Typhoid Fever: Charlotte Paulus

Charlotte Poelger (Pilger?) - (married name Paulus)
Born: July 16, 1864, Germany
Died: January 31, 1907, age 42
Relation to Author: 2nd Great Grandmother (Nana / Betty Cheney's paternal grandmother)

Charlotte Paulus died of typhoid fever when she was 42 years old. She was married to Christian Paulus and was the mother of five children, including my great grandfather Frederick Paulus, who was 20 when she died. The youngest child, Emilie Paulus was 13 years old when her mother Charlotte died.

Typhoid fever is a disease that spreads through bacteria in drinking water. It grows in the intestines of the infected person and is spread to other infected people by eating food or drinking water contaminated with feces from an infected person. In other words, it spread through really bad public sanitation. 

(Historians now believe that President William Henry Harrison died of Typhoid fever in 1841, after only 31 days in office, not by catching a cold while giving the longest inaugural speech in history in cold rainy weather without a jacket and then wearing the same wet clothes for the rest of the inauguration day festivities.) 

It looks like Charlotte died during a typhoid fever outbreak in Scranton in 1907. There is a newspaper article from the Scranton Truth on January 18, 1907 discussing infections and deaths, with over 1,000 infections and 113 deaths through mid-January. Her death certificate says her typhoid fever had lasted 19 days, so her infection, but not her death, is likely included in the stats in this article. 

Unfortunately, Charlotte died just a few years before we found a truly effective way to prevent the spread of Typhoid - water chlorination. While the newspaper article recommends boiling water and keeping property clean to avoid another outbreak in the spring, chlorination of public water, which was tested in Europe at the end of the 1800s, wasn't tested in the United States until 1908 in Jersey City, after which the practice spread rapidly across the country. A vaccine for soldiers started in the early 1900s.