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Diseases in 1920's


ex pat

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Does anyone have any knowledge of what was going around in the 1920's please ?

5 members of my family, in the same household all died between 1922 and 28-.in 3  different addresses.

I was thinking that something like T.B. may have been responsible . Any help would be very welcome.

 

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2 hours ago, ex pat said:

Does anyone have any knowledge of what was going around in the 1920's please ?

5 members of my family, in the same household all died between 1922 and 28-.in 3  different addresses.

I was thinking that something like T.B. may have been responsible . Any help would be very welcome.

 

My Uncle, a racing cyclist, was winning medals in 1928 but died in 1930 of TB. Fortunately no other members of the family caught it. There was no real cure for TB until penicillin came along. I understand Uncle gave up his job and bought a horse and cart and became a trader so he could live in the fresh air all the time as someone had suggested that it would help him and may even be a cure.

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there was a flu epidemic just after the first world war, and more people died from it than did in the war.

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Through the 1920's the average rate of TB cases was 75,000 per year.  Currently it's about 6000, which are mostly cured now, the reverse in the 20's.  The treatment, as Old rider mentioned, was fresh air.  My mother recalls visiting a relatively young aunt with TB who was at the TB hospital at Meadowhead, the "treatment" was being in a ward that had no wall to the outside.

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9 hours ago, Edmund said:

Through the 1920's the average rate of TB cases was 75,000 per year.  Currently it's about 6000, which are mostly cured now, the reverse in the 20's.  The treatment, as Old rider mentioned, was fresh air.  My mother recalls visiting a relatively young aunt with TB who was at the TB hospital at Meadowhead, the "treatment" was being in a ward that had no wall to the outside.

Thank you . That backs up my theory. Thanks all for your help.

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My first post.....

Another cause of death for the young and old  in the early 1900s was from erysipelas or cellulitis, a bacterial infection of the upper layer or lower layer of the skin. My father had two older sisters who died around the age of 2yrs in the early 1920s. One of them definitely died from erysipelas and possibly both. Another younger sister of his died around the age of 4 I think in the early 30s, but I'm not sure what the cause was.

He only told me about this after I came out of hospital in 2006 after being treated with intravenous antibiotics for a week for erysipelas, followed by 4 weeks of oral antibiotics

Of course, in the 20s such treatment wasn't available.

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On 01/05/2017 at 04:57, Edmund said:

Through the 1920's the average rate of TB cases was 75,000 per year.  Currently it's about 6000, which are mostly cured now, the reverse in the 20's.  The treatment, as Old rider mentioned, was fresh air.  My mother recalls visiting a relatively young aunt with TB who was at the TB hospital at Meadowhead, the "treatment" was being in a ward that had no wall to the outside.

As a matter of interest, where was the TB hospital at Meadowhead situated?

I've checked with some of my more knowledgeable (well, I thought they were!) local history buffs and come up blank.

Lou

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13 hours ago, Lou Scannon said:

As a matter of interest, where was the TB hospital at Meadowhead situated?

I've checked with some of my more knowledgeable (well, I thought they were!) local history buffs and come up blank.

Lou

Mmmm, it could have been Dronfield Infectious diseases hospital, as the tram from Sheffield would only go as far as Meadowhead, the rest would be walking.  However my mother (probably 13 at the time) refers to the facility as being poor standard wooden huts.  The lady she went to see was Auntie Nellie who lived in Rotherham, so I'd have expected the treatment to be at Oakwood Hall in Rotherham, though possibly wartime had dislocated many facilities.  Auntie Nellie returned to her home in Rotherham but died in 1945. Next time I see Mum I'll interrogate her.

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3 hours ago, Edmund said:

Mmmm, it could have been Dronfield Infectious diseases hospital, as the tram from Sheffield would only go as far as Meadowhead, the rest would be walking.  However my mother (probably 13 at the time) refers to the facility as being poor standard wooden huts.  The lady she went to see was Auntie Nellie who lived in Rotherham, so I'd have expected the treatment to be at Oakwood Hall in Rotherham, though possibly wartime had dislocated many facilities.  Auntie Nellie returned to her home in Rotherham but died in 1945. Next time I see Mum I'll interrogate her.

Thanks for the prompt reply, I'll look forward to more info in due course.

lou

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This would appear to be it. Somewhat sparse on detail but it’s all I can find. Looks to be well out of date & the link to Derbyshire Record Office doesn’t work.
Pre 1948 isolation & mental hospital but no indication of when it was built/opened.
 
