By Visio Roughton
During the 18th and 19th centuries, many communities throughout Europe and the United States were ravaged by an invisible illness. Tuberculosis—then known as “consumption” or the “white death”—was one of the deadliest diseases of the time, and it affected people living in New England in an especially disastrous way. With little to no scientific reasoning for what was causing the effects of the disease, coupled with the hysteria that stemmed from communities that had whole families die of the disease, the idea that vampires were responsible for the influx of tragedies became the widely accepted explanation for what was transpiring.
Tuberculosis: Beliefs About a Mysterious Illness
A respiratory illness, tuberculosis was spread through coughing, sneezing, and the expelling of moisture from those afflicted with the disease. Because science could not explain the disease, many blamed a curse or an unknown evil entity for its effects.
The disease spread rapidly among families and communities alike and left many in its wake dead or forever weakened from its symptoms.
The reason the disease was given the frightening, colloquial name of ‘consumption’, was because those who contracted the disease would suffer paler than normal complextions, and would also experience severe weight loss, and chronic cough that would often lead to them coughing up blood.
In America’s pre-industrial revolution period especially, medical understanding of infectious diseases and how they spread was extremely limited, and science of the time was not able to come up with a clear explanation as to why so many people were falling ill with the disease, nor how whole families could die of the illness.
Without any reasonable, scientific explanations for why so many were falling ill, many people turned their focus to old folklore, using old beliefs and legends to explain the effects of the spread of tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis is known to cause hallucinations, and many who were infected by it would suffer hallucinations of family members who had also died of the illness coming back to haunt them or drain the life from them while they were still alive. This coupled with the influence of folklore on society led to the increase in panic surrounding the dead coming back to life to hunt the living.
It should be noted that this concept was not something unique to New England, as these beliefs were brought over by Europeans when they immigrated to America, especially by those coming from Slavic and Germanic areas, where there was much prevalence in folklore that influenced much of society and its fear of the undead.
In the late 18th century and through the 19th century, tuberculosis was rampant throughout New England, most notably in Connecticut and Rhode Island. The heavy prevalence of European superstitions in those communities and poor understanding of the illness and how it spread spurred the fear that “vampires” were the ones to blame for the influx of deaths.
The term vampire was likely not used at the time, as it had only recently appeared in English, with its first noted use appearing in a London journal in 1732.
The concept of what a vampire was back then was also dramatically different from what the modern-day perception of what a vampire entails. They were not originally considered to be fanged, blood-drinking people in dark clothing; instead many associated them with the corpses of dead loved ones that had come back to life following their burial.
In many cases, to combat these ‘undead corpses’, bodies were often exhumed and disfigured; the bodies of the people who had died of consumption were often desecrated by the living as they thought that by taking certain measures, they could keep the corpses from ‘coming back to life’.
If a body was unearthed and found to have experienced little to no decomposition, or it was deduced that the body still had blood in its heart —along with any other signs deemed unnatural to what a dead body should exhibit— it would often be decided that the person had come back to life and was then feeding on their still living family. When a body in this condition would be found, people would go to extreme measures to keep the body from rising again. They would often remove and burn the hearts of the corpses or rearrange bones (some bodies discovered centuries later were found with their femurs placed in a cross on their chest). In more extreme cases, they would also burn the remains of the ‘vampire’ and then feed the ashes to a suffering family member as this was believed to be a cure and a way to protect them from other vampires.
Notable Case – Mercy Brown, One of America’s Most Famous Vampires
Traces of the vampire panic have been found all over New England — from Maine down to eastern Connecticut— however, one of the most notable cases of the era originates from Exeter Rhode Island.
One of the most famous cases of the New England Vampire Panic occurred in Exeter, Rhode Island, through the spring of 1892.
The Brown family had already been devastated by the effects of tuberculosis in the few years before Mercy Brown’s death in January of 1892. Mary Brown, the matriarch of the household, and her eldest daughter, Mary Olive Brown had also both fallen victim to the effects of tuberculosis.
When Mercy Brown finally died of the illness, her family and neighbors were determined to keep her remaining family safe. Her brother, Edwin, had also contracted and been battling tuberculosis at the same time Mercy had been, and after her death, Edwin’s condition began to drastically worsen.
With no other answers, the locals of the town soon became convinced that there was a supernatural power affecting the young man. They subsequently began to put pressure on George brown, father of Mercy and Edwin, to dig up the bodies of his deceased family members to examined.
He eventually agreed after much hesitation and on March 17 of that year, the bodies were finally exhumed.
Mary Brown and Mary Olive had decomposed in a way that was considered to be expected and natural, however, when Mercey’s body was examined, they found that she not only had experienced little to no decomposition but that she also had blood still in her heart and her hair and nails had grown whilst she had been buried.
These signs all indicated that Mercy had become a vampire and was feeding off of Edwin’s life, slowly killing him; at least this is what the people present believed.
In response, Mercy’s heart and liver were removed and then burned on a nearby rock. Their ashes were then mixed with water and given to Edwin to cure his illness. Their efforts to save Edwin were unsuccessful, however, and he died of tuberculosis two months later.
The Mercy Brown case gained national attention, with the story spread far and wide by newspaper reports.
A Look From the Future – What We Know Now
Since her death in 1892, modern medicine has found logical explanations for all the factors that led to Mercy Brown being deemed a vampire. It is asserted that the cold winter air was most likely responsible for slowing Mercy’s decomposition and making it seem as though her body had not decomposed.
Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, the fact it looked as though her hair and nails had grown after her death were actually signs that her body had indeed begun the process of decomposition. After death, skin loses moisture; which leads to it shrinking and retracting, and this is often most noticeable around the nails and hair, giving the illusion that they are continuing to grow.
As scientific understanding advanced, so did awareness of tuberculosis and its causes. As medicines were created and a vaccine was ultimately developed, the fear and superstitious hysteria surrounding the disease gradually subsided over time. With a more informed wealth of medical knowledge, proper education on how to maintain proper hygiene was established, and information was widely shared through communities which aided in this transition to trusting the medical process.
Even once the real cause of these ‘vampires’ was discovered, information on tuberculosis was only widely distributed in cities and other highly populous places, and it took much longer for scientific facts to start influencing the more rural communities. Even once the vaccine for tuberculosis had been developed, some still believed that the effects of the disease were supernatural in origin.
This struggle between knowledge, superstition, and distrust of science is not unique to the past however, as it is still very prevalent in societies today, but to truly understand the effects this hesitation can cause, one need only refer back to events through history to understand why the science of modern-day society is so influential and important to life today.
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