Mary Ingalls Didn't Go Blind From Scarlet Fever
LatestLaura Ingalls and her sister Mary—whose lives were immortalized on Little House on the Prairie, and in the Little House series of books on which the TV show was based—were real people who were really pioneers in the 19th century. And the real Mary indeed went blind in 1879 when she was 14. Both the books and TV show credit her loss of eyesight to a bout of scarlet fever. But a new article in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics explains that it couldn’t have been from scarlet fever—because scarlet fever doesn’t cause blindness.
In the fourth book in the series, By the Shores of Silver Lake, Laura writes:
Mary and Carrie and baby Grace and Ma all had scarlet fever…Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary’s eyes and Mary was blind.
On the TV show, Mary’s vision begins to decline, necessitating glasses. Eventually, she wakes up one morning screaming that she couldn’t see at all. A doctor told Pa that scarlet fever had “weakened the nerves” in her eyes. But Dr. Beth Tarini, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan, and co-author of “Blindness in Walnut Grove: How Did Mary Ingalls Lose Her Sight” says that “[C]linically, it doesn’t make sense.” However, it was a widely held belief: