OSV Documents - Addressing 1830s Illness at the Freeman Farm

Throughout most of the 1830s, Delia Marsh Freeman of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, suffered from a disease that caused her much pain and frequently left her confined to her bed. Because of his wife's failing condition toward the end of the 1830s, Pliny Freeman hired some help to look after her and tend to other household duties. By 1838 the Freemans' daughter, Delia Freeman May, their son-in-law, John May, and their two young grandchildren were also living in the house. Young Delia and 74-year-old Mary Pease, the hired housekeeper, probably both helped care for the sick woman. Their patient was afflicted with scrofula, a form of tuberculosis that attacked the lymphatic system and caused lymph nodes in the neck to enlarge and burst, making the patient very uncomfortable. In addition, the patient's joints, especially the elbows and ankles, often became infected and swollen.

As you may have guessed, Delia and Pliny are the same Freemans who during the 1830s lived in the Freeman Farm House now at Old Sturbridge Village. To help better interpret the life of this family, and the history of illness and healing in Village times, we recently transformed one of the downstairs rooms into a "sick room." When you next visit the Freeman household, you will see, to the right of the farm entrance, a room furnished with items that would have been found in a sick chamber in a rural New England home of the late 1830s.

In addition to a bedstead, the new furnishings in the room include a rocking chair. Fitted with ample seat cushions, rockers, like upholstered "easy" chairs, helped provide comfort for invalids or the elderly. The chairs could be drawn up to a fireplace for warmth or placed next to a window for light while the patient, or a caregiver, read or stitched.

Period illustrations of sick rooms often show a light stand or small table near the bed for medicines and other healing paraphernalia. The pedestal-based stand in the Freeman Farm House features a ceramic teacup and saucer, a tin teapot, and several medicine bottles. Harriet Beecher Stowe in her novel Poganuc People commented that every housewife and mother in early New England had her own favorite remedy. Women prepared these remedies and with the best of intentions sent them to the bedsides of sick neighbors, thus increasing the "army of bottles which always gathered in a sick-room." We can safely assume that Delia Freeman received a number of such remedies from those concerned about her. Among them may have been a tea—made from cayenne, bayberry, poplar bark, sumac berries, and meadow fern burrs—intended to remove impurities from the blood. Patients might receive a dose of this tea two or three times a day. Other remedies that Delia might have used include an Indian meal poultice applied to reduce scrofulous tumors and a salve composed of meadow fern ointment, cayenne, and lobelia.

Another feature of the sick room is a side chair near the bed for the caregiver and/or "watcher." Daily care of the sick was a common part of everyday life in early America, and this task usually fell to women, who not only administered medicine but also paid attention to all the patient's needs. When patients were very sick or near death, arrangements were made for round-the-clock watching. Immediate family members watched with the sick, of course, but they were often assisted by other relatives and neighbors. This often meant spending long hours in the sick chamber, even sitting with a patient through the night.

We know that Delia suffered from scrofula as early as 1830, from letters written home by Pliny Freeman Jr., who had migrated to Ohio a year earlier. On May 4, 1830 young Pliny wrote to his father: "I was very sorry to hear that mother is so afflicted. There is no doubt that she must suffer abundantly with pain. The Marsh blood is so subject to scrofulous complaints. I am afraid that she will be troubled more or less as long as she lives. ..." He was right.

By March 1839 the disease had overtaken Delia. Pliny Sr. wrote on March 24 to three of his children, then living near Cleveland, Ohio: "she continued to fail very fast until Tuesday the 19(th) when at half past 5 p.m. death relieved her from her pains which were severe, her funeral was Friday at 10 a.m. ..."

Scrofula was a common form of tuberculosis in the Village period. Before antibiotics provided a way to treat it, the disease could last for years as a chronic infection—as in Delia's case. A form of tuberculosis that infected cow's milk, the disease is rare today because TB in cattle has been nearly eliminated in the industrialized world.

With these changes at the Freeman Farm House, we hope to convey the importance of home health care in early America, the critical role that women played in care-giving, and the ways in which families adapted households to accommodate illness. Visiting the re-created sick room at Freeman Farm House can help us better understand what chronic illness was like for early New Englanders—and help us appreciate medical progress as well!