The university, founded in 1891, shares its name with former California governor Leland Stanford, but the story does not end there. The school that now sits in Stanford, California (population approximately 13,000) was founded by Leland Stanford and his wife Jane Stanford in the late ninetieth century as a memorial to honor the untimely death of their son Leland Stanford Junior who died at the age of fifteen.
While traveling with his parents in Italy Leland Jr. was stricken with typhoid (today commonly referred to as Salmonella) which is a form of food poising in which ingested bacteria makes its way through the intestinal wall and into an area of the body where it can cause severe damage to multiple organs. While trouble with Salmonella or typhoid is still prevalent in much of the developing world at strongly endemic rates (death rates are about 10% to 30% in untreated instances) for the illness to cause death in the developed world in the twenty first century is extremely uncommon. Unfortunately for young Leland Stanford Junior the circumstances surrounding his infection did not include the ready access to life saving antibiotics that are common today. The end result was the death of Leland Junior about two months shy of his sixteenth birthday. Today Leland Jr. rests in peace on the Stanford University campus alongside both his mother and father who were eventually put to rest at the Stanford family mausoleum as well.
In addition to keiser university forgiveness serving as a predecessor
