A return of 1841 Clare inquests at http://www.igp-web.com/IGPArchives/ire/ ... s-1841.txt makes interesting reading. In particular, a substantial number of people died ".....by visitation of God".
Does anyone here know anything about the pathogenesis and pathology of this form of death ?
Paddy
God's lethal visits to Clare, 1841
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Paddy Casey
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Re: God's lethal visits to Clare, 1841
Sorry can't help with the science but I can report the same cause of death is noted in my Beattie family in Charleston, SC, USA around 1870. I have often wonder about this cause of death myself. LouG
Re: God's lethal visits to Clare, 1841
Hi Paddy and Lou.
The piece below is a quote from
"Status Lymphaticus: Sudden Death in Children from 'Visitation of God' to Cot Death" by Ann Dally
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... 8-0078.pdf
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in cases of sudden death, coroners' verdicts of death by "visitation of God" became increasingly popular. This reflected growing reluctance to blame the dead person in a verdict of felo de se. Increasingly, sudden deaths were attributed to human accident. By the nineteenth century, as society became more secular and Christian ideas more sophisticated, belief in God's direct power waned, scientific medicine gained strength and "visitation of God" became less acceptable. A fatal "disease", status lymphaticus, was invented to fill the gap. This excited medical interest for some fifty years and is recorded as having killed thousands of people, mostly children. It was even regarded as "the most important problem in medicine". Later, though no "cure" had been found, it dropped from the textbooks so completely that today many younger doctors and medical historians have never heard of it.
Regards,
Mike
The piece below is a quote from
"Status Lymphaticus: Sudden Death in Children from 'Visitation of God' to Cot Death" by Ann Dally
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... 8-0078.pdf
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in cases of sudden death, coroners' verdicts of death by "visitation of God" became increasingly popular. This reflected growing reluctance to blame the dead person in a verdict of felo de se. Increasingly, sudden deaths were attributed to human accident. By the nineteenth century, as society became more secular and Christian ideas more sophisticated, belief in God's direct power waned, scientific medicine gained strength and "visitation of God" became less acceptable. A fatal "disease", status lymphaticus, was invented to fill the gap. This excited medical interest for some fifty years and is recorded as having killed thousands of people, mostly children. It was even regarded as "the most important problem in medicine". Later, though no "cure" had been found, it dropped from the textbooks so completely that today many younger doctors and medical historians have never heard of it.
Regards,
Mike
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Paddy Casey
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Re: God's lethal visits to Clare, 1841
Thank you, Mike, for this delightfully meaty and well-referenced article on the pathophysiology of Visitation of God and the medical specialty of Pseudology.
I loved the passage "In cases of sudden death, the old inquest verdict of "Died by the visitation of God" is at least as scientific as and more modest than "Status [Thymicus" or] "Lymphaticus"; "Cause unknown" is to be preferred [to either and] [t]he present use [of these terms] in certification and in evidence in coroners' courts ... is, we suggest, a good example of the growth of medical mythology. A nucleus of truth is buried beneath a pile of intellectual rubbish, conjecture, base observations and rash generalisation. This heap of rubbish is described in the current scientific jargon and treated as an orthodox shrine. (from M Greenwood and H M Woods, "'Status
-lymphaticus" considered in the light of current works on the thymus', J. Hyg., 1926, 26: 305-26, p. 307).
Medical Pseudology is alive and well today, not least of all because it nourishes reputations and bank balances. As the author implies, like a snowball, a kernel of medical pseudology picks up respectability and becomes unstoppable as it rolls inexorably downhill and - to mix metaphors - acquires adherents and vested interests in the forms of academic reputations and careers, lucrative lines of therapy, relatives who are satisfied at being able to hang a tragic death on a convenient diagnostic nail, doctors who have an explanation for the unexpected death of a healthy person, etc. etc.
In this context regular visits to http://www.quackwatch.org/index.html can be salutary (in the original sense of the word, ha ha).
Paddy
I loved the passage "In cases of sudden death, the old inquest verdict of "Died by the visitation of God" is at least as scientific as and more modest than "Status [Thymicus" or] "Lymphaticus"; "Cause unknown" is to be preferred [to either and] [t]he present use [of these terms] in certification and in evidence in coroners' courts ... is, we suggest, a good example of the growth of medical mythology. A nucleus of truth is buried beneath a pile of intellectual rubbish, conjecture, base observations and rash generalisation. This heap of rubbish is described in the current scientific jargon and treated as an orthodox shrine. (from M Greenwood and H M Woods, "'Status
-lymphaticus" considered in the light of current works on the thymus', J. Hyg., 1926, 26: 305-26, p. 307).
Medical Pseudology is alive and well today, not least of all because it nourishes reputations and bank balances. As the author implies, like a snowball, a kernel of medical pseudology picks up respectability and becomes unstoppable as it rolls inexorably downhill and - to mix metaphors - acquires adherents and vested interests in the forms of academic reputations and careers, lucrative lines of therapy, relatives who are satisfied at being able to hang a tragic death on a convenient diagnostic nail, doctors who have an explanation for the unexpected death of a healthy person, etc. etc.
In this context regular visits to http://www.quackwatch.org/index.html can be salutary (in the original sense of the word, ha ha).
Paddy
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smcarberry
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Re: God's lethal visits to Clare, 1841
To supplement the transcribed list of 1841 inquests already placed online, for which Paddy Casey provided the link in his posting on this topic, below are the screenshots of the actual page, magnified as much as possible and yet show all the columns. This shows that Patrick Grace was actually a Kilkishen resident, a place appearing as Kilhehan on the IGP transcription for which the link was provided. Also, the actual page displays the involved coroner, which can assist in locating placenames that were obscure in location, since each of the three coroners had a specific administrative jurisdiction, easily discerned by seeing the more major places served by a particular coroner.
I can't show a screenshot of the title page for this report, as the inquests are just tacked onto a larger report about charitable healthcare institutions, for which there are the usual spate of statistics (and some names of employees, only one of whom, a woman named Feltur, was from Clare, then working in a Dublin lying-in hospital for the indigent). Here is the link:
ACCOUNTS AND PAPERS: TWENTY VOLUMES
p. 200 Clare inquests, 1841
http://books.google.com/books?id=UnRbAA ... &q&f=false
Sharon Carberry
I can't show a screenshot of the title page for this report, as the inquests are just tacked onto a larger report about charitable healthcare institutions, for which there are the usual spate of statistics (and some names of employees, only one of whom, a woman named Feltur, was from Clare, then working in a Dublin lying-in hospital for the indigent). Here is the link:
ACCOUNTS AND PAPERS: TWENTY VOLUMES
p. 200 Clare inquests, 1841
http://books.google.com/books?id=UnRbAA ... &q&f=false
Sharon Carberry
- Inquests 1841, names, places.jpg (80.49 KiB) Viewed 7883 times
- Inquests pt2 1841.jpg (85.2 KiB) Viewed 7883 times
- Inquests of 1841, pt3.jpg (76.65 KiB) Viewed 7882 times