The Tuberculosis Victims Buried in Dallas City Cemetery
by Daniel Grieg Babb
Last month’s article about the Dallas City Cemetery noted that many of the people buried in the cemetery died from “pulmonary tuberculosis”, more commonly known today as “TB”.
Tuberculosis is an infectious disease that generally affects the lungs. The classic symptoms of active TB are a chronic cough with blood-containing sputum, fever, night sweats, and weight loss. The historical term “consumption” may have referred to the weight loss experienced by TB victims. Hollywood has taught us well that the mere image of someone coughing up blood is a sure sign that they will be dead in the next few minutes of screen time. In reality, TB took 1-5 years to run its course.
Although TB existed for centuries, the bacillus causing TB, M. tuberculosis, was identified and described in 1882 by Robert Koch. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905 for this discovery.
In 1892, chemist Earnest Lederle experimentally inoculated milk from TB-diseased cows into guinea pigs, which caused the guinea pigs to develop the disease as well. In 1910, Lederle, then in the role of Commissioner of Health of New York City, introduced mandatory pasteurization of milk.
Pasteurization treats liquids with mild heat (<100 °C) to eliminate pathogens and extend their shelf-life. This process was named after the French scientist Louis Pasteur, whose research in the 1880s demonstrated that thermal processing would inactivate unwanted microorganisms in wine.
Improvements in sanitation, the use of pasteurization, and other public health measures slowly began reducing mortality rates in the first decades of the twentieth-century, but it was the development of the antibiotic streptomycin in 1946 that proved to be the most effective treatment for the disease.
Here are just a small sample of TB’s victims laid to rest in Dallas City Cemetery:
- John Abina, age 29, railroad worker
- Herminia Aguria, age 16
- Will Dawkins, age 42, laborer
- Irene Gonzales, age 19
- Jesse McCray, age 35, druggist
- William Aaron Miller, age 41, pool hall owner
These victims of TB may have shared more than a cause of death in common. Many of them spent their last days in Woodlawn Tubercular Hospital, which was the Dallas hospital for infectious diseases at the time. The hospital was built in 1919, at a cost of $55,000, which was shared between city and county.
We will continue to provide updates on the cemetery’s restoration progress, and stories about the people interred there.
Image credit: Fight Tuberculosis–Obey the Rules of Health. New York, None. [New York: WPA Federal Art Project, dis. 4, between 1936 and 1941] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/98513584/.
