Lakewood Lore

Old-time ailments vanish as years pass

What happened to the vacant-lot medicine shows where itinerant mountebanks sold $1 bottles of patented elixirs between spurts of entertainment, such as an Indian playing a banjo?

Better yet, whatever happened to the catarrh, quinsy, goiter, pleurisy, dropsy and other old-time sicknesses the quack remedies were supposed to cure?

"My grandmother used to talk about catarrh," remembers Dr. Frederick S. Donaldson, retired physician who has lived on French Avenue for the past 27 years.

"It was an inflammation in the throat and upper respiratory passages producing a thick phlegm. To overcome it today, all the patient needs is a humidifier and a cough medicine with a liquefying agent."

Remember quinsy? It was an abscess and soreness of the tonsils that anti-bacterial prescriptions now easily control. Likewise, pleurisy (inflammation of the lining of the lungs) is taken care of rather expeditiously by modern medications and, thus, no longer is a household word.

Goiter, too, is an old name.

"We are still in what was called the goiter belt, but iodized salt now checks most of that thyroid complaint, which once caused large protrusions from the neck to be frequently seen," Dr. Donaldson said.

He recalls that during the early part of this century Dr. George Crile, who founded Cleveland Clinic, built a reputation on surgical treatment of goiter, becoming the No.1 authority.

Dropsy (excessive accumulation of watery fluid) is still with us, but it is now known as edema. The Bright’s disease of yesteryear is chronic nephritis. Rheumatism has become arthritis; consumption, tuberculosis; apoplexy, stroke; and infantile paralysis, polio.

St. Vitus dance (jerky, involuntary movements in the face and limbs) is better known today as chorea, while the skin problem, St. Anthony’s fire, currently is referred to as erysipelas, or simply "a superficial infection by streptococcus."

"Be careful you don’t step on a rusty nail and get blood poisoning," mothers used to warn us when we went barefooted in the summertime. Tetanus shots and boosters now handle the problem, and the fear of getting lockjaw, an end result, has tempered.

Vaccinations have tamed the once prevalent whooping cough, diphtheria and small pox, erasing the dreaded ring of those names. Nor do we hear much anymore about the formerly scary scarlet fever.

That threat has been fairly well cleared up by antibiotics, as have boils, which, when we were kids were a dime a dozen.

This article appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post March 28, 1991. Reprinted with permission.

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