tuberculosis? We explore these and other intriguing questions raised by an 1880s cemetery ledger.
My friend Janet recently attended an event at Green-Wood Cemetery, the celebrated Brooklyn oasis that opened in 1838 and is now the final resting place for about 600,000 souls.
Fifty-eight of those souls are listed on the two-page spread shown above, which Janet photographed during the event. Those pages are part of a ledger listing people who were interred at Green-Wood in 1884. Let’s zoom in a bit to get a better view of the spectacular penmanship:
The registry has all the column headings you’d expect to see: “Name,” “Place of Birth,” “Age,” etc. But what really gets me is the column on the right-hand page labeled “Cause of Death,” which earns extra pathos points for having the various maladies rendered in that same magnificent calligraphy:
I have so many questions. For starters, note that the very first cause of death listed at the top of the column is “Paralysis,” which is not something I’d normally think of as a fatal condition. Like, can you really die of paralysis? Wouldn’t it be more likely that you died of something else that caused the paralysis? (By odd coincidence, paralysis also appears as the final entry at the bottom of the column, so the list is essentially bookended by immobility.)