Posted on 10/09/2013 6:29:42 AM PDT by C19fan
Lined up for a family photo these Victorian children look miserable as they stare sternly at the camera. But their grim expressions may be understandable after it becomes clear they are posing for a macabre photo with their dead younger sibling who is laid out on a chair. These remarkable pictures show the morbid way that the deceased were remembered in the late 19th century.
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Big cholera outbreak in London in the 1850’s - entire families wiped out overnight.
“Most photos of people from the 1800s seemed to show ‘stern’ subjects.”
Two years ago I “stayed” at an old church in Minneapolis during a youth mission trip. They had all the old church photos up on the wall. One was of a women’s group, it appeared to date from around 1890-1900. All of the women had that “stern” expression. Two of them looked absolutely demented. And then I remembered that most of these women probably had nine kids running around their house.
Personally, I would not want to see the baby if it was still-born, or after it passed if it died soon after birth. I would rather keep my memories of the living, even if the only time I shared in that life was while it resided in my womb.
I do not want to see dead family members. We had a closed casket funeral for my grandma for precisely that reason. My memories are of my living grandmother, not of a lifeless body.
I wonder how many weren't accidental?
I asked my grandfather many years ago why people looked so stern in olden days. He said the photos weren’t snapped in an instant. You had to sit very still for quite a while. It was too hard to “hold” a smile.
My grandmother loved to tell the story (guessing 1910’s) of the funeral of her uncle. The family all gathered around for a picture with uncle in the casket. They had to keep propping the casket up higher to get him in the shot until he tumbled out onto the floor. To her, in her old age, it was really funny but not when it happened.
Yuck..
One interesting thing. To me anyway. With the exception of a couple of the photographs the subjects look “healthy”, other than being dead of course. Looked like they died quickly. I would think the children and infants would look more wasted away.
A big reason for the stern faces, which people often don’t think of, is the state of dentistry at the time. You don’t give a big wide smile in an expensive, once-a-decade photograph if you don’t have a full set of pearly whites.
The underlying reason for this was the tuberculosis epidemic, which traumatized much of Europe, though was less pronounced in the US.
Generally called Consumption, phthisis, scrofula, Pott’s disease, and the White Plague, tuberculosis was peculiar because it behaved so differently from most other diseases.
Its closest commonly known relative is leprosy. Unlike other bacteria, that reproduce on average about each half hour, they reproduce slowly, only once or twice a day. Even today, this means that treatment for those diseases can last from six months (for just infection that is not active) to years.
In any event, tuberculosis terrified people for several reasons. First because it could kill quickly, with very few obvious symptoms, or it could drag on for years or decades. A person could be infected yet not show symptoms for years, either.
Second, it could attack any organ in body, with very different results. When it hit the brain, a person could become wildly creative (which resulted in some calling it “the artists disease”), or they could become hyper-sexual, or they could become demented or insane.
Often people became very pale and gaunt as their body wasted away, which was actually adopted as a fashion, “the Victorian look”. Many had their spinal cords damaged by the disease, forcing them to use wheelchairs.
What we think of today as morbid and Gothic fashion sense was because of the fascination with death and dying and fatalism found at that time. The horror genre became very popular, with themes such as premature burial. Many novels would have characters suddenly vanish from the plot because they just up and died.
At the end of the 19th Century and in the first part of the 20th Century, effective treatments were finally developed. Then with the development of antibiotics the disease was almost eradicated in the US. The last tuberculosis sanitariums were finally closed in the 1960s, having run out of patients. They were distinguishable by their smokestacks, since they always burned their mattresses and linens.
Unfortunately, tuberculosis is coming back. At first, the disease developed drug resistance to some of the more common antibiotics. So it is identified as DR-TB.
The real problem began with multiple drug resistant, or MDR-TB. Because people with MDR-TB were given ordinary antibiotics to treat it, it would progress further before effective treatment, and in some cases it was too late, so the mortality rate increased.
Even worse is extensively drug resistant XDR-TB, which if you catch it, you must be quarantined, and you have at least a 50% chance of death. In the United States, 63 cases of XDR TB have been reported between 1993 and 2011.
There has now been two reports of totally drug resistant TDR-TB outbreaks, but they were so fast and lethal that everyone infected has died, stopping the disease from spreading.
Importantly, each of these varieties of TB coexist, so the vast majority of infections are not drug resistant.
TB is second only to HIV/AIDS as the greatest killer worldwide due to a single infectious agent. In 2011, 8.7 million people fell ill with TB and 1.4 million died from TB. Over 95% of TB deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, and it is among the top three causes of death for women aged 15 to 44.
TB is a leading killer of people living with HIV causing one quarter of all deaths. Multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) is present in virtually all countries.
They also made “hair remembrances”. They would weave the deceased’s hair into the shape of a ring to wear or make “flowers” out of it to hang on a wall.
In the second photo..which one is the departed? Not sure.
Sounds very high to me.
BTW, boiling (cotton) clothes is still an excellent way to get out certain types of stains. I've saved quite a number of dress shirts this way.
Haven't tried it, but I suspect a pressure cooker would be even more effective.
I lost my best friend in 09 - he was 39 - Im 52 - little brother I never had - His parents were destroyed with grief, their only comfort being their Faith, and that of their son.
I ministered for a number of years, and always took ghost stories with a grain of salt....but not long after his passing I had a dream in which I was sobbing while speaking to him. Now, to know him - you knew his inflections and demeanor and you could tell when he was up or down. In the dream I told him I was sorry to lose him, and without hesitation, he said "dude, I have no idea what happened".......how many ghosts speak with inflection and humor? - Right then, I knew he was in a good place...
My grandmother had photos of relatives in coffins in the 60’s so I think it was still commonplace at least in the south through the 60’s.
During one week, two of the children died from diphtheria. Another once deadly disease, now largely eradicated by vaccines.
They lived in Vermillion, South Dakota.
In some cases, these might’ve been the only opportunity for these families to immortalize their loved ones...
It’s clear it was all done out of love... Good God, that must have been difficult...
There is a book called Wisconsin Death Trip that contains many photos like these.
My first thought too was that they’re with Jesus in heaven at least. I don’t know what the magical cutoff age is when a person is old enough to make a conscience decision, but I’m sure those little ones are with Jesus. That being said, it’s still heartbreaking to see them.
Some today would view the practice as gruesome, but I can understand it:
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