Death of the President (1850)

New York Tribune ^ | July 10, 1850 | Staff

[NRx]

Note the different view on the importance of the Federal Government from our modern one. For only the second time in history a sitting POTUS has expired before his term of office. And yet you need to go to page 4(!) to find the announcement and a short but rather moving obituary. Among the news items from the front page we find some local political news, a steamboat accident, a fire in Newark NJ and one Thomas Brown apparently became ill from overwork and had to taken home by a policeman.

[Publius]

https://www.politico.com/story/2011/06/zachary-taylors-body-exhumed-june-17-1991-057126

[Bonemaker]

“A Southern man and a slaveholder, his mind was above the narrow prejudices of district and class and steadily aimed at the good of the nation as a whole.”

Now that you mention it, democrats will try and purge his name and edifices,

[Tax-chick]

treated ... after the old system of practice, with purging, by calomel and otherwise, and blistering.

Or he might have lived.

[Pontiac]

Cholera in 1850

I doubt it.

Tens of thousand die of it every year today

[Jamestown1630]

I’m wondering how long it will be before some of our current cancer treatments will be similarly outmoded.

People do what they can do, with what they understand at the moment. We just don’t understand enough, yet - and it seems to have been ever thus.

[Tax-chick]

True, but not everyone died of it. Cholera kills mainly by dehydration because of diarrhea and vomiting. Mercury salts (”calomel”) cause more diarrhea.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Right above the article, there’s an item as germane then as now:

“Neither branch of Congress did anything worthy of special notice yesterday.”

[Alas Babylon!]

Cholera, not only for the 19th Century, but now coming to an illegal alien camp or homeless settlement near you!

[Tax-chick]

Those are good points. However, even in 1850, treating every disease with chemical purgatives was being challenged by those who observed that cholera patients, for example, lived longer if they were kept cool and given beef broth.

[Pelham]

Zachary Taylor was a Whig. His daughter married Jefferson Davis.

[Tax-chick]

We know what causes cholera. Put a few drops of bleach or, if you prefer, alcohol in your water. (Is Yemen still having a cholera epidemic?)

[Pontiac]

Yep,

All sorts of disease that had been banished from our shores are returning thanks to the Democrats strategy to obtain a permanent majority in Congress.

[Jamestown1630]

There are those - today, and for quite a while - who have maintained that destroying the immune system is not a sensible way to deal with cancer.

I guess we’ll continue to ‘live and learn’...

[Tax-chick]

Or die and learn ... the way it’s always been.

[Jamestown1630]

Yes.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Bookmark

[Jamestown1630]

“Neither branch of Congress did anything worthy of special notice yesterday.”

I think I'd like to have known the wag who wrote that :-)

[SpaceBar]

treated with all the skills that science could form and affection render vigilant...

Quaint 19'th century prose for leeches and mercury salts.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Probably Jim Robinson’s Great Great Grandfather.