by David DeKok
The fact that only homeopathic nurses were on the regular infirmary staff suggests that a desire to keep the facility friendly to homeopathic physicians might have played a part in the decision to bar involvement by the medical school, since its staff was all allopaths. But ultimately the odd decision remains a mystery. The lack of physician involvement in running the Cornell Infirmary became a raging controversy after physicians from the medical school criticized the care students received during the epidemic, but we get ahead of ourselves.
Shumard grew up on a dirt farm near Bethany, Missouri, about twenty-five miles south of the Iowa line and nearly as close to Nebraska. He graduated with honors and as class president from the University of Missouri in 1902, receiving his diploma from the hands of Mark Twain himself, the author Samuel L. Clemens. Shumard and his fellows were known ever after as the “Mark Twain Class.” The author had come to the University of Missouri to receive an honorary degree after what was to be his final visit to Hannibal, the small Missouri town on the Mississippi River where he grew up and his fiction took root. The white-haired, sixty-six-year-old Clemens was mobbed by well-wishers everywhere his train stopped, and he often became so emotional that he broke down in tears.
Shumard won a $300 scholarship to Cornell, a major award, and planned to study philosophy as a graduate student. He was an admirer of Dr. Frank Thilly, a philosophy professor at Missouri who had begun his teaching career at Cornell in 1892 and would return there in 1906 after two years at Princeton.21 After spending the summer of 1902 with his family and friends, Shumard set out in September with his family’s last $300 in savings—a year’s living expenses—on the nearly 1,100-mile rail journey to Ithaca.22 At Cornell, he enrolled in courses in metaphysics, logic, psychology, and ethics. For financial reasons, the young man couldn’t return home over Christmas break, so he was in Ithaca when the death water arrived in the taps. For whatever reason, he was among the first to drink it.
On the evening of Shumard’s hospitalization, a full house at the Lyceum Theatre in downtown Ithaca applauded the British actress Lillie Langtry in the play Cross-Ways. A legendary beauty, Langtry in 1877 became the mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales, who was crowned King Edward VII on August 9, 1902, and she was linked to many other rich and powerful men throughout her life. By the time she appeared on stage in Ithaca, Langtry was an American citizen. She made it through Ithaca without contracting typhoid (not every actress at the Lyceum Theatre that winter was so fortunate) and to her next performance in Rochester. The following night, Cornell defeated Harvard in basketball at the Armory, 23-9. Life in Ithaca seemed entirely normal as long as one didn’t probe too deeply.
Once again, the weather turned bitterly cold. Oliver Shumard was joined in the infirmary by several other students with typhoid symptoms, including Zella Marie Clark, a premed student from Prince Edward Island, whose sister, Clemmie, had died of typhoid in 1899. Their parents had refused to bring the coffin into the house, even with a cold November rain falling, out of misplaced fear of contagion. As it became clear to Zella that she, too, suffered from typhoid, her fear grew, but it was tempered by a deep religious faith and a curiosity about the medical drama going on around her in the infirmary.
At first, both Ithaca newspapers listened to typhoid skeptics like Dr. Hitchcock. On January 26, the Ithaca Daily News published a front-page story headlined, “Many Fever Cases Reported in City,” but argued that most of these cases were not really typhoid. Rather, echoing Hitchcock, they were a fever “peculiar to this city, caused either by climatic reason or by germs generated in drinking water.” The miasma theory seemed alive and well in Ithaca. Yet even Hitchcock was getting the runaround from the water company. The story revealed that Ithaca Water Works had refused to tell Dr. Hitchcock on which dates Six Mile Creek water might have been mixed with Buttermilk Creek water. This was done when the volume of the latter was too low. If this had happened, the Flats of Ithaca, which included the downtown, might also have received contaminated water, not just East Hill. But he refused to be suspicious, at least for the record. “The health officer will neither assert nor deny that the water from Six Mile Creek is responsible for the fever,” the Daily News said. In an editorial that day, the newspaper urged city officials and the scientists of Cornell to determine what was causing the mystery disease. In the meantime, it warned readers to boil their water.23 No such warnings were issued from city government. Common Council members were still focused on the perceived threat of the ninety-foot dam on Six Mile Creek that had consumed them since November, and Dr. Hitchcock seemed simply incompetent. It is also possible that he knew what the game was but was under pressure from his main employer, Cornell University, and the Tremans not to confirm there was a typhoid epidemic. Incompetent or spineless, Hitchcock did not carry out his duties as he should have.
