Prevalence of Typhoid Fever
Through text mining, using the Google Ngram Viewer, we are able to see the prevalence of typhoid fever mentions in their archive of digitized books over the course of two hundred years, between the years 1800 and 2000. What we are looking at here is more-or-less a bell curve, with gradual gains starting from roughly 1840. What is bizarre, is that during the period that John Beck contracted typhoid fever, in the early 1860's (or, in other words, the period that the Civil War was being fought) we do not see an abundance of mentions. In fact, almost right after that mark is where we really see it start to make large gains. The question is then, are we seeing more mentions due to the fact that more people are contracting typhoid fever during these periods, or, are we seeing more mentions due to a higher awareness to this disease after the civil war and more reaserch decicated to it. Either way, the graph shows that this was fairly popular subject matter for nearly a century, showing us the severity and enormity of this sickness.