More Mullane Misery

As I noted when following up on posts about the Mullane family, there was a lot of tragedy in the early part of the 20th Century for all members of the family.  While conducting one of my regular searches of newspapers a while ago, I ran across another sad story about the Mullane family.

Myrtle Mullane, who was the only child of Patrick Henry Mullane and his wife Ellen Mary Sullivan, died at the age of nine during the Independence Day celebrations in 1916.  When I found her death notice that indicated she died while the family was in El Verano in Sonoma County, I thought perhaps there had been some kind of accident while the family was on vacation.  I would need to order her death certificate to know for certain how she died, but I discovered something more about Myrtle that may have contributed to her young death.

In October 1910, Myrtle was playing in the back yard of her parents' home when she found some matches and managed to light one and set her dress on fire.  Ella Mullane rushed out of the house and batted the flames with her hands.  Both Ella and Myrtle were badly burned.  According to the article I found in the San Francisco Call, Myrtle was "a pathetic, moaning figure, swathed in bandages from head to foot."  She was admitted to the Mission Emergency Hospital "where the surgeons will work desperately at the well nigh hopeless task of saving her life."  She was "terribly burned on the face and chest" and was clearly not expected to survive.  The Oakland Tribune coverage was brief, but more optimistic.  Myrtle was sent home after spending just a day at the emergency hospital to be cared for by her mother who was also burned on her hands and arms, but was "well enough to attend to [Myrtle's] injuries."  There was also a brief mention of the incident in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which made it sound like both Myrtle and Ella were in dire condition.

Myrtle clearly survived this horrific accident, but it does make me wonder if a result was enduring other health problems over the remaining years of her short life.  None of the news articles are particularly long, and the way it was written in the Call was quite dramatic, so it's difficult to know just how badly injured Myrtle was, but it seems to have been fairly serious.  Surviving those kinds of injuries is challenging today, so I can only imagine what it was like in 1910.  It is not terribly surprising that she died about six years later.