No one would be able to deny there was a typhoid epidemic for much longer. Ithaca City Hospital was filling up with fever patients. Housed in the former Burt mansion in the Flats near where North Aurora Street crossed Cascadilla Creek, the hospital opened in 1889 and an operating room annex was added some years later. The Daily Journal reported on January 28—again not using the word typhoid to describe the illnesses—that City Hospital was full and consideration was being given to moving the nurses into other quarters.24
At least one private hospital was also open in Ithaca at the time, operated by Grace Robinson at Linn and Mill Streets. Little is known about the role of Robinson Hospital in the epidemic beyond quick references to this or that patient who had been taken there. Ben Poor, a student who fell ill with typhoid on January 31, was moved to Robinson Hospital by carriage from his boardinghouse at the recommendation of Dr. Coville and stayed until March 5, when he was taken home to Burlington, Iowa, by his mother to complete his convalescence.25
Complaints about the quality of care provided by the nurses of Cornell Infirmary were already being heard. Part of the problem was that the nurses had too many typhoid cases to look after, but clearly there were also management and competency problems. Annie Sophia Clark went to visit her sister, Zella, late in January and was surprised when a junior nurse, a Miss Cross, asked her sister to get out of bed and into a chair while she changed the sheets. The hospital matron entered the room while this was going on and became angry, telling Zella that under no circumstances did Dr. Coville want her to get out of bed. On another day, a nurse didn’t seem to know how to use a thermometer.26
Rumors were beginning to circulate that Ithaca Water Works and the unsanitary work camp at the dam site were responsible for the illnesses. Professor Gardner S. Williams was quoted in the Journal on January 29 denying that the water company was in any way to blame for the typhoid outbreak or that the work camp was unsanitary. “Before this sickness appeared, we took every precaution to prevent any contamination of the water. Closets were built on the hills, over deep pit holes, and the place was generally disinfected with lime.” The reports by Hollister and others of the ground around Six Mile Creek at the work camp littered with human excrement had not yet surfaced, so he did not have to explain those away. Williams insisted that cases of the “fever” were routine in Ithaca and happened every year.
That morning, Dr. Hitchcock finally advised residents to boil all water used for drinking purposes but strangely refused to say it was a precaution against illness. Simply common sense, he said, rebuffing the obvious follow-up question from the Ithaca Daily News reporter. In an Ithaca Daily Journal article, Williams heartily seconded Hitchcock’s recommendation, adding, “and in fact I have always boiled water since living in Ithaca” and offering helpful hints for making boiled water taste better. He must have assumed people had forgotten that a year earlier, he lied and told them that Six Mile Creek was just fine to drink without filtration.27
One suspects the Ithaca Daily News would have liked to talk to Williams, too, but the city was dividing into two camps. In one camp was William T. Morris and his friends,
including the Tremans, Cornell University, and the Ithaca Daily Journal. In the other was nearly everyone else and the Ithaca Daily News, which saw its circulation skyrocket. Published by Cornell oratory professor Duncan Campbell Lee, the Daily News had decided to abandon the reticence that characterized its initial stories about the typhoid outbreak. Led in the trenches by managing editor Frank E. Gannett, it would aggressively report on and editorialize about nearly every aspect of the epidemic. The Daily News became the voice of the people, an oft-misused phrase but quite accurate here. The Ithaca Daily Journal, run by George E. Priest and Charles M. Benjamin, and edited by Brainard G. Smith, increasingly became the voice of the embattled Treman family and their friends, especially Morris. President Schurman was in this group, too, although he tried to keep his distance.
