John Guiner, who was a 26-year-old native of Ireland who was convicted in Erie County in October in 1846 for grand larceny. He is badly affected by something called Scrofula (see volume 2 page 86). In the 1870s the British Medical Journal wrote about what scrofula was. On Saturday, March 19^th, 1870, it was all the craze.

Scrofula is a disease which produces enlargements of the glands, white swellings of the joints, obstinate ulcerations of the skin, caries of bones, and so forth. The only thing that can really help this disease is sea air and the use of cod liver oil daily.

When this disease occurs, whatever organ it inflames, you can use or be active with that specific one. One of the doctors quoted in the medical journal is Dr. Adams and says scrofula meant bad flesh to heal. Everyone gets inflammation, and the cause for them really vary for each person. Good healing flesh is the very opposite to what we think to be the characteristic of the scrofulous diathesis. In the early Nineteenth Century scrofula was known as a chronic illness, and it was most common in children between two and fifteen.

Some doctors only used the term scrofula to cervical lymph glands being enlarged, the formation of abscesses, and curdy yellow pus through the one or more holes. But most recognize the eyes, ears, joints, and bones as other sites wherein scrofulous, and left ragged ulcers that were usually slow and very difficult to heal.

Scrofula is also referred to Struma.

Scrofula can be caused by a variety of internal and external things, mainly speaking it was caused by lymphatic temperament, contagion, degeneration of the syphilitic virus, food and drink, dirt, excretions, and atmospheric influences. All and all, Scrofula was a disease most common in the early nineteenth century that affected little kids, so John Guiner may have caught it when he was little and never was able to get rid of it. 

Sources: 

Lomax, Elizabeth. “Hereditary or Acquired Disease? Early Nineteenth Century Debates on the Cause of Infantile Scrofula and Tuberculosis.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science,Volume 32 (Oxford University Press, 1977), 356-374. 

“What is Scrofula?” The British Medical Journal, Volume 1 (BMJ, 1870), 290-291.