John Cameron
b. 1829 · d. 1889
The family of John and Elizabeth was indeed a tragic one. Of their twelve children, only four reached the age of eighteen. The ages of death of the eight children were — 0, 0, 2, 4, 8, 12, 13 and 17. Between 1872 and 1894 the last three of these died from phthisis, presumably due to the conditions in the towns of the Industrial Revolution, and also from the cramped living conditions.
John died on 16 August 1889, aged 60, a hand-loom weaver. Elizabeth, born in County Antrim, was still at Cartside Road in 1891 and died in 1916.
The tenth child, and the one who carried the line forward, was Duncan — Duncan Hartley’s grandfather.
“The Artists’ Disease”
The following is extracted from the programme notes to the play The Doctor’s Dilemma by George Bernard Shaw, produced at the Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake, as part of the Shaw Festival in 2000. Duncan placed it here because it names the illness that took so many of John and Elizabeth’s children.
What we now call tuberculosis was known to the ancient Greeks as phthisis (“decay”). In the nineteenth century, consumption was a leading cause of death in Europe. Environmental effects associated with the uncontrolled growth of cities — pollution and overcrowded living — were contributing factors. In 1882 Robert Koch isolated the bacillus; antibiotics that could cure it did not arrive until the 1940s.
