amandabang 150 points 13h ago
Ultimately, it's really difficult to try to retroactively diagnose historical figures. 1902 might not seem like that long ago, but medicine has changed dramatically in the past 100 years, as has our understanding of how to diagnose and treat different conditions.
This is especially true for women, whose symptoms were often dismissed or characterized by vague and non-scientific/medical terms like hysteria, feeble-mindedness or, like in this case, "frail" and "delicate."
These in and of themselves are obviously not diagnoses nor are they really symptoms. These kinds of terms were also used interchangeably and inconsistently to describe both common physical ailments (like anemia or malnutrition) and mental illnesses, (ranging from depression to autism spectrum disorders). These terms could also be used to describe the symptoms of things like PMDD, PTSD, post-partum depression, and generalized anxiety, though some of those terms simply didn't exist in the early 20th century.
Notably, a lot of medical terminology during this period in the US was ascribed to the person rather than the illness (thanks, eugenics movement). This muskies the waters even further.
Additionally, there is no way to rule out the very real possibility that she suffered from multiple physical and/or mental illnesses or disabilities. For example, perhaps she lived in housing that exposed her to black mold or lead, which can cause a range of chronic symptoms. Tack on 9 (!) pregnancies at a time when pre- and postnatal care was poorly understood, and that could have exacerbated the symptoms of a preexisting condition or introduced new physical or mental issues. She may have also just been really tired. We greatly underestimate the effects of chronic fatigue, exposure to cold, a lack of sanitation, and just what life was like living in the early 1900s.
Ultimately, there isn't enough information for us to even guess at what she may have had, both because of how little information there is in the account and because historians aren't medical professionals. That being said, we do know that lead exposure, anemia, malnutrition, and tuberculosis were not uncommon, though it's hard to day how common those were due to lack of record keeping as well as a lack of standardization in medicine and diagnostics. The certifications for medical professionals themselves were kind of all over the place. Licensing boards first emerged in the US after the Civil War, but their development at state and local levels was inconsistent. And even when licensing was more rigorous and standardized, it was still limited by the medical knowledge at the time, which was (by today's standards) not great.