The two camps met in peace for the last time on the evening of January 30 in a gala at the Masonic Hall in downtown Ithaca. Decorations were pretty, an orchestra performed, potted palms and plants circled the orchestra stand, and couples crowded the dance floor. The story in the Ithaca Daily Journal notes that “punch was served at the entrance.” Did the ice come from a safe source? One begins to see danger everywhere when writing about an epidemic. Among those present at the “unusually pleasant” event, as the newspaper termed it, was Barbara F. Schurman, but not her husband, the Cornell president.28
Jacob Gould Schurman was in New York City, where the previous evening he had delivered a major address to a large audience at Cooper Union containing a plea for the independence of the Filipino people that was reprinted in full in the next day’s New York Times.29 Schurman had been on an extended lecture tour through the Midwest, New York, and New England since mid-December, speaking on a variety of topics but especially the Philippines, and spending considerable time away from Ithaca and the university.30 His speech at Cooper Union was his masterwork as an orator on the Philippine question, delivered on the same stage where, on February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln delivered one of his more famous antislavery speeches. Schurman often declared that Lincoln was his role model, so the choice of platforms was probably no accident.31 As a naturalized citizen, he was ineligible to be president of the United States, but Schurman loved the limelight and considered himself to be doing God’s work in bringing the Philippine situation to national attention. He seems to have paid little attention to Cornell and Ithaca during the approach of the epidemic. His eyes were on the world, but the danger was at his feet.
Also at the Masonic gala were Robert H. Treman and his wife, Laura; Charles E. Treman and his wife, Mary; Samuel D. Halliday, chairman of the Cornell University Board of Trustees, and his wife, Jennie; Charles H. Blood, the bachelor district attorney and codeveloper with Jared Treman Newman of Cornell Heights, which needed some of the water that would rise behind the Six Mile Creek dam; and Professor and Mrs. Duncan Campbell Lee.32 We can only imagine what went through Lee’s mind as he walked among the revelers, knowing that the next day his newspaper would publish a story that spared nothing in describing the peril Ithaca faced from typhoid fever. Did he have any doubts about the path he was following? Or did he think back to the sick and dying soldiers in his unit during the Spanish-American War? He counted on Frank E. Gannett, his managing editor, to deliver the aggressive reporting while he wrote most of the bold editorials.
Judging by the editions he put out, Gannett was very much the young Charles Foster Kane, always pushing his reporters to bring back both the daily developments in the epidemic, including long and detailed lists of patients, plus the back story about what was really going on. That was what Lee wanted him to do. At this point we should note that while both men seem to have gotten along fine during this period, and while Lee later wrote Gannett a warm letter of recommendation, nearly forty years later Gannett claimed that Lee was away on sabbatical in England during the typhoid epidemic and that he, Gannett, was entirely in charge of the news coverage and editorials.
The claim first arose in Gannett’s 1940 campaign biography, which he commissioned from writer Samuel T. Williamson when he decided to seek the Republican nomination for president in 1940.33 Not that it did him much good. Gannett placed a distant eighth in first-ballot voting at the 1940 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. The GOP ultimately picked another businessman, utility executive Wendell Willkie, who went on to lose decisively to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The claim that Lee was in England during the epidemic is easily debunked. For one thing, Cornell University records show Lee’s sabbatical in England to have been during the 1901–02 academic year, not 1902–03. He returned to Ithaca months before the epidemic started. Lee was listed in the Cornell University catalog, The Record, as teaching several courses during both semesters of the 1902–03 academic year. There are the mentions of him in the newspaper, such as at the Masonic gala. No, Lee did not leave Ithaca during the epidemic.34
After the sun rose on the morning after the gala, Lee made his usual stop at the newspaper office, conferred with Gannett, and determined the story was ready to go. No one who read it could have any illusions about the typhoid fever epidemic in Ithaca.
