by David DeKok
A week later, Schurman ordered a full-scale investigation, seemingly motivated by a letter he received from Charles S. Francis, editor and publisher of the Troy Times and a former United States ambassador to Greece and the Balkans. Francis asked about Edna Huestis and mentioned that his own two daughters had had a rough experience with typhoid when they lived in Athens. Schurman contacted Margaret Harvey, warden of Sage College, and ordered her to investigate how Huestis might have developed typhoid. Whether this was Schurman’s intent is unknown, but Harvey, who already believed Huestis to be a problem, set out to pin the blame on the young woman’s own behavior over the previous few weeks.14
Harvey was in her first year at Cornell, having been hired away from Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia to be the warden, or housemother, of Sage College. Sage, as noted previously, was a dormitory for female students at Cornell and not, like Radcliffe or Barnard at the time, a separate degree-granting institution with a close affiliation to an all-male college. Huestis liked to party, which was no secret, and Harvey interrogated her friends, especially fellow members of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. She looked for evidence to bolster an argument that Huestis’s own bad behavior was to blame for her contracting typhoid.
She told Schurman that Huestis had been in a “weak, run-down condition, unable to do her university work or to take her examinations both before and after her stay in the infirmary” for tonsillitis. A premed student in her sorority had even urged her to go home, but Huestis refused, not wanting to miss out on Junior Week. She ate and drank her way through the Sophomore Cotillion and Junior Prom, according to her friends Edward Fernow and Mary Merrit Crawford, the latter a fellow Kappa Kappa Gamma. Harvey had believed Huestis to be physically run-down even before her mother’s complaint, and her letter to Schurman recounted a dinner table interrogation of Huestis prior to her going home. Her friend and sorority sister, Olive Morrison, and a third student, Maida Rossiter, who was a library science student and a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, were also present. Zeroing in like a prosecutor, Harvey demanded to know whether they had consumed any cold drinks at the soda water fountains or confectioners downtown, which the Sage College women had been strictly forbidden to do. Huestis confessed that she had consumed a “chocolate sunday” the day before, perhaps at the Platt & Colt Pharmacy in Ithaca where ice cream sundaes were invented in 1892, although the report doesn’t say. Rossiter, who described the interrogation in a separate statement attached to Harvey’s report, helpfully explained that a chocolate sundae “is a cold drink” in case Schurman didn’t know.
Summing up, Harvey labeled Huestis an “incautious” young woman who was “careless of her health” and who just couldn’t stay home during Junior Week. It was meant to be a damning indictment, even if this morality play seems comical today. Huestis may well have contracted typhoid from that “chocolate sunday” but could just as well have picked it up during her stay in the Cornell Infirmary for tonsillitis, which was around the time the first typhoid patients began arriving. As we have seen, sanitary precautions were not always observed in the infirmary. In any event, Huestis survived her case of typhoid, graduated from Cornell in 1905, and went on to become a leading American miniature painter under the name of Edna Simpson.15
Margaret Harvey was remembered more fondly by Isabel Dolbier Emerson, the Brooklyn student who had experienced the Junior Prom as a “blissful night.” Emerson saved the printed warning distributed by Harvey to the Sage College coeds during the epidemic: “Do not relax care in regard to water used for brushing the teeth, or taken for any purpose in the mouth. Do not eat uncooked oysters. Do not take any cold drinks nor eat ice cream or uncooked food downtown. Do not forget that responsibility rests on you.” Emerson pasted it in her scrapbook accompanied by a handwritten note: “She did such a lot.”16
Some students, in the face of the serious illness and death around them, regretted their past frivolity. Cornell’s Chi chapter of the Delta Gamma sorority confessed as much in a report written for the sorority’s national magazine, Anchora: “In Chi’s last letter . . . we were groaning over ‘finals’ and wondering if life was worth living; but as we look back on these trials, they seem trivial indeed, for now we are in real trouble.” More than half the Delta Gamma sisters had fled Ithaca, so the national sorority had given permission to postpone rush. On the other hand, the Alpha Psi fraternity boasted that none of the brothers had become ill and only five had left campus when the epidemic was at its peak. Some fraternity houses had been deserted for much of the semester. “Our perfect immunity is accounted for in the careful precautions taken and our own spring of pure drinking water on the premises,” the fraternity secretary wrote.17
Winter and spring sports at Cornell sagged during the epidemic. Some teams declined to travel to Ithaca because they feared their players would become ill, such as when Harvard canceled its fencing meet with Cornell. Basketball and baseball were especially hard hit. On February 27, Cornell’s cagers lost to Princeton in an away game, 55-18. A story in the Ithaca Daily News blamed the loss on demoralization over the typhoid epidemic combined with the loss of star guard Percy L. Lyford, who was ill with the fever. Lyford became ill in New Haven, Connecticut, just before the previous night’s game with Yale, and was hospitalized there. Worse was yet to come. On March 12, Robert S. Knapp, a starting forward, died of typhoid.
