In the meantime, it was a leading cause of death for children around the world. While there was some understanding of how the illness spread-by what we would now call respiratory droplet, through coughing or sneezing or kissing-the actual, underlying cause was not yet known. The tragedy prompted the Sanitary Journal to warn readers of the “kiss of death” that had most likely spread the disease through the royal family: “The greatest care and thoughtfulness should be exercised in these cases of simple sore throat, as in the severer cases and it should be constantly borne in mind that the kissing of children at such times is most dangerous.” Five of Alice’s children had also been sick with the disease, along with her husband, the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt their youngest child died. Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Alice, died of diphtheria in 1878 at the age of 35. It brought terror to the richest and the poorest, blighting famous families and anonymous ones. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, diphtheria challenged doctors with the terrible specter of children choked, smothered, snuffed out. And children, with their relatively small airways, were particularly vulnerable. He based it on the Greek word diphthera, for leather-a reference to the affliction’s signature physical feature, a thick, leathery buildup of dead tissue in a patient’s throat, which makes breathing and swallowing difficult, or impossible. In 1821, a French physician, Pierre Bretonneau, gave the disease a name: diphtérite. The “throat distemper” had somehow weakened their bodies. ![]() Many families lost three and four children-many lost all.” And children who survived generally went on to die young, he wrote from his vantage point of more than half a century later. The disease moved through the colonies, he wrote, “and gradually travelled southward, almost stripping the country of children.It was literally the plague among children. “In May 1735,” he wrote in A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases, “in a wet cold season, appeared at Kingston, an inland town in New-Hampshire, situated in a low plain, a disease among children, commonly called the ‘throat distemper,’ of a most malignant kind, and by far the most fatal ever known in this country.” Webster noted the symptoms, including general weakness and a swollen neck. Even Noah Webster, that master of words, did not have a name for the terrible sickness.
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