Question about Roseanna (spoilers)

We don't know what she died of unfortunately. They say she died of a "broken heart" which was usually a nice way to say suicide in those days. Who knows though.

My guess would be Tuberculosis. At that time, pretty much incurable especially if your immune system had been worn down by a rough pregnancy and even rougher childbirth. At one point, her nasty, vicious cousin Nancy tells Johnse that Roseanna had come down with " the cough ". TB was greatly feared well into the 1920'-1930's. There were no antibiotics until after the two World Wars. Like Leprosy, no one understood how this disease was spread. Both have fairly long incubation periods---like AIDS.

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Maximus Decimus Meridius

Wasn't there blood coming out her nose?

The first thing I thought was brain aneurysm, my husband said, a stroke?

First, whatever the manner of death in the show, or the symptoms, we don't know to be an historical account, so any bleeding from any orifice may or may not have happened, but at any rate, people who commit suicide by hanging, or taking poison sometimes bleed from the nose and mouth as well.

"A broken heart" may have been a way of describing a suicide at one time, but it wasn't exactly a euphemism the way we use the word, because people literally thought the heart was the seat of emotions then-- or at any rate, some people did. Some scientists and physicians had cottoned on to the idea that emotion was entirely a thought process in the brain, but in the 1860s and 70s, that wasn't general knowledge, and most people still thought the heart played an important role in emotions. So, being sad, or having a shock, or being overly stressed, could literally cause your heart to malfunction.

When old people died of heart attacks, or other cardiac events, the cause of death was "old age" (in fact, it wasn't until the 1950s that doctors were no longer allowed to list "old age" as a cause of death on a death certificate); when a young person died of the same thing, people looked for a reason for the person's heart to have worn out before its time, and the heartache of unrequited love was one of those things.

The fact is, there are lots of reasons a young person could die of a heart attack: a person could be born with a defect that didn't take its toll until early adulthood, so someone could appear healthy in childhood, but after some of the strains of adulthood-- farmwork or military service for a man, childbirth for a woman, a person's heart could give out. Nowadays, these sorts of defects are detected shortly after birth, and surgically corrected in the first few years of life, and the person has a normal lifespan.

Another reason is a strep infection. Louisa May Alcott describes this with startling accuracy in Little Women. SPOILER: one character has a fever, and after that is always weak, and pale, and then dies young. Scarlet fever is caused by the bacterium that causes strep throat, which is not completely curable with antibiotics, and will have no lingering effects. However, at the time of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, and the time of Little Women, the toxins produced by the strep bacteria could cause heart damage, other kinds of muscle weakness, or nerve damage, and damage a person's hearing or vision. It is very dangerous if untreated, and even kills small children and infants.

So, Roseanna may not have committed suicide, she may have simply died after a decline in health that seemed abnormal in a young person, and was attributed to her emotional state.

Whatever she died of it was depressing as *beep*

Boycott movies that involve real animal violence! (and their directors too)