For the baseball team, the impact of the epidemic was not quite so devastating. Coach Hugh Jennings had two key players out sick with typhoid, but both survived. Nearly half the squad left during the height of the epidemic, which coincided with preseason practice. But by the time competition began at the end of March, most had returned and Jennings and the team finished the season with a respectable 17-9 record. From the description of the season he wrote for that year’s Cornellian, the student yearbook, Jennings seems to have been a thoughtful and considerate coach, opposite in style to the angry bluster of Charles Courtney, the crew czar.18
Some of the worst tragedies occurred when a parent taking care of a sick child caught typhoid and died. There were three known instances of this, and it would not be surprising if more cases had escaped public attention. Ill Cornell students dispersed across the United States during the epidemic, some to distant farms or very small towns in the Midwest and South. These secondary deaths by rights should be added to the grim statistics of the Ithaca epidemic, bringing the known death toll to eighty-five rather than the official figure of eighty-two.
The danger of secondary infections during a typhoid epidemic, especially to physicians and nurses, was well known. Typhoid cannot be spread through the air, like a cold. The danger comes through the hands. A caregiver is continually cleaning up after the patient and coming in contact with things he touched or wore. Dr. Edwin O. Jordan, a prominent Chicago bacteriologist who went to Ithaca to investigate the epidemic for the Journal of the American Medical Association, said it took only a tiny drop of patient urine or a speck of excrement to transmit typhoid to a caregiver. “In almost countless ways,” Jordan wrote, “typhoid bacilli may find access to the alimentary tract of attendants or associates.”19
Physicians and nurses were trained in the dangers of typhoid patient care, but most parents were not. We can only imagine the guilt of the sons in the two cases in which they survived and their fathers died. One survivor could not talk about his father’s death even as an old man. In the other case, the family tried to deny the father’s typhoid was connected to the son’s, even though the link was obvious. It was no doubt an attempt to spare him the mental anguish of having been partly responsible for his father’s death. In the third case, the son died before the father became ill.
The story of the Pray family of Sherburne, New York, reads like something out of Dickens. Fred J. Pray was a freshman at Cornell in the veterinary school, the only child of James A. Pray. James’s wife, Nettie Pray, was Fred’s stepmother. His birth mother, Emma Pray, had died in 1887 when Fre
d was six years old, and his father had subsequently remarried. By all accounts, Fred Pray and his stepmother got along fine. The parents, like other families of modest means who sent a child to Cornell, scrimped and saved to find the money to pay his tuition and expenses. Fred Pray came home on February 17 ill with typhoid fever and was treated by Dr. Lewis A. Van Wagner, a Sherburne physician. His parents, and especially his father, nursed him at home, but James Pray was fated to watch his son die on March 12. He was buried next to his birth mother two days later in Christ Church Cemetery in Sherburne.
