Tag: 1913

Speculating with the life of the people

Newspaper reports: The director of Public Health and the director of the Vaccination Institute are engaged in the struggle to supply vaccines.
Hygienist Dr. Carlos Seidl: “Your Excellency, Your Excellency, don’t disturb me in the smallpox war! Just provide vaccine…”
Baron de Pedro Affonso: “Dr. Seidl, Dr. Seidl, don’t get involved in my business!”
Rivadavia [uncertain who this figure is, unless it is historical metonymy for Argentina, which handled vaccination differently?]: “That’s right, Joe! Everything is out of joint! There shouldn’t be a fight when smallpox is threatening…”
Joe Public: “What do you want? They gave His Excellency the vaccine monopoly… They put the vaccine up for negotiation…”
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1913)

Brazilian smallpox cartoon

The smallpox scare

How it originated in Sydney.
A story of putridoxcinnation.
(Truth, Brisbane, 1913) (Follow the link for the extended verses that accompany this; I include a couple below.)

In our Southern clime, in a healthy time, when trade was slack with the coffin-makers,
When the hearses’ teams chewed their oats in dreams, and a lifeless trade was the undertakers’,
Came a grisly pair labeled ‘Death’ and ‘Scare’–for the visit the last bedmakers thanked ’em–
And settled them down for a time in town, in a crazy Sydney doctor’s sanctum.
……….
What was left of the scare was a small affair not calling for further consideration–
There was no smallpox. IT WAS PUTRID OX that menaced Old Sydney with decimation.

Australian smallpox cartoon

Quarantine

How the dodge is worked: And how it is being fought.
(Truth, Sydney, 1913) (During a smallpox scare, compulsory vaccination seems to have aroused considerable opposition, including the sentiment that it constituted “a gross and filthy idolatry, an arrogant superstition, a giant delusion, deified as scientific by the medical fraternity.”)

Australian smallpox cartoon

Brilliant ideas

(The Brazilian Public Health Service resolves to send its delegates to hold conferences among workers in factories and offices as a means of combating tuberculosis.)

To be a worker and married are practically synonymous! A worker cannot be understood without having a wife and at least four or five children. Currently earning what he earned five years ago, while at the same time the cost of housing and goods is of necessity going up, quadrupling in value, a poor devil who earns $6-10 a day has to live in a shed without hygiene of any kind and eat bread kneaded by the devil…

But… Hygiene thinks it has discovered “bread honey” by developing its theories for factories and offices in solemn rhetoric against tuberculosis.
What will these doctors say to the workers? This: look for good, comfortable and airy rooms; Have a good time, eating well; rest three months a year in Poços de Caldas [spa city north of São Paulo], etc… etc…
Doubt it? Go attend these conferences.
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1913)

Brazilian tuberculosis cartoon

Before the Prague elections

“Are you supposed to give up your candidacy? What happened?”
“But they summoned me to the medical department, if I have any scruples, now they want me to get down in the mud when the cholera is frightening us…” (Meaning, you can get dirty in politics or in fighting an epidemic, but not both at the same time? This wants improvement.)
(Humoristické listy, Prague, 1913)

Czech cholera cartoon