“Consumption,
Killing Me By Degrees”
Mamie’s Death Certificate
In Mamie Desdunes’ era the deadly threat of tuberculosis, commonly known as “consumption”, was a constant fear. An infectious disease that usually spread by airborne transmission of particles of saliva through coughing, spitting, etc., tuberculosis thrived in urban areas of dense population, crowded housing, struggling sanitation systems, and poverty, conditions that defined New Orleans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Today, modern medicine has dramatically reduced tuberculosis cases worldwide, but when Mamie died there were no antibiotics, no cure once the diseased reached the active stage, only the hope it might remain in remission. If it didn’t, death resulted.
New Orleans was a hothouse for tuberculosis, with one of the highest proportion of cases in the United States. Because of widespread poverty the City’s Black population was disproportionately affected, cases for Blacks reaching twice as many as for Whites.
Storyville, a compact thirty-eight block area dropped into New Orleans’ bustling downtown, and next to the City’s railroad terminus, was a sex destination site not only for locals, but for visitors from around the world. As such, with its crowded intimacy, fueled by alcohol and conviviality, it was a bubbling petri dish for the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, the cause of consumption. Prostitutes in Storyville were particularly susceptible to tuberculosis.
Mamie may have already been dying of consumption when Jelly Roll Morton first heard her singing her haunting Blues. She was a young woman then, but tuberculosis doesn’t discriminate based on age. Mamie was only 32 years old when she succumbed.
Consumption didn’t kill Mamie or anyone else immediately upon becoming infected, rather it indeed killed by degrees. That was the cruelty of the disease: it took its time.
It may have been the unexpected cough of a family member, a neighbor, or a stranger that brought the disease to Mamie. It could have happened at a family meal, on streetcar ride home, or during sex in Storyville.
Tuberculosis destroys the lungs. If Mamie experienced the common progression of symptoms she would have first had a persistent, hacking cough that kept reoccurring. Concerning, certainly, but also attributable to a variety of maladies, some worse than others. It was only when she opened her handkerchief one day and saw the blood that she would have panicked. Everyone in that era knew what coughing up blood signified: consumption.
The coughing fits continued and Mamie gradually began to loose weight. Bouts of malaise left her bed-bound for days, sometimes feverish. She always bounced back, until one day she didn’t. Her ravaged lungs hemorrhaged and she drowned in her own blood on December 4, 1911.
According to her death certificate Mamie died at home of phthisis pulmonitis, i.e., tuberculosis of the lungs. She died as “Mamie Dugue”, having resumed her married name, and was identified as a housekeeper.
Storyville would have to continue without her.
Red Cross poster is taken from the internet. Copy of the death certificate is from the Louisiana Department of Vital Statistics.
