Category: tuberculosis

The official world

(From newspapers.) People’s Welfare Minister Rudevics has raised the issue of disinfecting incoming items in order to protect officials.

Woman: “If you don’t mind: from the countryside with a petition?! First of all, present a certificate that you’ve had a bath; then a certificate that you have been vaccinated against smallpox, typhus, cholera, tuberculosis, or rhinitis, then a document that your family is not insane; then a covering letter disinfecting the petition; then …”
Petitioner: “Then I better wait and bring a certificate that I am dead and buried!…”
(Svari, Riga, 1927)

Latvian hygiene cartoon

The meat market

“Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink.” Matthew 6:25
(Shelves include “tuberculosis lard.” This was published later in the year when Upton Sinclair levelled his devastating indictment of the Chicago meatpacking industry in The Jungle.)
(Puck, New York, 1906)

American tuberculosis cartoon

Our July 14th

O Malho [The Sledgehammer] (solemnly, to Joe Public): “Drawing your attention to the Bastille of Routine, I celebrate in the best possible way the great date of the French Revolution and the date of my second centenary! Those five diggers [with public health official Oswaldo Cruz on the right, holding a syringe] have already demolished a lot, but there is still a lot to do… Down with any remaining attachment to the status quo!”
Joe Public: “Me as well! I want schools! I want housing for the poor! I want a steady fight against tuberculosis! … Let there be money!“
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1906)

Brazilian tuberculosis cartoon

There’s no harm in experimenting

(The Brazilian League Against Tuberculosis, using the discovery of Calmette and Guérin [a French vaccine first introduced in 1921], will save newborn babies from the white plague.)
Joachim Francisco de Assis Brasil (Brazilian politician who had played an important role in securing Amazonian borderlands to the Republic) and Francisco Antônio de Almeida Morato (Brazilian politician and founding figure of the Democratic Party this same year): “We bring you here the National Party in order to be protected against near or future consumption [TB].”
Miguel Couto (Brazilian physician and politician) and Ataulfo de Paiva (magistrate, elite networker, and apparently at one point a figurehead in the Brazilian Academy of Sciences): “There’s no harm in experimenting. But if the disease is born, there will be no vaccine to cure it…”
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1927)

Brazilian vaccine cartoon

The political vaccination metaphor was not new to O Malho: see this example from 1904.

Bacteria bombs

Main caption: A French man of culture has made the proposal to introduce bombs with plague bacteria as a new means of warfare. If this benevolent enterprise were to be realized, then the Central Powers will not be accountable for the reply.
(Kikeriki, Vienna, 1915)

The Italians can then prepare themselves for bombs with the pathogen of galloping consumption.

Bacteria which produce extra upper legs are intended for their sympathetic ruler.

For English listening posts bullets with the sleeping sickness pathogen are at the ready.

Epilepsy will be transmitted to English flyers.

The Foreign Legion soldiers so valued by the Parisian ladies world for their dark skin color will have to cease their heartbreaking activity soon, when we’ve given them bleaching on their necks.

Transmitting the English disease to the equine ranks of the Allies is child’s play.

It will be just as easy to spread the bacillus of Masurian dropsy in the Russian army.

The lovely d’Annunzio ought to be punished by a secret medicament until his hydrocephaly has attained a form that makes it impossible to wear a hat.

For the delightful Gaby Deslys-Navratil [an immensely popular French singer and silent film actor who would expire in 1920 from complications following a bout with Spanish flu], who has gotten into a bit of a spot from all the kissing, we have a means ready to develop a splendid trunk in a short time, so that she can spare her lovely 42 cm mouth during her grueling advertising service.

Whistling!

(Newspapers are reporting that the cost of living in Brazil is calamitous, afflicting the poor classes.)
Joe Public: “Look, gentlemen, we are reduced by protectionism, which favors a false national industry. Here are the consumers of tuberculosis. Imagine what the descendants of such a race will look like! The people are positively dying of hunger, they are already on the path of despair.”
(Various officials give mealy-mouthed excuses…)
Republican Senator for São Paulo and former agriculture minister Francisco Glicério: “And in the face of spectacles like this, I will not repeat that this is not the Republic of my dreams!”
Joe Public: “Nor mine. Republic of dreamers is what this is, the Republic of talkers. Some are eaters, the rest are fasters. Republic of doctors!”
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1912)

Brazilian tuberculosis cartoon

Viennese night specter

What drives through the wind so late at night?
It’s the street sweeper, my child!
It cleans the streets — it’s a horror! —
If you get in its way, you’re done for.
It knows how to find any germ,
It whirls it up, hands it over to the winds,
And what was lying around before, quietly at rest,
It scatters in all directions in no time.
The desert wind, I’m not overstating,
Is child’s play against this work.
And if you’ve just nicely swallowed the tubercles,
That these brooms spit out all around,
Then there is consolation: another process
is being studied — I think for fifteen years!
(Die Muskete, Vienna, 1912)

Austrian hygiene cartoon

Foreign traffic

(Riders of the tram include measles, tuberculosis, typhus, diphtheria, croup, and syphilis–the “606” signals Ehrlich’s Salvarsan remedy.)
Cholera Asiatica: “For heaven’s sake, let me onto this route!”
[Budapest mayor István] Bárczy the Conductor (confidently denigrating her): “Well, don’t you see the sign saying it’s ‘Full!’?”
(Borsszem Jankó, Budapest, 1910)