This Day in History: 1938-09-19

Only weeks after her miscarriage, Jeanette is back in the hospital again for 2 weeks, the press is told it’s for an “ear operation.” There is no documentation to note what the real reason was and Jeanette was hospitalized a third time before the end of the year. By late November reporter Regina Crewe admitted Jeanette had been “seriously ill”. Contemporary letters from a year or so later refer to Nelson blaming himself for “one of Jeanette’s ovaries going bad” so it’s likely that these hospitalizations were for pregnancy-related complications. (It has also been suggested that an “ovary gone bad” might indicate a brief ectopic pregnancy later in 1938.)