Epidemic Spreads Throughout City
City Hospital Over-crowded with Sufferers from Fever
Physicians Call it Typhoid
The epidemic of fever which at present is raging in the city is rapidly reaching most serious proportions. Five new cases were taken to the City Hospital yesterday and the building is today so crowded that some of the nurses have been moved to private homes. Only urgent cases are being taken at the hospital and the number of patients being treated at their own homes is very large. Just how many patients there are now in the city is difficult to find out. Nearly all the physicians have from 15 to 20 cases each and it is estimated there are from 150 to 200 cases of typhoid here today.
—Ithaca Daily News, January 31, 1903
There was no exaggeration or sensationalism. The Daily News was reporting the epidemic as it ought to be reported. There would be no more pretending that the disease in Ithaca was something other than typhoid fever, no more pretending it was not a major catastrophe.
At City Hospital, the arrival of so many desperately ill people quickly filled it beyond the normal capacity of twenty-six. Nurses quarters became patient rooms, and even the reception area on the first floor was turned into a ward. Cots were set up wherever room could be found. Daniel W. Burdick, a druggist who was chief of the hospital as well as president of the Ithaca Business Men’s Association, appealed to the public for donations of pillows, sheets, and blankets. Rev. Cyrus W. Heizer, pastor of nearby First Unitarian Church, offered his Sunday school room as an overflow ward.35 Heizer was concerned about the college students in Ithaca who were away from their families, especially those in the nearby Ithaca Conservatory of Music (today Ithaca College) who sometimes used his church as a rehearsal and performance space. “It is the duty of Ithacans to take care of all such,” he said.36
The Ithaca Daily Journal continued to hold back, even when Mrs. Charles M. Benjamin, wife of one of the two copublishers, became ill with typhoid herself. The Journal did not ignore the epidemic completely, but it published fewer column inches and tended to orient its coverage, although not blatantly, toward the interests of the Tremans and Morris. It stressed personal responsibility to avoid the typhoid bacillus rather than assigning fault for the catastrophe that had occurred.37 Lee’s editorials in the Ithaca Daily News were clarion calls to action, while Smith’s in the Ithaca Daily Journal tended to be muted appeals to reason if not defenses of the city elite.
The Ithaca Daily News began printing long lists of the names and addresses of people who were ill with typhoid, sometimes adding brief remarks on their condition. These lists, which probably could not be replicated by a newspaper covering an epidemic today, show that typhoid in Ithaca attacked the families of the rich as well as the poor, the intellectuals as well as the day laborers. In the first list on January 31, we see, for example, t
he name of John Elliot Griffis, ten-year-old son of Rev. William E. Griffis, pastor of First Congregational Church of Ithaca. Rev. Griffis was an Orientalist and a prolific author. John Elliot was ill for a month but survived to become an important American composer of piano and chamber works. His older brother, Stanton, who did not contract typhoid, is perhaps the best-remembered of the family. He became a Wall Street investment banker, acquiring control of Madison Square Garden in 1933 and becoming chairman of Paramount Pictures in 1939. During the early 1950s, he was U.S. ambassador to Argentina during the ascendancy of Juan and Eva Peron. The two boys’ older sister, Lillian, who was away at Vassar College, contracted typhoid on a visit to Ithaca early in the epidemic and was now recovering from the illness in Poughkeepsie.
Despite the raging typhoid epidemic, many other young women from around the East Coast were about to descend on Ithaca for a major winter social event. Junior Week was a winter revel of long standing, held during the first week of the second term at Cornell after first semester exams were over. It was a big deal. As the editor of the Cornell Era magazine complained in 1893, “Junior Ball week is getting rather overdone. What with the Sophomore Cotillion and the Glee Club concert and the Junior Promenade and numerous private and fraternity parties and the entertainment of guests, for a large number of students the entire week is consumed in pleasure.”