It is mentioned very briefly and not in depth at all. Here is the sentence. “A doctor who did not come back to see a sick child until too late told the mother it died of “purple-itis,” a very rare disease, which he could not have cured anyway.”
Perhaps the doctor made it up? Would love to know.
Book: “Mothers of the South” by Margaret Jarman Hagwood
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The book was published 1939 and reflects Hagwood’s sociological work over the preceding years. Our era is the 1930s and our setting the rural South (both Carolina/Piedmont and Deep South, but focused on white women living on farms.) This would be a setting with limited healthcare infrastructure and doctors doing a lot of traveling. For instance, in the same era as Hagwood’s book, Methodist minister and family physician Dr. Robert F. Thomas provided something like a thousand house calls per year to the people of Sevier County in east Tennessee. This meant covering a six-hundred square mile range, some of it rugged and mountainous enough that travel on foot or horseback were required. (His name and career are particularly well-attested because on one of his house calls in 1946, for the fee of one bag of cornmeal, he fought through a snowstorm and delivered local couple Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton’s first child, Dolly.)
I don’t have full access but the context of the passage uses this as an example to indicate the concern that care could be pretty uneven as doctors might be biased against rural tenant farmers given the distance, low pay, and class bias. The passage also acknowledges that some of the stories appeared distorted by memory and health literacy. So in this case, we can either interpret “purple-itis” as a doctor making something up as consolation, or as a layperson’s mispronunciation/mishearing/misremembering of something legitimate the doctor said. The latter is more interesting.
We know that it must be rare and would have been untreatable as of the 1930s. When we hear “purple” and “mother,” the first thought would be this is a mishearing of “puerpural” as in “puerpural fever” or “puerperal sepsis.” Puerperal is simply an older word for “postpartum” or the period after delivery, and there are a broad range of typically bacterial infections at play. Many would have remained a serious threat at the time. The earliest sulfa antibiotics were emerging at this time and in fact saw their first evidence in postpartum infections in 1935, but translating that finding to clinical practice and thus actually having a bottle of the right stuff in the right hands in the backwoods would have taken years. (The elixir sulfanilamide scandal, when a sulfa drug was mixed with what was thought to be an inert solvent that we now only use as antifreeze because it’s pretty toxic, didn’t help matters.) That said, “puerperal” 1)generally would have referred to an infection affecting the mother rather than the baby, and 2)was by no means a rare problem. Postpartum infections were common then and remain a common cause of maternal mortality worldwide to this day. The age of the child isn’t referenced but I’m guessing “newborn” or “baby” would have been used if this was in the first few weeks after birth.
Thus, the more likely possibility is that the doctor mentioned “purpura,” which refers to a specific sort of rash, with medium-sized discolored spots on the skin which don’t turn lighter when you press on them. Purpura are present in a considerable number of conditions, some relatively mild and harmless, some rare and life-threatening. The rash itself is more of a sign of other stuff going on. It could include certain autoimmune conditions, disorders of platelets or blood clotting, and infections like meningitis. (I doubt the latter in this case as meningococcal meningitis was somewhat diagnosable and treatable by that time and also known to be a highly-contagious cause of epidemics, so the doctor would likely be talking quarantine and contacting the health department if he believed that to be the case.) Not all of the causes would have been fully understood or treatable at the time, but it had been known and described/broken down into variants for a long time.
In this case, it’s plausible that a physician would have arrived, seen a deceased child covered in a distinctive rash, taken some basic history about what they’d been suffering with, and concluded, perhaps fairly, that nothing in his little black bag would have been rapidly curative or stabilizing.