Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Surviving the early years : childhood diseases in Hamilton at the beginning of the twentieth century / D. Ann Herring, editor. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-9782417-1-1 1. Children--Diseases--Ontario--Hamilton--History--20th century. 2. Child health services--Ontario--Hamilton--History--20th century. 3. Children--Health and hygiene--Ontario--Hamilton--History--20th century. 4. Children--Ontario--Hamilton--Social conditions--20th century. I. Herring, Ann, 1951- II. McMaster University. Faculty of Social Sciences RJ103.C3S95 2008 362.198'92'000971352 C2008-902618-7 Cover image adapted by Maciej Siarkiewicz from “Heart of the World” (1883) from xroads.virginia.edu/~ma02/rodriguez/Gilded Age/Gilded Age Children.html [accessed March 2 2008] Surviving the Early Years: Childhood Diseases in Hamilton at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century D. Ann Herring, editor FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, McMASTER UNIVERSITY Hamilton, Ontario Contents FIGURES AND TABLES vi 1 Introduction 1 D. Ann Herring 2 The Ambitious City: The Rise of Hamilton as an Industrial Centre 5 Daniel Rowe 3 “So...What do you want to do?” “I don’t know, you figure it out” – Strategies of the Hamilton Board of Health to Tackle Childhood Disease 17 Graeme C. Housego 4 Disease in the Early Years: Immigrant Children and Their Childhood in Hamilton 27 Miranda E. J. Brunton 5 Of Asylums and Homes: A Look at Orphans in Hamilton, 1900 to 1917 37 Angela Berlingeri iii 6 Houseflies and Hygiene in Hamilton Homes: The Spread of Typhoid Fever in Children 45 Samantha Parker 7 In the Nurse’s Office: Addressing Childhood Disease in Hamilton Schools 55 Samantha M. Craigie 8 Is Scarlet Fever a Democratic Disease? 65 Danielle Budhoo 9 Hot Town, Summer in the City: Childhood and Infant Diarrheal Death in Hamilton, 1901 to 1911 75 Rose A. Monachino 10 Changing Perspectives on Child Health and Disease during ‘the Great War’ 85 Madison L. Rose 11 A Need for a Children’s Hospital in Hamilton 97 Reshma Saeed iv 12 ‘A Sure Curer’ – the Treatments and Remedies of Childhood Diseases 107 Anna Kata 13 Taking the Wonder Out of the ‘Wonder Drugs’: A Critical Examination of the Effectiveness and Economic Feasibility of Cures for Childhood Diseases in Hamilton 117 Krystal L. Cameron 14 The Infectious Corpse 127 Bonnie W. S. Chan 15 Death as a Social Event: Memorializing Children in Hamilton 135 Dianne Pelzowski REFERENCES CITED 149 INDEX 173 v Figures and Tables FIGURES Figure 2.1: Map of Southern Ontario 6 Figure 3.1: Mortality Levels among Children 22 Figure 4.1: The Proportion of Immigrants in Hamilton, 1901: 31 Figure 4.2: Proportions of Immigrants in Hamilton According to Age Categories in the 1901 Census 32 Figure 5.1: Grants from Hamilton City Council 1900-1908 42 Figure 6.1: Showing Percentages of Reported Cases of Typhoid Fever in Hamilton from 1900-1917 49 Figure 7.1: Victoria Avenue School, Renamed Tweedsmuir School in 1941 56 Figure 7.2: School Nurse Leading Children in a Nose-blowing Drill 62 Figure 8.1: Quarantine Notice from Connecticut Public Health Office 67 Figure 8.2: Scarlet Fever Deaths of Children,1901-1911 70 Figure 9.1: Age Distribution of Childhood Mortality Due to Diarrheal Disease 78 Figure 9.2: Seasonal Distribution of Diarrheal Death among Children under 12 Years of Age, 1901 -1911 80 Figure 9.3: The Incidence of Diarrheal Death of Infants and Children in Hamilton, 1901-1911 81 Figure 9.4: Incidence of Diarrheal Death of Infants and Children in Hamilton, 1908 82 Figure 9.5: The Incidence of Diarrheal Deaths of Infants and Children in Hamilton, 1908 Summer Months 82 Figure 10.1: Childhood Deaths by Month, 1910-1920. 87 Figure 10.2: Pediculosis Rates Showing Seasonal Increases Between September and November of Every Year 89 Figure 11.1: Miss Jeannette Lewis, 1877-1942 101 vi Figure 12.1: Dr. Wood’s Norway Pine Syrup advertisement 109 Figure 12.2: Chamberlain's Cough Remedy advertisement 110 Figure 13.1: Advertisement for Dr. Chase’s Cough Syrup 120 Figure 13.2: Advertisement for Scott’s Emulsion of Cod Liver Oil 123 Figure 15.1: Hamilton Cemetery circa 2008 139 Figure 15.2: Woodland Cemetery circa 2008 140 Figure 15.3: Tombstones offered by Woodland Memorials on Garden Street, Hamilton, Ontario specifically for children 142 Figure 15.4: Motifs offered by Woodlands Memorials on Garden Street, Hamilton, Ontario especially for children 145 TABLES Table 3.1: Cases of Specific Infectious Diseases in Hamilton from 1904 to 1917 20 Table 3.2: Deaths Recorded of Specific Infectious Diseases in Hamilton from 1904-1917 25 Table 4.1: Population of Hamilton, 1890 to 1914 31 Table 4.2: Components of Childhood Mortality, 1901 and 1911 (Government of Ontario 1901, 1911) 32 Table 4.3: The Ten Most Frequently Reported Primary Causes of Death in Children, 1901 and 1911 (Government of Ontario 1901, 1911) 33 Table 6.1: Reported