Elizabeth of York TB Carrier??

I just had a thought this morning. I had read a book previously that surmised the Reverend Patrick Bronte may have been a carrier of TB. He had had it when a young man and had bronchitis to the end of his days. However, he managed to pass it on to all his children who died as young adults. Could it be possible that Elizabeth of York was a carrier. She was Anne Neville's lady in waiting. Anne possibly died of TB. Elizabeth's eldest son Arthur died of it and Henry VII died of it. Elizabeth's younger sister Mary of York died at fifteen of unknown causes. In fact only one of Elizabeth of York's sisters lived past the age of thirty-eight. They all died, including Elizabeth at the age of thirty-seven or thirty-eight. Or was it just a very prevalent disease?

When you say Mary died of unknown causes, do you mean *we* don't know why she died, or that people at the time didn't know why she died? If the latter it's possible that she and her father both died of an inherited AVM (arterio-venal malformation).

It does sound like a suspiciously high death rate, given that they were artistocrats and would have had the best of food and medical care (such as it was). On the other hand people drank small beer all the time because the water was dirty, which can't have done much for their general health.

Does anybody have any data on the normal lifespan for nobles of the period? Richard's daughter died very young, but that may have been childbirth. Offhand there certainly seem to have been some pretty elderly aristocratic ladies around - Anne's and Richard's mothers, Oxford, Salisbury, Desmond, Beaufort - which tends to support the idea that there was something abnormal about the high death-rate among Edward's girls.

If there was a TB carrier involved, I suppose it wouldn't necessarily have to be Elizabeth herself - it could be some faithful family servant whom she took with her when she married Henry. Maybe she took her wheezy old nanny along to look after her son

My meagre sources just say she died at age fifteen. Elizabeth herself died of childbed fever or infection but it certainly doesn't explain the high number of cases of TB in her immediate vicinity.

whitehound wrote:

If there was a TB carrier involved, I suppose it wouldn't necessarily have to be Elizabeth herself - it could be some faithful family servant whom she took with her when she married Henry.  Maybe she took her wheezy old nanny along to look after her son  

That would not explain why almost all of Edward IV's daughters died so young. In addition, both the Warwick girls died before they were 30. Yet EW, and Cecily both lived to a relatively old age.

If there was an infected servant who was with the household she could have been there to infect all of them - if she was EoY's nanny she'd have been there from the outset, since she was eldest.

Whoever was the carrier (assuming there was a carrier) there's a certain amount of difficulty in explaining how Isobel got it, and even if EoY was the carrier her sister Cecily either didn't get it or did get it and survived, so the same might be true for both Elizabeth and Cecily.

I'm not saying it's not Elizabeth, just that that's not the only possibility.