Half in Love with Death
Henry Baldwin spent the month of May 1849 keeping vigil at his young wife’s bedside in Newport, New Hampshire. “Here I sit in the dear chamber—the ‘bridal chamber’—where one short year ago I first pressed to my heart a young and pure and blooming wife,” the engraver and illustrator wrote in his diary. “Then how fair and hopeful and beautiful she seemed, with the bloom upon her cheek … Now, alas, she lies all pale, stricken, and dying.” Marcia Baldwin, 21, had consumption, an inscrutable wasting disease that terrified and obsessed Americans.
Antibiotics’ arrival in the mid-20th century defanged consumption, as tuberculosis was once known, but earlier the disease—responsible for as many as a third of deaths in America—brought terror. The ailment was especially feared in New England, where settlement and living patterns—the close quarters of farmhouses and small, tightly knit villages—encouraged its spread. When Rhode Islander Samuel Tilling-hast tracked mortality among acquaintances in the 1750s and 1760s, he found that over half had fallen to consumption. Transforming life, altering ambitions, and reshaping the very culture, consumption morbidly fascinated Americans.
the young woman’s eight-month ordeal. “I have watched her gradual decay,” he wrote. “I have seen the full, round, and rosy cheeks fade away, the elastic steps grow weak and altogether fail, the ringing, pleasant tones of her gentle voice subside to the feeble & broken whisper.” In March 1849, Marcia, undone by “a distressing attack of bleeding at the lungs,” took to her bed—for good. Henry bathed her through enervating fevers, held her as convulsions and crippling pain wracked her emaciated frame, and tried to position her so she could breathe. “What a dreadful scourge is consumption. It seizes upon the loveliest of earth’s flowers and blights and withers them away,” he wrote in early June. “It loves the ruddy cheek, and vampire-like delights to feed upon the ruby lips. Ghostliness and pallor alone remain to mark its
