Monday, October 20, 2014

A crowd from Sturgeon Bay arrived on a special train one late Sunday morning in August, 1902.  They joined a large group already assembled in Algoma to say goodbye to a respected and beloved member of the community, Professor E. M. Phillips.

Elbert Merton Phillips, the principal at Algoma High School for the past seven years, had accepted a similar job in Oconto.  But, it was not a happy send-off to his new position that was cause for the farewell get together.  E. M. Phillips had died of typhoid pneumonia and those gathered were attending his funeral. 

Mr. Elbert M. Phillips was well known in Algoma and the northern part of the state as an able instructor and an ardent supporter of the Algoma Public Library.  He had taken his elementary course at the Oshkosh Normal school, taught in Auburndale, Ellis Junction, and Peshtigo, and then completed an advanced course and came to Algoma.  It was believed that he had contracted the disease while teaching a summer school program in Oshkosh.  At the time of his death, he had only been ill for a couple of weeks.  He was 33 years old when he died.       

Unfortunately, death by typhus was not a rare occurrence before water sanitation techniques existed and antibiotics were available to cure someone infected.  People attended many funerals in those days for typhoid victims. 

The concern recently over the potential for a widespread outbreak of the ebola virus must be put in context to the frequency in which otherwise healthy people contracted typhus and died within weeks just a century ago.  Essentially, isolation of the ill was the only method used to contain outbreaks.

Today, typhoid remains a common worldwide bacterial disease.  According to online sources, millions of people are infected each year.  About 200,000 of them die.  Typhoid is transmitted by ingestion of water or food that has been contaminated with the feces of a person infected with typhoid bacillus, salmonella typhi.  

The disease is usually curable.  People in North America and industrialized countries have a very low infection rate as they often acquire the disease only while traveling to developing countries.  Therefore there are a small number of typhoid carriers in every country including the U.S. each year.  They are contagious for a few days before any symptoms develop when, if they don’t wash their hands properly, they can transfer the illness to food or water and to another person or spread it directly person to person by contaminated hands.

 

The most famous typhus carrier in E. M. Phillips’ time was Mary Mallon.  “Typhoid Mary”, a cook in New York, was the first American carrier identified.  In 1907, she was associated with 53 cases and three deaths.  She was told to give up working as a cook or have her gall bladder removed.  Mary quit her job but returned later by another name.  She was held and quarantined after there was another typhoid outbreak.   After 26 years in quarantine she died of pneumonia.

It was only recently identified by a team of Stanford University researchers in a journal article published August 14, 2014 how Mary, who by all outward appearances looked perfectly healthy, could make so many people ill.   They theorize that the salmonella bacteria were able to wait out the body’s immune response before positioning themselves in cells where a protein called PPAR-delta allowed the salmonella to replicate itself inside macrophages and hack them.  

   

When the illness affected his lungs, Professor Phillips died of pneumonia.  He left behind a widow and a son who was just a year and a half old to mourn his death. 

As fate would have it, Mr. Phillips’ widow, Frances McDonald Phillips, met my great grandfather, Dr. James W. Tooley, and they were married two years later.  Were it not for the sad and untimely death of E. M. Phillips, I would not be.