Poor Isabella

I was looking again at the family of the Shoemaker of Pottsville that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. One of the daughters was Isabella Josephine, born 18 March 1856 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. We don’t know much about her early life, only that she was married before the spring when she was 30. That was when her father made his will in June 1886, and he named her “my dear daughter Isabella Hamilton, wife of William Hamilton.” Isabella would have been 30 and about 4 months old.

William Hamilton is a complete cypher. All we know is his name, that he married Isabella Josephine Boedefeld, and that he died before 1900.

In the late spring of 1900, we find Josephine Hamilton, a widow born in February 1856 in Pennsylvania, living with three other single people in a house in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Josephine is described as a “housewife,” and she is a “boarder.” Of the other two women, both in their 20s and each a “saleslady,” the elder is the head of the house and the younger is a boarder like Josephine. The man, who is from Spain, is in the insurance business, is a naturalized citizen of 20 years or so and is called a “lodger.” He is also married, for 15 years, it is reported. Despite Josephine being reported to be a widow, under the number of years married column, somebody reported 9 years. The discrepancies in this record can be ascribed to the probable unfamiliarity of the young woman reporting on her household with the detailed facts about all the members of that household.

Perhaps Isabella Josephine’s marriage occurred just before her father made that will, and perhaps William Hamilton died just nine years later, in 1895. With such a common name as his, I haven’t been able to find a single record about him so far.

Josephine disappeared from most of the records after 1900, but she moved to the state of Washington and became a practical nurse, or so her death certificate reported. She died in the Harborview Hospital in Seattle on 21 March 1932. What is on the certificate is from the head nurse of the hospital, and we can probably assume that Josephine had worked there. She shaved ten years off her age, but nobody did the math and correctly reported that her birth was in 1856 even though they said she was 66 years old at death.

The sad thing is that she was being treated for third-stage syphilis since ten months earlier. Presumably the disease had been dormant for a number of years—it can remain dormant between the second and third stages up to 30 years in some cases. It is a very terrible disease, especially before the discovery of penicillin in 1943, which cures it. The treatments were various concoctions of mercury, which often led to mercury poisoning including hair loss, mouth ulcers, teeth falling out, neuropathy, kidney failure, etc. In the late 19th century other things were tried to treat the disease, such as potassium iodide with small doses of mercury, and other metals were tried, including gold, with little to no good effect. In 1909 a so-called “magic bullet” was invented by a couple of chemists who ended up winning the Nobel prize for a compound with arsenic in it called arsphenamine that seemed to be somewhat more effective than anything else up to that time.

Syphilis was sort of “discovered” in the late 15th century by French troops invading Hungary, Italy, and Turkey. It is theorized that maybe it was an older disease that morphed around that time and was brought to Europe by the retreating French army. It was named the French pox in dubious honor of those troops, and it apparently was a much more virulent form of the disease than known today, or even in Isabella Josephine’s time. The three stages known today were present then, but they progressed much, much faster, with death occurring within weeks or sometimes months.

The third stage can produce blindness, insanity, paralysis, heart trouble, and a host of other terrible things, always ending in death. Poor Isabella.

How did she get it? Obviously from sexual intercourse with an infected person. It might have been William Hamilton, or it could have been someone she had an affair with after William died. I do wonder if her husband infected her and if she became a nurse after his death, and if she was ironically hoping to be on the spot for getting a cure.

Such a betrayal that would have been! Many, many women suffered that betrayal of course, but it doesn’t make it any better. And women of that era would not have spoken of the experience with anyone, not even a doctor, unless they trained in a hospital to be more practical than private about such matters.

But it was too late for her. Perhaps she thought she was cured when the disease went into its years-long dormant period, only to find to her horror when she was in her early 70s that she was in for a very terrible end. The death certificate noted that her face was covered with sores. Poor Isabella!