To his second wife’s horror, James Pray began to exhibit the symptoms of typhoid on March 26, within the standard incubation period of the disease. Within days, he developed a full-blown case of typhoid, and on April 8 he died. Three days later, he was buried in Christ Church Cemetery next to his son and first wife. Nettie Pray barely had him in the ground when her husband’s sister, Nellie Pickert, and other family members descended on the house like locusts, began taking things, and demanded she leave. James Pray left no will, and under New York State law of the time, his estate went mainly to his birth family, which clearly was not on good terms with the second wife. They knew what state law allowed, and they were executing their claim. Nettie Pray was turned out of her house, which was then sold and the proceeds applied to the remaining medical and burial expenses of Fred and James Pray. The rest went mainly to Nellie Pickert, and the widow received nothing.20
Edwin G. Nourse was a freshman at Cornell who planned to stay for six years and become an engineer. He was on a tight budget in the winter of 1903, trying to make $200 cover his room and board for the remainder of the semester, and so was always hungry. When typhoid symptoms appeared one day, Nourse feared he would never recover if he went to the overcrowded Cornell Infirmary. So he set out by train for his home in Downers Grove, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. It was a grueling experience. When his sister, Alice, arrived from Evanston, where she was a student at Northwestern University, “he was lying on the couch by the window and looking pale and thin against its red plush.” She heard her brother say repeatedly, “I thought I’d never make it.” He was sick and exhausted.
Although Nourse had no fever to speak of that first night home, by morning he was too ill to get out of bed. His condition worsened by the day, and soon his life hung in the balance. He became delirious. “His mind was affected and he had no control of himself, making the care of him unnecessarily hard,” his stepmother, Alice P. Nourse (both the stepmother and daughter were named Alice), wrote to President Schurman. Both parents struggled together to care for their son. Alice cleaned the soiled bed linens in a washboiler atop the stove and then put them through a wringer. Edwin H. Nourse, who was seventy years old and living on a meager pension after being forced out as director of music education in the Chicago public schools for political reasons, rolled over and lifted his unconscious son as necessary. But they finally had to bring in a nurse, despite their limited resources. Identified only as “Miss Whitcomb,” she had done home care for the family during a previous illness and was much loved.
One day, young Alice Nourse found both Miss Whitcomb and her father ill with typhoid. They had caught it from Edwin. Now she and her stepmother had three people to care for. Her brother gradually recovered, but his father died ten days later, blood pouring out his rectum. As with James Pray, his close and loving care of his ill son had led to his own death.21
When Edwin G. Nourse finally had the strength to return to Cornell University, he decided for economic reasons to give up engineering and get a bachelor of arts degree, ultimately gravitating to agricultural economics and the Brookings Institution. From 1946 to 1949, he was President Harry S. Truman’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. In an oral history conducted by the Truman Presidential Library in 1972, Nourse mentioned Cornell University and his bout with typhoid but not how it led to his father’s death. His sister, Alice, was forced by their father’s death to drop out of Northwestern University. She did not return. Five years later, she traveled to China to visit her sister, Mary, the third Nourse child, who was a teacher in Hangchow. While there, Alice met and later married Earle Tisdale Hobart, a Standard Oil executive. As Alice Tisdale Hobart she became a best-selling novelist, writing of her China experiences in Oil for the Lamps of China and other books. Her 1959 memoir, Gusty’s Child, contains an account of how her family was devastated by the Ithaca typhoid epidemic.22
For the Mudge family in Brooklyn, the tragedy took much the same course. Alfred E. Mudge Jr., a junior at Cornell who seems to have been one of the last students afflicted with typhoid during the epidemic, returned home sick and was ministered to by his father, Alfred Sr. The elder Mudge was a lawyer and the last corporation counsel of Brooklyn before it became a part of New York City in 1898. He contracted typhoid and died on April 28. The family and their physician denied that Alfred Jr. had infected his father, but the chances of any other source for the infection seem remote. The younger Mudge also became a prominent lawyer, a name partner in his firm even after his death in 1945. As Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander in the 1960s, the law firm became a home for former Vice President Richard M. Nixon before he ran successfully for president in 1968. The firm dissolved in 1995.23
