Fair Flower: Gracie Camron

William and Alice Camron were the first residents of the Camron-Stanford House. They moved from Martinez to Oakland in 1876 bringing their daughters Amy and Grace to their new Italianate mansion. The first known picture of Camron-Stanford House shows the entire family on the circular drive overlooking Lake Merritt.

A year later, four days after her second birthday, Gracie died. The family had held a picnic on their property in Contra Costa County and Gracie became ill that night. As for so many families, death was unexpected and swift.

Fair Flower: O, Dear, no sooner came / Thy early days in beauteous bloom / But death did crop the tender bud / and laid thee in the mournful tomb. (From a 19th century tombstone)

(Image: Portrait of Gracie Camron, circa 1874. Portrait from a locket containing the infant images of Amy and Gracie Camron. Camron-Stanford House Collection. Gift of Rodney Atsatt, 1977.)

Cancer in the Nineteenth Century

While infant mortality was a large percentage of nineteenth century deaths, illnesses like Cancer were well known to the Victorians.

Cancer, in fact, has been recognized since antiquity. With the microscopic observation of cells in the 1840s, the understanding and study of cancer advanced. Cancer’s physiology went unexplained until the 1920s.

In the nineteenth century it was commonly thought that cancer was inherited, contagious, or even venereal. Those afflicted with it felt shame, blamed them-selves, or thought it to be punishment for sin. If cancer were punishment for sin, then mortal attempts to cure it were wrong at best or blasphemous at worst. Many believed that since it was God’s will, cancer should be left to run its course.

Those afflicted with cancer were stigmatized, shunned, and often abandoned to cope on their own with their pain and suffering. Few were treated, so that the symptoms, which offended Victorian sensibilities, went without medical care. Untreated cancer of the skin and breast, for example, ate away at the flesh, producing an unbearable stench.

For external cancers, treatment in the first half of the nineteenth century was applying poultices of caustic chemicals that effectively burned away the malignant lesions. Treatment at this time for internal cancers was based on the theory that they were caused by poisons in the body, so that even without proven clinical benefit bloodletting and enemas were tried as well as prescriptions for purgatives, mercury, and herbal remedies.

Doctors still had nothing as effective as morphine by hypodermic injection to alleviate the suffering of cancer patients. But morphine brought with it its own suffering. Widely used during the Civil Was, wounded veterans brought their dependence of morphine home with them. By the 1870s the growing number of men and now women addicted to morphine by doctors became a public concern.

(Image: Bloodletting was a favored procedure for treating cancer and other ailments. This lithograph from the 1820s depicts the often harsh experience that many patients underwent frequently to ease their pains. Lithograph by L. Boilly, 1827. The Wellcome Collection.)

Josiah Stanford: Requiescat in Pace (March 5, 1817 – May 14, 1890)

Josiah’s cancer was thought to have been caused by an accident two a half years before his death. He was on a train to Monterey when, passing from one car to another, he was jolted, lost his balance, and fell heavily on his side. The fall was thought to have caused an inflammation that developed into a cancer of the pancreas, stomach, and spleen. Josiah would not have had such symptoms as pain, loss of appetite, and fatigue until the cancer had progressed to its last stage.

Fellow members of the California Society of Pioneers recalled in their Memorial Record that Josiah had always been in excellent health until he fell ill in December 1889. All was not right from then on, although his malady did not manifest itself with great virulence until March. From then on his stomach troubles increased alarmingly. By April, it had become impossible for him to digest anything or even retain a glass of milk and lime water.

Josiah resisted all efforts to ease his suffering with morphine during those last five months of his life. Even though “he failed physically there seemed to be no failing mentally, his mind seeming to hold its clearness up to the very end.” He was by nature deeply religious. “At all times,” they wrote, “he felt his dependence upon a divine Providence and accepted his trials without complaint.”

Three Oakland physicians, Drs. L.S. Burchard, T.H. Pinkerton, and B.R. Swan, attended Josiah on his deathbed. He died surrounded by his family at half past five in the afternoon on Wednesday, May 14, 1890. His funeral was the following Saturday. He was interred in Mountain View Cemetery.

(Images: Tomb of Josiah Stanford, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, California)

A Dead Ringer

Heart monitors, blood pressure cuffs, and stethoscopes…they all tell a doctor when the patient has expired. But what if there were no tools, or no doctor at all?

Victorians were seriously worried about burying someone alive. The custom of sitting with the corpse throughout the night likely originated because the family was looking for signs of life.

"The difference between death and a state of trance—or, as the Germans put it, Todt and Scheintodt — has never been quite clearly understood by the generality of mankind. Society, which sometimes does its best for the living, does not always do its best for the dead (or those who appear to be dead)." (Premature Burials by G. Eric Mackay Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 16 January 1880)

Inventors of the period responded with a vengeance, creating a variety of safety coffins with bells, alarms, breathing tubes, etc. In his short story Premature Burial, author Edgar Allan Poe told the story of a man who had invested in just such a coffin.

"I writhed, and made spasmodic exertions to force open the lid: it would not move. I felt my wrists for the bell-rope: it was not to be found. And now the Comforter fled for ever, and a still sterner. Despair reigned triumphant; for I could not help perceiving the absence of the paddings which I had so carefully prepared—and then, too, there came suddenly to my nostrils the strong peculiar odor of moist earth. The conclusion was irresistible. I was not within the vault. I had fallen into a trance while absent from home—while among strangers—when, or how, I could not remember—and it was they who had buried me as a dog—nailed up in some common coffin—thrust deep, deep, and forever, into some ordinary and nameless grave."

A Lingering Illness

The Stanford Family had not yet completed their mourning period when sorrow struck once again just four months later.

Josiah "Joe" Winslow Stanford Jr. and Alice Gertrude Gordon were married in June of 1890. Their marriage would be a brief one. In September of 1891 Gertrude passed away while recovering from an illness at the family's residence, the Camron-Stanford House.

The circumstances surrounding Gertrude's death are not entirely clear. Interment records from Mountain View Cemetery list "valve disease of the heart" as her cause of death. Her obituary in The San Francisco Call notes that Gertrude had died after a "lingering illness of four months."

Gertrude was 28 years old at the time of her death. A memorial was held in the home. Gertrude's body was buried at Mountain View Cemetery in a temporary tomb. Her body was eventually moved to a family tomb erected by the surviving Stanfords soon after.