1849-50 — Scurvy,[1] California Gold Rush Immigrants ~10,000
— ~10,000 Grob. The Deadly Truth. 2002, p. 127.[2]
— ~10,000 Logan and Fenner. Land Scurvy, p. 467.
— 10,000 McDowell. Vitamin History, the Early Years. 2013.
— ~10,000 Sauberlich in Packer & Fuchs (eds.). Vitamin C in Health and Disease. 1997, p15.
–Thousands Scurvy and dysentery. Dolnick. The Rush. [3]
Narrative Information
Grob: “Scurvy was particularly prevalent among California’s Gold Rush immigrants in 1849; as many as 10,000 may have succumbed to the disease.”[4]
Nutrition Research Division, Sunkist Growers: “A little more than a hundred years ago land scurvy swept through the mining camps of California, taking an estimated 10,000 lives. This epidemic was the subject of the Trumbull Lecture, History of Medicine, given at Yale University October 19, 1955.
“Time and again, scurvy is referenced to as the ‘bane of the gold mines,’ where oranges and lemons or any fresh fruits and vegetables were almost totally lacking in the winter of 1849. Scurvy, cholera and dysentery were kinked as the great killers in an early medical paper written from California.
“Through the courtesy of its owner, The Stanford-Lane Medical Library, San Francisco, we are privileged to reproduce in facsimile this historic paper by Dr. Thomas Muldrop Logan, pioneer physician and public health officer, which was published in the Southern Medical Reports, New Orleans, Vol. 2, 1850.
“Dr. Logan…graduated in medicine from the Medical College of his native Charleston, S.C., continuing his studies in Paris and London in 1832, where he visited the cholera patients in the epidemic of that year. Returning to Charleston he attended the scorbutic[5] emigrants who landed there after the potato famines in Ireland, and then served as a physician in the Army Hospital of New Orleans during the war with Mexico. He came to California in the summer of 1849….Dr. Logan was the first secretary of the newly formed California State Board of Health, and the first California physician to be elected president of the American Medical Association in 1872….”
Logan letter excerpts in Southern Medical Reports, 1850: “….In the whole history of the immigration into this vast continent, from the first landing of our forefathers on the Atlantic border, down to our last halting-place on the Pacific ocean, there has never occurred such an amount of suffering and calamity as has accrued since the discovery of gold in California. The almost interminable plains, now whitened with the bones of thousands of the bravest and noblest of our adventurous people, attest the truth of this assertion….” (p. 472)
McDowell: “….In 1849 and 1850, over 60,000 passengers alone sailed into the San Francisco harbor. The travel distance to California by land…or by sea…took many months with many cases of scurvy observed prior to reaching the gold fields. Scurvy was observed as a result of the sudden exertion of dragging trunks through quagmire streets after having been in confinement aboard a ship. In 1848 and 1849 several overland parties en route to California and Oregon were almost destroyed by scurvy.
“After reaching the mines there was even more depletion of vitamin C due to the physical exertion, or course the real problem was lack of vitamin C-containing vegetables of any kind. Many diets were described as ‘salt and greasy provisions (pork and beef) without vegetables.’ Fondness for raw onions was the secret of the Mexicans resistance to scurvy, just as the ‘under cooking’ of vegetables and use of sprouted legumes prevented the disease in the Chinese.
“Scurvy was devastating; the death rate in January 1850 had been 18 to 20 per day for the past five months at Sutter’s Fort. It is conservatively estimated that 10,000 men died of scurvy or complications of scurvy (e.g. pneumonia or diarrhea) in the California gold rush, half of them in the winters of 1848 and 1849, when scurvy appeared like a contagious epidemic (Lorenz, 1957). In the mining camp of Sonora, in the fall of 1849, a hospital was established purely for the care of the scurvy-stricken miners. Of the miners seeking gold, more found scurvy than the precious metal.” (Google preview does not show page number.)
Sauberlich: “California Gold Rush. Many of the emigrants to the western United States in the 1840s and 1850s traveled by ship that had traveled around the treacherous Cape Horn. Scurvy outbreaks were common on these long voyages. In 1850, over 36,000 immigrants arrived in San Francisco. Often passengers after arrival developed scurvy from the exertion of unloading and carrying their baggage. Of the miners, it has been estimated that from 1840 to 1855, 1 in 36 had frank scurvy, with a mortality rate of 30% (2,28). During the California gold rush of 1848-1850, it is estimated that at least 10,000 men died of scurvy. Interestingly, the shortages of ranges and limes at that time stimulated the beginning of commercial production of citrus fruits in Southern California.” (Sauberlich in Packer and Fuchs. Vitamin C in Health and Disease, 1997, p. 15.)
Sources
Dolnick, Edward. The Rush: America’s Fevered Quest for Fortune, 1848-1853. Little, Brown and Co., 2014. Google preview accessed 5-23-2018 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=T0xIAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Fenner, E. D., MD (Editor). Southern Medical Reports, Vol. II, 1850. New Orleans: D. Davies, Son & Co., and New York: Samuel S. & William Wood, 1851. Google preview accessed 5-23-2018 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=3M1QAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Grob, Gerald N. The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America. Cambridge, MA: President and Fellows of Harvard College, Harvard University Press, 2002. Partially Google digitized at: http://books.google.com/books?id=U1H5rq3IQUAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
McDowell, Lee R. Vitamin History, the Early Years. University of Florida, 2013. Google preview accessed 5-23-2018 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=bb9xPf6JqLgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Sauberlich, Howerde E. “A History of Scurvy and Vitamin C.” pp. 1-24 in: Packer, Lester and Jürgen Fuchs (eds.). Vitamin C in Health and Disease. New York, Basel, Hong Kong: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1997. Google preview accessed 5-23-2018 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=4nODCOzu2n8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
[1] Severe vitamin C deficiency which can lead to death. GARD (Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center), National Institutes of Health, U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services, includes scurvy as a disease and shows a table which “lists symptoms that people with this disease may have.”
[2] While Grob writes of the scurvy in CA in 1849 and 10,000 deaths, others (e.g. McDowell) note a longer 1849-50 time-frame, and we choose to adopt this more conservative approach.
[3] “With hundreds or thousands of miners crammed into primitive camps upstream and downstream from one another, with nutrition abysmal and sanitary standards low or nonexistent, dysentery and intestinal woes were all but universal. Those too weak to stagger to work lay in fetid rags, shivering convulsively with fever, clutching their bellies as dysentery emptied their guts, watching helplessly as scurvy turned their flesh black and loosened their teeth. ‘Each squalid death,’ wrote the historian Kevin Starr, ‘and there were thousands, turned California’s golden fleece into a vomit-stained shroud. Of all the miners’ afflictions, scurvy was perhaps the most dreaded. Men with scurvy ‘rotted to death by inches,’ one miner wrote, and he described one sick man so bent in pain that he was ‘drawn up into a kind of ball, and could have been rolled over and over like a bale of carpet.’”
[4] Cites in footnote 11: Anthony J. Lorenz, “Scurvy in the Gold Rush,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 12, 1957, pp. 473-510. See also: Georgia W. Read, “Diseases, Drugs, and Doctors on the Oregon-California Trail in the Gold-Rush Years,” Missouri Historical Review, Vol. 38, 1944, pp. 260-276; and George W. Grob, Gold Fever (New York: William Morrow, 1966).
[5] “Relating to or affected with scurvy.”