Cause of Death

[anabanana]

Hi folks, I'm stumped with the first word here - can anyone help?

[Nettie]

Looks like erysipelas to me.

http://www.healthline.com/health/erysipelas#Overview1

Painful way to go 

[anabanana]

Thanks Nettie, and eek yes it sounds an awful illness...one that in todays world could be successfully treated perhaps.  Alas this ancestor had the condition in the 1860s.

Thanks again for deciphering 

[Nettie]

You're welcome.  It is sad when you find relatives who have suffered terribly and died from something that would be easily treated these days. Makes you appreciate the health system a little more.

[Billyblue]

The very first person I laid out, doing my nursing training, was a woman in her 40s who died from
this disease.  That was in about 1957.

Dawn M

[Annie65115]

It certainly says erysipelas -- but without antibiotic treatment, that could kill you within hours or max a couple of days, so I doubt that the person suffered from it for 2 years solid before death!

I think causes of death on these old certificates have to be taken with a large pinch of salt. It wasn't even necessary for a doctor to certify death or suggest a cause until the 1870s so neighbours etc would tend to attribute symptoms to something that they knew - it doesn't mean that they were correct.

eg I suspect that many cases of "TB" would have possibly been something else - but if you were wasting and had a cough, TB was common enough for people to assume that that's what you had so that went on the certificate.