 
It would have been a short walk from Meadowhead, down the road towards Chesterfield then a cut across the fields.
It's now a private nursing home, Brookview, Holmley Lane, £600 - £900 per week.
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On 06/05/2017 at 12:52, Lou Scannon said:

Thanks for the prompt reply, I'll look forward to more info in due course.

lou

I visited Mum today and quizzed her about Auntie Nellie's hospital visit.  She went three times, and it was a tram ride to Meadowhead (she nearly got knocked down by a car when she went round the back of the tram).  There was then a walk across a park ( I reckon Graves Park). The whole of one wall was open to the elements, despite the snow and both patients and visitors were wrapped up well. It definitely wasn't Dronfield, because another aunt lived on Holmely Lane next door to that hospital.  I believe it was the Jessop / Firth Auxiliary Hospital at Norton, next to St James church (see map below), and Mum and her mother would have walked up Charles Ashmore Road and across the park.

From the National Archives site:

"The Firth Auxiliary Hospital opened as an auxiliary to Jessop Hospital in October 1927 in the converted Norton Hall. The hall, with land, had been donated to the four Sheffield voluntary hospitals by Colonel Bernard Firth in 1925, as a site for a new hospital where the services of the Royal Hospital, Royal Infirmary and the Jessop Hospital would be amalgamated. The later decision to build in the city centre changed this, leaving the Jessop Hospital to take on sole use of the site. It could house 45 antenatal and fever cases.

The main hospital was severely damaged in an air raid in 1940 and new buildings were completed in 1943. By 1948 there were 211 beds including 47 at the Firth Auxiliary Hospital, Norton, where there was a special provision for the treatment of puerperal sepsis in an open air ward. Closure of the Firth Auxiliary Hospital, (also known as the Norton Annexe) was discussed in April 1969. It eventually closed in 1972 and was later used as a private clinic."

So I think Nellie possibly had puerperal sepsis rather than TB (as a child Mum would not be given the full details, we just assumed it was TB).  This has now cost me a tenner as I can't avoid obtaining my great Aunt Nellie's death certificate, which may confirm the theory.

591225d5c9f1b_Jessop-FirthHospital1927.png.cb149527af7050c00aafdec8d488dc9e.png

591223a382188_JessopFirthAuxiliaryHospitalMeadowhead-Norton.png.d43a193fab1cfee68fb81db8ef47209b.png

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Edmund, thanks so much for your detailed information. I guess the differential diagnosis makes all the difference.

I was somewhat pixie led at first by the TB reference and my misreading earlier posts to think the year referred to was 1920. I was trying to work out where "Meadowhead" hospital was. I had considered Norton hospital but the TB reference seemed to rule it out making Dronfield the preferred option.

Sorry about the tenner but inquiring minds need to know.........

Related to this you may be interested in one of my heroes, Ignaz Semmelweis, who had an interesting life and sad death.

Lou

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My great aunt Nellie's death certificate has arrived - it shows that she died at home in Rotherham, of pulmonary tuberculosis, in October 1945.  Her sister (my grandmother) died in childbirth the previous March, so my mother's visit to the Firth Auxiliary hospital at Norton would probably been during 1944 at the latest.

I was uncertain about whether visitors to TB patients would have been allowed (especially a pregnant lady with her young daughter), however after reading the extracts from the diary of a TB patient's diary of 1944, I am confident that Nellie was being treated for TB at Norton,  The link to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine diary article is: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1079536/

TB caused nearly 25% of deaths in the 1800's , but this was reduced by improvements in public health and treatment (such as collapsing the lung to rest it), until the introduction of streptomycin in 1946 changed the situation completely.

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Thanks for the update. The tenner was well spent.

It seems we/you now have the truth of it.

I still find it a little odd that TB patients would be treated at the same hospital as patients with puerperal sepsis  as I guess both sets of patients would be somewhat immunocompromised with a good chance of cross infection, I suppose the state of knowledge at that time.......

Interesting thread, thanks.

Lou

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My own maternal grand-mother, died of Pulmonary tuberculosis, in Winter Street Hospital in 1927.

I do not know a great deal about Winter Street Hospital, but it certainly seems to have been some form of isolation hospital, as it seems to have been at the centre of the major Smallpox epidemics that blighted Sheffield in the nineteenth century. It seems to be mentioned in all of the official reports of the time.

One of the principle recognised sources of tuberculosis, is through the consumption of raw (unpasteurised) cow's milk, and it wasn't until milk pasteurisation became widespread that the effects of the mycobacterium tuberculosis bacterium were first effectively contained. In-fact, the legal definition of 'pasteurised milk' is milk which has been heat treated to a specified temperature, for a specified time, both of which together, in combination, are known to kill the mycobacterium tuberculosis bacillus. A number of time-temperature combinations are recognised, but H.T.S.T., or high temperature, short-term pasteurisation, (161°F (71.7°C), for 15 seconds), is still the most commonly used.

T.B. testing of cow herds, and their milk products also played an important role in the control of tuberculosis, although the real change was the widespread adoption of milk pasteurisation. Does anyone remember 'T.T. Certified Milk? That essentially was tuberculosis testing.

 

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