Archive for September, 2011

Any of you guys ever read Chita? It’s a superb novel by Lafcadio Hearn…and I LOVE the author’s name almost as much as I love his book! If I made it up in a story, EVERYBODY would consider it far too off-the-wall to believe, but he was REAL…even lived in New Orleans for a while…where he learned about the destruction of Isle Derniere during a hurricane in the 1800′s and wrote about it. That’s where things get TANGIBLE and kind of spooky for me because I’ve BEEN there…to Isle Derniere…or more accurately what’s left of it, just spitting distance from dad’s favorite oyster beds when I was growing up.
Now only a few pilings and boards scattered among the palmettos, with maybe a HINT of a pier here and there, a gently sloping beach, and a lot of high, dry ground where a magnificent summer hotel once stood, it was a favorite retreat for people from New Orleans in those days, bathed by sea breezes, lavishly Victorian, and free from “Yellow Jack,” which we know as Yellow Fever. New Orleans has ALWAYS had problems that way, cloistered as it is between two bodies of water and completely vulnerable to miasma breeding and buzzing in the shallows.
If you want to lose yourselves in the horror of those times, watch “Jezebel,” one of my favorite Bette Davis movies, even though I didn’t really care for her concept of a Louisiana accent…more like Georgia, and for that matter, the scenes they depicted of New Orleans, too…but they got the idea across: antebellum, lavish, and VULNERABLE. I guess they were trying to establish a MOOD, but when Henry Fonda slapped that mosquito on his neck, EVERYBODY knew. Above the Yellow Jack line or no, he had CAUGHT it, and he was one dead puppy.
Most people don’t get this, but in the last few scenes when Bette is acting up a storm in a cart rattling over cobblestones toward Lazaret Island…which doesn’t exist…there are NO islands in the Mississippi around New Orleans…there were always NUNS in the wagons, nuns with big, fancy hats…and that’s accurate, too. The Daughters of Charity took care of those people at great personal risk and significant mortality to its members, and TO THIS DAY, they ride free on any New Orleans public transportation…as thanks from a grateful city.
The rest of it is also accurate, like those cannons firing sulphur into the air, stupid though it may seem. Those poor people didn’t have a CLUE about what was REALLY going on, but that didn’t stop the politicians and medical hacks from ordering the army to do things like that. They were wrong, of course, but they were DESPERATE; what else could they have done? Voodoo? Prayer in St. Louis Cathedral? They did all of it…everything they could think of, but the disease still got to them because if could FLY.
Poor New Orleans, Yellow Jack wasn’t its only disease problem; there were LOTS of others…like CHOLERA, and one poor, innocent bastard wound up crushed by both the disease and history. You see, if you’ve had cholera, you’re usually IMMUNE to re-infection, so when an epidemic hit, the guys who had it before were enlisted to stay and help the others…while the rest of them fled, usually to places like Isle Derniere. One of those staying behind was a minister, who in his quiet hours before sleep began plotting the new cases on a map of the city.
In time he realized something. Cholera seemed to follow WATER, and he made the big mistake of writing an article about it in the local newspaper. While he was only trying to help, the doctors in New Orleans POUNCED on him, demanding a retraction, and in time he printed one…poor fool, poor intuitive, brilliant fool. He was RIGHT, but that didn’t stop the establishment. I’ve read his announcement, and it’s heartbreaking. How do you reach back in time and tell a guy like that he was right and the rest of them were WRONG?
Not much later, some guy in England made the same connection, and HE’S considered the visionary…not our poor minister. I can’t help wondering…I’m a PHYSICIAN novelist, after all…what would I have done? Told them to BOIL their water, for sure, and to drain their swamps, told medical personnel to WASH their hands after every patient encounter, told cholera vicitms to drink a lot of water with salt in it, but doctors in those days were a stupid bunch…and VERY poorly trained. They’d probably have run me out of town on a rail, most likely tarred and feathered.