In the privacy of correspondence with friends, Schurman sometimes let his guard down and allowed his emotions about the epidemic to show through. “It has been and is a time of terrible affliction and sorrow,” he wrote in a March 6 letter to a member of the Board of Trustees, Stewart L. Woodford, a walrus-faced man who was a Civil War general on the Union side and U.S. ambassador to Spain when war broke out in 1898. “But though it is almost too much to hope we shall have no more deaths, I think it is at least safe to say the worst is over. Many homes, however, are sorrow stricken.” Schurman was wrong about the worst being past; nine more students died from that point forward.24
Throughout the epidemic, clergy and lay people alike prayed for divine intervention to spare Ithaca from further suffering. Rev. William L. O’Hara, president of Mount Saint Mary’s College, a Catholic school in Emmitsburg, Maryland, was among those sending spiritual blessings to President Schurman. O’Hara wrote: “We pray that He who is the author of life and strength may stay the hand of death, drive away the dread disease, and restore the sick to health.”25
The continuing agonies of Ithaca and Cornell University seemed unstoppable. People were coming down with typhoid long after the original contamination of the water supply at the beginning of January 1903. Even the booster shot in late January should have lost much of its potency by now. “Seldom does any institution of learning meet a foe so mysterious, relentless, and persistent,” wrote W. H. P. Farmer, president of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, in a letter to Schurman on February 21, 1903. But if Ithaca and Cornell University could not solve their own problems, perhaps an outsider could.
Chapter 13
The Man Who Saved Ithaca
If there was anyone who could stop the typhoid and save Ithaca, it was George A. Soper. A sanitary engineer and a good one, he was an autocratic, driven man, a master of planning who had cleaned up Galveston, Texas, after the hurricane of 1900, the worst natural disaster in United States history. But he was also a difficult man, arrogant, class-driven, and in love with himself and his accomplishments. Soper considered himself part of an aristocratic class—engineers—and looked down upon the lower classes in the cities he was hired to save. But despite his personal qualities, or perhaps because of them, Soper got the job done. He saved people no matter their class deficiencies or the color of their skin. His war was against the great and terrible diseases of the day, and humans were almost an afterthought, pieces on a chessboard.
George Soper was not a physician, which he would readily admit. That point is often overlooked. He was called Dr. Soper for his academic degree in engineering. Although his work, in Ithaca and elsewhere, often seemed to call for a person trained in both sanitary en
gineering and medicine, he was trained only in the former although clearly had read much of the latter. There were gaps in his knowledge. When he tried to understand the causes of the Ithaca epidemic in 1903, for example, he was doing so without any knowledge of Dr. Robert Koch’s findings regarding human typhoid carriers.
In fairness, few American physicians had yet read Koch’s address to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin of November 28, 1902, but fair or not, this should be kept in mind in considering Soper’s beliefs regarding the cause of the Ithaca epidemic, especially his contemptuous dismissal of the possibility that the Italians at the dam site could have triggered the epidemic. Normally he would have been quite ready to ascribe the worst of sins to immigrants or the poor, but to do so here would have cast doubt on the integrity of fellow engineers who employed and supervised the Italians, especially Gardner S. Williams, the designer of the Six Mile Creek dam. By the time Soper tracked down Mary Mallon, aka “Typhoid Mary,” in New York City in 1907, his most famous case, he did know of and admire Koch’s work on typhoid carriers, but it was recently acquired knowledge.1
Soper climbed up the academic ladder of the engineering world in late-nineteenth-century America, beginning with his bachelor of science degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in 1895. He earned a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1898 and a PhD from Columbia a year later. Then he was off and running, obtaining his first job at the Boston Water Works and then traveling the country as an engineer for the Cumberland Manufacturing Company, which built water filtration plants.