Brain infection, not scarlet fever, may have caused Mary Ingalls' blindness
Dr. Beth Tarini, an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, decided to look into the cause of Mary Ingalls' blindness. / University of Michigan
It may have been a brain infection -- not scarlet fever -- that caused Mary Ingalls of "Little House on the Prairie" to go blind.
A new study published in Pediatrics on Feb. 4 shows that Laura Ingalls Wilder's older sister probably had viral meningoencephalitis, in which the brain and the meninges (the membranes that protect the central nervous system) become inflamed.
Dr. Beth Tarini, an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said a conversation she had in medical school sparked her investigation into the cause of Ingalls' blindness. According to the beloved book series, Ingalls went blind in 1879 at the age of 14 due to scarlet fever.
"Since I was in medical school, I had wondered about whether scarlet fever could cause blindness because I always remembered Mary's blindness from reading the 'Little House' stories and knew that scarlet fever was once a deadly disease," Tarini said in a press release. "I would ask other doctors, but no one could give me a definitive answer, so I started researching it."
Tarini's team pulled up newspaper reports, Wilder's memoirs and letters and school registries for further evidence. Wilder wrote in her memoirs that her sister had become sick with head pains, had a high fever and went delirious. She then said that Ingalls' face looked "drawn out of shape," which her mother later told her was a stroke. As Mary recovered, her eyesight diminished. A doctor told the family "the nerves of her eyes had had the worst of the stroke and were dying, that nothing could be done." They also discovered a letter Wilder wrote to her daughter Rose describing her sister's "spinal sickness" (which she initially called spinal meningitis before crossing it out).
In addition, a local newspaper that reported on Ingalls' sickness said that "it was feared that hemorrhage of the brain had set in (sic) one side of her face became partially paralyzed." Furthermore, a register from 1889 listed the cause of the blindness as "brain fever," which was what meningoencephalitis was referred to in those days.
"Meningoencephalitis could explain Mary's symptoms, including the inflammation of the facial nerve that left the side of her face temporarily paralyzed and it could also lead to inflammation of the optic nerve that would result in a slow and progressive loss of sight," Tarini explained.
An actual stroke was ruled out because there was no evidence of Ingalls having any other paralysis. Bacterial meningoencephalitis was not the culprit because Ingalls' showed no sign of brain damage and would have had learning problems. However, Wilder wrote that her sister was very smart even after the blindness, eventually going to school for blind children. Also, because her blue eyes still remained "beautiful" according to Wilder, just an infection of the eye or eye tissues like orbital cellulitis or endophthalmitis were unlikely.
The study authors hypothesized that the editors may have changed the illness to scarlet fever, which was rampant between 1840 and 1883, because it was easier to understand. Scarlet fever is caused by an infection of group A Streptococcus bacteria, which also causes strep throat. A toxin created by the bacteria causes the red rash from which the disease got its name. While curable today, it was fatal in 15 to 30 percent of causes and was one of the top 4 causes of blindness until 1910, the authors noted.
"Laura's memoirs were transformed into the Little House novels. Perhaps to make the story more understandable to children, the editors may have revised her writings to identify scarlet fever as Mary's illness because it was so familiar to people and so many knew how frightening a scarlet fever diagnosis was," author Sarah S. Allexan, a medical student at the University of Colorado, said in a press release.
Dr. Bruce Hirsch, an infectious disease specialist at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., told HealthDay he agreed that scarlet fever was not the illness that caused Ingalls to go blind, but was doubtful it was meningoencephalitis. He favored the illness being a viral sickness coupled with a high fever, which may have caused her to be dehydrated. This could have caused retinal vein occlusion, a condition where a blood vessel could have blocked a vein that supplies the eyes with blood.
"If meningoencephalitis caused enough nerve damage to blind you, it would be unusual for it to just hit that part of the brain without causing a more general injury," he said.
Tarini said whatever the cause, the study highlights that even sicknesses written about in childhood books can affect our perception of a disease.
"Familiar literary references like these are powerful -- especially when there is some historical truth to them." Tarini says. "This research reminds us that our patients may harbor misconceptions about a diagnosis and that we, as physicians, need to be aware of the power of the words we use -- because in the end, illness is seen through the eyes of the patient."
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Scarlette fever. The whole family contracted the virus except Laura, who helped nurse the family back to health. I'm not a doctor but even I know that the hard measels was a dangerous virus that caused blindness, deafness and other horrendous outcomes. That is why children today and for several generations now are vaccinated for this lethal virus.......
Laura was the barefoot and pregnant woman back on the farm writing columns basically telling all other woman to go back to the farm and be barefoot and pregnant.
Not once in the Little house books does Laura even touch on the fact that the farmers and settlers percolating into the west were utterly destroying the Indian culture.
Farmers in her books are the only ones who truly own, value & deserve the land - because they are extracting resources from it. People like Indians who lived with the land and hunted and gathered don't deserve the land as much as the farmers. Ironically her family lived off hunting game in between harvests, and her father was never a prosperous farmer, not until much later when the kids were grown and gone and the books ended.
Laura also ignored slavery completely, even though the Homestead Act which the family took advantage of, was designed specifically to prevent the formation of gigantic farms - plantations - since Lincoln knew that slave labor was only economical on the plantations. That was why the Southern states had always opposed passage of the Homestead Act.
Ma's brother was killed at Shiloh, and Pa's brother Hiram joined the Union army and served. These are facts that were ignored.
In Laura's Little House world, she completely ignores the political environment that formed it - if Slavery had not been an issue in the United States, the Homestead Act would never have been passed and there would have been no pioneer land rush. And in fact the Pioneer land grab wasn't economically sustainable anyway, as within a century the small farms envisioned by the Homestead Act had mostly been bought up by the large corporate agribusinesses that we have today - those businesses today work their land exactly as the old Southern slaveholder plantation owners did except that they use machines and not people, today.
Without slavery Pa Ingalls would never have been able to afford to move west and become a farmer. The family would have grown up in the city most likely.
Most readers of the Little house books do not realize they are fictional, they are not true retellings of the actual events of Laura's childhood. Stories like this news story are always a shock to many people because it informs them that the Little House books aren't reality - and the pseudo reality that Laura wrote about never really did exist as she said it did.
There's an old saying if you want a lie accepted always plant a little truth in it - the Little House books take this adage to heart - there are true bits and pieces in them - but they are mixed up with a rose colored view of how good the "pioneer farmer" really was, and how good a life pioneer farming really was.
and OMG...kids were allowed to catch measles? let alone they LIVED to tell the tale??? LOL
"Ingalls' having" is completely correct. You use the possessive when followed by the gerund as a noun. E.G. "Please excuse my being late." Unfortunately, too many people say, "Please excuse me being late," which is patently incorrect. http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/022205posscasegerunds.htm
Each of your corrections are incorrect. The first point was correct. The past tense is used to refer to the book that WAS written. The present tense is only used when examining the contents of the book as written, as in a book report for instance. The second point is also correct. It is call "Bacterial". I checked this with my father, who is a doctor. The third point is also correct. The name is Ingalls. It does not require a possesive, for you cannot possess "HAVING". Finally, copy editing ia two words, not one; a sentence shoul end with a period; the list of incorrect corrections should FOLLOW the introductory sentence. YOUR GRADE IS F.