These days New Orleans is free from cholera and Yellow Jack, but you can just bet they’re still out there…waiting patiently in swamps surrounding the city for something to unleash them. In the old days people spoke a lot about malaria, even patients much later when I was practicing medicine, and I don’t see why it couldn’t have happened, same swamps and all…but these days all the cases New Orleans sees are imported, much like the few cases of cholera they had a couple of decades ago.
Of course, they had the usual problems, viral infections, pneumonia and infected wounds, just like we have today, but non-infectious causes of death were also common, most prominently including childbirth, accidents…life was tough in those days…and cooks burning to death in the kitchen. At one time, immolating cooks outnumbered childbirth deaths, and it makes sense if you think about how they cooked…on open hearths…while wearing MOUNTAINS of lacy undergarments. One well-placed spark or cinder and the cook went up like a Roman candle.
The people at Isle Derniere all drowned, of course, and that was common in those days. Not many people were effective swimmers, particularly considering the way they dressed. That’s actually STILL TRUE in the great Atchafalaya Basin. I’m always ASTOUNDED by how many of those trappers and fishermen don’t know how to swim…or even dog-paddle, and every now and then one of them falls in…and people say, “Well, he drowned…fell out of the boat.” FELL OUT OF THE BOAT? Hell, we used to DIVE out of boats when we were water skiing. Take some swimming lessons, Guys; you won’t regret it.
Sorting through all this makes me even happier to be living in the 21st century than I was before. Life is tough enough without the deck stacked against you…like it was in those days. I’ve never seen the statistics, but I’ll just BET there were a lot of food-borne illnesses, too…no refrigeration, easy for staph, shigella, or salmonella to get a toe-hold and bring you down. A word about staph food poisoning…as a physician, I saw a lot of cases, and the thing I remember most was when we had identified the infected food item, the patient always said, “But it was DELICIOUS!” No wonder we had so many infecitons; it seems staph tastes GOOD.
In the old days, death was always close by, sometimes only inches away in the kitchen, and EVERYBODY lost a child or two during a lifetime. There was nothing to do about it, so they went on with their lives, not perfectly, some might say not even in a civilized fashion, but they did persevere and left us an odd mixture of good and bad, as I suspect most forebears do. For one, I’m grateful they did, leaving us the Louisiana we have today…filled with promise and hope, free from cholera, Yellow Jack, dead mothers and infants, and with MUCH safer cooking…but there’s STILL one sticking point.
The old guys cleared the land…or more precisely, their plantation workers did…and we’ve built on it…in more ways than one. Normal life here no longer has the sting of unexpected illness and death, but at a truly TERRIBLE cost to humanity…and yes, I’m talking about SLAVERY. I’ll never understand how those cultured, sophistocated people considered it reasonable to go to Africa, link human beings into an iron chain, and work them nearly to death in their cotton fields. Slavery was…and ALWAYS will be a MONSTROUS evil…horrible, and damned…not just a human illness, a societal one.
Slaves died, too, from overwork, from illnesses, from childbirth, and from despair, but NOBODY has statistics on them. They DIDN’T COUNT…non-entities to those white folks behind the columns who only worried about the cotton crop, the latest fashions, and whether food arrived hot at the table. If those old guys could speak to us, they’d expect us to be grateful for what they endured for our sake and they’re right…up to a point, but thank God, modern sensibilities have kicked in to put things into perspective.
I’ve read the Civil War journals of BOTH Mary Chestnut and Sarah Morgan…several times. My copy of Mary’s journal is almost falling apart, and the take-away lesson is THEY KNEW SLAVERY WAS WRONG and did absolutely nothing to change things…didn’t even like to talk about it. Most of them were scrupulously religious…and not a little superstitious. I wonder why they didn’t see Yellow Jack, cholera, death in childbirth and all the rest as Divine retribution for their demonic traffic in human misery. Personally, I don’t think God sends death and destruction, but he DOES send tests…to help each of us learn EXACTLY who he is. Unfortunately, they failed theirs flat.
So…Old Guys…the way I see it, the best you can hope for from us is a WASH, whatever horrors you endured…and even there, the odds are iffy.