Person:Elizabeth Bryan (24)

Judging from the birth and death dates of Elizabeth and her unnamed daughter, I would assume she died of complications of childbirth.

From the San Francisco Call September 7, 1869

DOUD- In this city, September 6, Elizabeth, wife of Aaron Doud, aged 30 years.

Cause of death: Puerperal Peritonitis

Inflammation of the peritoneum (membrane lining the abdominal cavity). Characterized by violent pain in the abdomen, increased by the slightest pressure, often by simple weight of bed clothes. It frequently occurs in parturient state and begins on the second or third day after delivery. At times, a malignant epidemic, and perhaps contagious, variety has made its appearance, and destroyed numbers of females. This has been described under the name puerperal fever, metroperitonitis and low fever of child bed. [Dunglison1874]

In 1843 Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809­-1894), Professor of Anatomy & Physiology at Harvard, wrote in his celebrated paper entitled "On the Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" that: "...if one case of puerperal fever arises in a physician's practice there is an increased risk of a second, two cases suggest that the physician should do no obstetrics for at least a month, and three prima facie evidence that he is the source of the contagion."

The Viennese physician Ignaz Philip Semmelweiss (1818-1862) provided proof of the cause of puerperal fever. ­In 1847 he ordered hand washing in chlorinated water before delivering infants and the mortality from childbed fever declined dramatically. Semmelweiss wrote that: "Puerperal fever is caused by conveyance to the pregnant woman of putrid particles derived from living organisms, through the agency of the examining fingers....... Consequently must I make my confession that God only knows the number of women whom I have consigned prematurely to the grave."

1. ↑ San Francisco Call Newspaper
   Obituaries.

   Doud-In this city, September 6, Elizabeth, wife of Aaron Doud, aged 30 years.

2.   Teall.ged.

   Date of Import: May 28, 1999