On August 8, 1907, Miss Magdalena Herr of East Petersburg received a postcard from her friend, Minerva, in Elizabethtown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Petersburg,_Pennsylvania

The face of the postcard is a hand-colored photograph of Elizabethtown College, which had opened only eight years earlier, in 1899.

The photograph was made by George Ness Falkenstein, one of the founders of the College, and the second President.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabethtown_College

(This is the third postcard story related to this curious 19th century photographer, academic, entrepreneur, writer, clergyman, and agriculturalist.)

In her message, Minerva acknowledges that she is tardy in responding to her friend, applauds her friend having taken a vacation, and invites her friend to ”come up whenever you can”.

The colorful stamp commemorates the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia.

This friendly communication between young women represents a calamity when one looks at the subsequent history of the correspondents.

Magdalena Herr became dangerously ill with influenza in 1918.

At the time, there were no antibiotics or other medications to treat the continuing distress caused by her illness.

(Shortness of breath and insufficient oxygenation could persist for a very long time -as we learned during the pandemic, a century later.).

In 1919, Magdalena shot herself in what was declared to be “an act of insanity”.

More than a hundred years later, we can see more clearly that this was a young women suffering chronic pain and anxiety – and we grieve her untimely death.