In Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" books,
she describes her sister Mary going blind from scarlet fever.
But brain and spinal cord inflammation likely caused Mary's
blindness, a new study suggests. The findings, published today
(Feb. 4) in the journal Pediatrics, came from poring over the
symptoms Wilder described in memoirs and books. "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," said study co-author Beth
Tarini, a pediatrician at the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott
Children's Hospital, in a statement. Wilder wrote several books
describing her life as a pioneer in the mid-1800s. In one, she
describes her sister Mary going blind at age 14 in 1879. At the
time, scarlet fever was one of the deadliest scourges for young
children. The fever occurs when the bacteria that cause strep
throat run rampant