Life on the road suited the idealistic, optimistic Bronson, but he was a bad salesman and soon found himself in debt. Bronson, a self-educated Romantic, left his Connecticut home as a teenager to become a Yankee peddler, a type of traveling salesman. Louisa May Alcott, circa 1870s Getty Images Louisa's father was a transcendentalistīorn in Pennsylvania in 1832, Louisa was one of four sisters, the daughters of Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail “Abba” Alcott. But Louisa’s real-life family, upon whom the book was partly based, was infinitely more complicated - and even more interesting. Louisa had captured the world’s imagination with her tale of the brave, beloved March family, and Little Women - a book about the Civil War–era lives of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, four sisters who struggle with life, love and friendship - has never been out of print. The “infants” were Louisa’s fans, and ever since the publication of Little Women, they had bombarded her with letters asking for a sequel and demanding to know how much of the book was autobiographical - a question readers still pose today. “Don’t send me any more letters from so cracked girls,” she begged her mother in a letter from Switzerland in 1870.
Her latest book, Little Women, was a runaway bestseller - and the constant barrage of fan mail, the visits and the demands on her time had wrecked her already delicate health. But even in the Swiss Alps, the author couldn’t escape the thing that had exhausted her in the first place: her fans. A portrait of Alcott raises the possibility that she had systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).Louisa May Alcott had come to Europe to rest. We propose instead that Alcott suffered a multi-system disease, possibly originating from effects of mercury on the immune system. We have reviewed Alcott's observations, as well as those of others, and have determined that acute mercury poisoning could not have caused her long-term complaints. Standard biographies propose that her illnesses were due to acute mercury poisoning from inorganic mercury medication she received for a bout of typhoid in 1863, a cause she herself believed. Alcott tracked her signs and symptoms (in letters and journal entries), which included headaches and vertigo, rheumatism, musculo-skeletal pain, and skin rashes in her final years she recorded severe dyspepsia with symptoms of obstruction, and headaches compatible with severe hypertension.
Her illnesses evoked intense interest in her time and in ours.
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), famous in her own time and immortalized in ours as a major figure of the "American Renaissance," died at the age of 55 after intermittent suffering over 20 years.
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