Tarini and her co-authors found evidence in Laura Ingalls Wilder's memoirs and letters that described Mary's illness as "spinal sickness" with symptoms suggestive of a stroke. Mary Ingalls went blind in 1879 at age 14. "I would ask other doctors, but no one could give me a definitive answer, so I started researching it." "Since I was in medical school, I had wondered about whether scarlet fever could cause blindness because I always remembered Mary's blindness from reading the Little House stories and knew that scarlet fever was once a deadly disease," says Tarini, an assistant professor of pediatrics in the Child Health Evaluation and Research Unit at the University of Michigan's C.S. Tarini, M.D., and her co-authors used evidence from newspaper reports, Laura Ingalls' memories and school registries to conclude Mary's blindness was probably caused by viral meningoencephalitis. But in a new study published today in the journal Pediatrics, University of Michigan researchers found it is likely scarlet fever had nothing to do with Mary's blindness.
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