My great-grandfather (d. 29 April 1937) has this on his death certificate, under the question “The principal cause of death and related causes of importance were as follows”:
Loise of the brain
Locomotor ataxia several years
What does this mean? Google thinks I want to search for LOUISE THE BRAIN!!! so no help there!
Um, possibly Lues,pronounced like lou-ease, a name for tertiary syphillis. The ataxia could be a symptom. Of course it could be something else entirely.
If you look up Locomotor ataxia, it is defined in Wikipedia as:
“Locomotor ataxia is the inability to precisely control one’s own bodily movements. Persons afflicted with this disease may walk in a jerky, nonfluid manner. They will not know where their arms and legs are without looking, but can, for instance, feel and locate a hot object placed against their feet. It is often a symptom of tabes dorsalis, which is a key finding in tertiary syphilis.”
And tabes dorsalis says:
"Tabes dorsalis, also known as syphilitic myelopathy, is a slow degeneration (specifically, demyelination) of the sensory neurons that carry information to the brain. The degenerating nerves are in the dorsal columns (posterior columns) of the spinal cord (the portion closest to the back of the body). They help maintain a person’s sense of position (proprioception), vibration, and discriminative touch.
It is caused by degeneration of the posterior (dorsal) white column of the spinal cord."
So it looks like he may have had Syphilis
Probably if you looked in old medical books you would find Loise of the brain as a description of a symptom now described differently.
From a genealogy dictionary of archaic medical terms - http://www.genealogy-quest.com/glossaries/diseases2.html I get:
That is interesting - would never have expected something like that from stories and family history. He did serve in some capacity in the first World War, perhaps something happened then.
I will look in to this some more!
Before the discovery of penicillin, syphilis was extremely common. And he may not even have needed to have done anything to get it - it could be passed from mother to child.
This clip from the British TV show, “Who Do You Think You Are?” picks up with actor Martin Freeman (Bilbo Baggins, Arthur Dent) trying to figure out why his great-grandparents had six children who died in infancy, and it goes a long way toward explaining this kind of thing for that time period:
I once saw “planet” as a cause of death on such an old death certificate…
It might have made more sense if it had been malaria, instead of syphilis. You know “Every little breeze seems to whisper Loise.”
If by “something” you mean “French prostitute” then yes.
Suppose he picked it up when he was a soldier in World War I. I would guess he got married a few years after he got back from the war. Why didn’t his wife get it? [OP do you know when he was born and when he got married?]
This all reminds me of the old joke about the guy who paid a fortune to have his family tree looked up… and then a bigger fortune to have it hushed up.
Also the Mauldin cartoon with the caption “This is the town my pappy told me about.”
In the later stages, which can occur in less than a year after infection, transmission of the disease is greatly reduced. It’s also not a guaranteed infection from sexual contact, although it is pretty virulent. He could have picked it up any time in his life though, and we don’t know his wife wasn’t also infected, even before having children, it’s not guaranteed to be passed congenitaly. Despite public health laws (though I don’t know when they were enacted), doctors didn’t always report cases detected. In one highly public case, John List murdered his wife and children. She had been infected (probably from her first husband), and treated by a doctor who never reported to public health authorities. Her children were born without the disease and he never contracted it.