Napoleon (Ohio) Faced Smallpox in 1924

Napoleon (Ohio) Faced Smallpox in 1924                                                       by Alan Borer

        

            The COVID-19 outbreak has caused disruptions all over the world.  Such is the very definition of pandemic, an epidemic that is widespread enough to be felt in many countries.  My grandmother told stories of the “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918-19; her whole family recovered, but the village doctor succumbed.  Typhoid, bubonic plague, and cholera killed millions over the centuries.  Other diseases have claimed large numbers, but have done it more haphazardly.

            One small outbreak of smallpox occurred in Northwest Ohio in 1924.  Smallpox, a disease which caused large blisters and sores on the skin, was often but not always fatal, but left disfiguring scars on the skin.  Treatments were being tested for smallpox as early as the late eighteenth century.  Edward Jenner developed a workable vaccine in 1796.  But smallpox remained a public health concern well into the twentieth century.

            In March of 1924, a man named Byron Linthicum, living on Phillips Avenue in Toledo, received a letter from his mother Fannie in Liberty Township near Napoleon in Henry County.  She and her husband J. Giles Linthicum were heads of a hard-working farm family.  In a surviving letter, Fannie stated that they had baled hay, probably left over from the previous season.  She then mentioned a possibly alarming bit of news:

“….they are exposed to Smallpox carried right to their house  -  don’t stop too long in Napoleon when you come Saturday.  Smallpox is thick but no one is quarantined  -  only the sick.  They have School & Shows going full blast…”

            Mrs. Linthicum was not just repeating gossip.  Although it did not reach the numbers or geographic spread of a pandemic, there was definitely smallpox making the rounds.  For example, this news article appeared in the Lima News on June 15 of that year:

“Smallpox Outbreak is Reported in Vicinity

Henry Eickholt, undertaker of Ottoville, is the first victim of the disease in Putnam-co. He was employed in Toledo and embalmed the body of a child who died there from the disease.
He was attacked in the most virulent from [sic] the death ensued after a week. The body was buried in Ottoville within 24 hours after death.”

Smallpox was common in Detroit that same summer:

During the first six months of 1924, 3,999 cases of smallpox were reported in Michigan, of which 1,532 were in Detroit. From Jan. 1 to May 30, there were 106 deaths from smallpox in Detroit and 27 in the rest of the State.  [Time Magazine, July 21, 1924]

The twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul in Minnesota experienced a very aggressive outbreak:

…. a report issued in 1925 by the Minnesota Department of Health, describes the state's worst smallpox epidemic, which raged from 1924-1925. Before the outbreak ended in August, 1925, 4,041 people were stricken with smallpox and 504 died.  [http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/200111/26_losurem_smallpox/history.shtml]

            The 1925 smallpox cases did not add up to a pandemic, or even an epidemic.  Officials in Minnesota traced, they thought, their cases to a man in Ontario, Canada.  But in Ohio, only scattered cases developed.  Fannie Linthicum need not have worried, as she lived to be 74 and saw many grandchildren in her time.

            Smallpox was finally eradicated in 1979 and no longer occurs in nature.  A few samples are held by the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia; a few more are kept by the Russian government the city of Koltsovo. They are held (we hope) for research purposes.  As we all have just witnessed in COVID-19, viruses are nothing if not dangerous!