deaths from typhoid fever in Hamilton from 1900- 1917 47 vii Table 6.2: Mortality from Typhoid Fever by Age Groups in 1900, 1905, 1910 and 1914 48 Table 8.1: Cases and deaths of scarlet fever by year 70 Table 13.1: Average Earnings of Heads of Families in Specified Occupations in Hamilton, Ontario from 1911 (Sixth Census of Canada, 1921: 19-20) 124 Table 13.2: Ranking of Canadian Industrial Cities by Illiteracy of Rate of Labourers in 1921 (Sixth Census of Canada, 1921: 18) 125 viii 1 Introduction: Surviving the Early Years D. Ann Herring This book has been written by a group of fourth-year Honours Anthropology students studying infectious disease at McMaster University. Our focus is on children and the afflictions from which they suffered and died in Hamilton during in the early 1900’s. The story is set in a time when the city was growing spectacularly, when ideas about children and how to rear them were changing, and when there were considerable impediments to surviving in an urban environment that was less than salubrious and often downright dangerous to health. The inspiration for the book’s theme came from an international research group known as The Children and Childhood in Human Societies Cluster, lead by Dr. Shelley Saunders (Canada Research Chair in Human Disease and Population Relationships, Department of Anthropology, McMaster University). One of the goals of the cluster is to encourage research on children, a challenge that was ably and enthusiastically taken up by this class of fourteen graduating student authors. The third in a series of books written by the Anthropology of Infectious Disease class at McMaster, this project revealed how little attention has been paid to children, childhood and childhood diseases in early twentieth century Hamilton (an exception is Rosemary Gagan’s excellent research on the subject). The authors address questions about living conditions in Hamilton, the experiences of the city’s children, the urban geography and impact of childhood diseases, municipal strategies to reduce the infectious disease load, treatments used during the period, and the ways in which children’s bodies were prepared and their lives memorialized after death. Our book begins with Daniel Rowe’s discussion of the social determinants of 1 Surviving the Early Years childhood disease and mortality, viewed from a political and economic perspective that situates the local realities of Hamilton in wider global processes. Patterns of disease and death varied along class lines because city officials privileged economic expansion over the public health needs of the people. Infants and children, often from working class families living in overcrowded and poorly serviced neighbourhoods, paid the price for this policy with their lives. Graeme Housego scrutinizes initiatives aimed at intervening and improving public health, undertaken by the Hamilton Board of Health. Medical officers in Hamilton acted as part of a larger, international movement toward sanitary reform that typified many western nations at the time. Despite these efforts, Hamilton lagged behind cities such as New York, London and Toronto and failed to keep pace with the massive expansion of the city in the early twentieth century. Miranda Brunton considers the double difficulties faced by immigrant children during this period, not only in terms of the impoverished conditions they often endured, but also the stigma and blame attached to being an immigrant child in Hamilton. Angela Berlingeri explores the lives of orphans, another group of stigmatized and disadvantaged children in Hamilton. She contends that they were at one and the same time invisible and ignored, and the subject of a great deal of attention, as various institutions and organizations strove to transform them into productive adults. The landscape of infectious disease in early twentieth century Hamilton was dramatically different from today, as Samantha Parker makes clear in her chapter on typhoid fever. Overcrowded conditions, low incomes, inadequate sewage treatment and garbage disposal – and a lack of political will to change them – opened up attractive niches for the housefly and allowed typhoid fever to flourish in the city, especially among children. Scarlet fever was also prevalent in Hamilton in the early twentieth century. Depicted in the epidemiologic literature as a ‘democratic disease’ because it crosses socioeconomic and class lines, Danielle Budhoo concludes that while this may be true for the disease, deaths from scarlet fever seemed to cluster in impoverished parts of Hamilton. Rose Monachino finds a similar configuration for childhood diarrheal deaths in Hamilton, observing that impoverished parts of the city suffered more extensively from these maladies. Diarrheal diseases were far more prevalent than either typhoid fever or scarlet fever, taking a particularly heavy toll of infant and child deaths in the late summer and early autumn.