Category: Health
Advertisers Urged to Give Away Drinking Cups To Stop Sharing
In the early 1900s, public health officials were trying to convince Americans to abandon one of the most ordinary, and potentially unsanitary, habits of daily…
Teen Dies After Explosion Erupts in His Mouth During Routine Surgery
A routine operation for a broken jaw turned horrifying in a London hospital in 1925. Sixteen-year-old Laurence Sims was under anesthesia while surgeons worked to…
Doctors Believed Cancer Could Linger in Houses and Infect New Residents
At the beginning of the 20th century, doctors were still trying to understand what caused cancer, and some of the theories now sound deeply unsettling….
Doctors Said Coal Miners’ Lungs Were Black and Their Wages Too Low to Live On
At the turn of the 20th century, coal mining was not merely dangerous work. For many miners, it was a job that slowly destroyed the…
Typhoid Scare Forced Richmond Dairies to Sterilize Milk Bottles
A typhoid fever outbreak in Richmond, Indiana, turned public attention toward an everyday household item: the reusable milk bottle. In October 1913, health officials linked…
Don’t Poison Baby
At the beginning of the twentieth century, exhausted parents could purchase “soothing syrups,” cordials, and drops intended to quiet a crying baby or help a…
Mob Tried to Burn Down New Jersey Pesthouse as Firefighters Fought Back
Orange, New Jersey, had barely finished building its new pesthouse when an angry crowd tried to burn it down. The small hospital, meant to isolate…
Smallpox Patients Refused the Pesthouse as New Cases Spread
Another smallpox case had appeared, and with it came the difficult question of where the sick should be kept. Miss Mamie Halligan, a domestic in…
Omaha Mob Burned the Pesthouse, and Officials Wanted Arrests
Omaha officials had a rather serious problem in January 1901. The city needed a pesthouse, but someone had burned it down. The smallpox isolation building…
Armed Guards Sealed Off Virginia Smallpox Region
Armed guards once surrounded a small mountain region of Virginia to keep smallpox from escaping. In February 1900, the Denmark area near the headwaters of…
