Tag: tuberculosis

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Health and Living

Open-air schools and sitting-out bags: Keeping children safe during tuberculosis scares

This is a sitting-out bag. No child ever wore one because he wanted to impress his friends.

But this awkward example of outdoor wear was created to save lives and keep students educated during one very concerning health crisis.

Teaching children during perilous moments of disease spread had been a challenge since the invention of public schooling. The educators of the past did not have the option of remote learning. And sometimes the epidemics faced during these moments seemed to specifically target children.

Such was the case of tuberculosis (TB), a constant specter over life in big cities for centuries. Like COVID-19, tuberculosis is spread through aerosol droplets. And like COVID-19, TB is spread through close and continued exposure to an afflicted person.

Tuberculosis was one of the leading causes of death worldwide in the 19th century and would not fully be controlled until the widespread acceptance of vaccines after World War II.

But in densely populated neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, combatting the disease was an uphill battle. Not only were people packed into small spaces, but those spaces were hardly well ventilated.

Where possible, educators chose to heed the advice of experts and hold classes outdoors.

The Seward Park Library opened up its rooftop as a reading room for students, both as a way to beat the heat but also to encourage the flow of air and the prevention of disease. (Courtesy NYPL, date unknown, photographer Lewis Hine)

The so-called ‘open air schools’ instructed students in environments with ample ventilation, often on building rooftops or lawns.  

According to a 1916 analysis of the movement, an open-air schoolroom was “fully exposed to the air on one or more sides, providing merely shelter from wind and rain. There is no artificial heating, the temperature of the room always being that of the open air.”

Bureau of Charities, via Library of Congress

The first open-air school in New York opened in 1908 on an “abandoned ferryboat.”  Easily the most notable of New York’s open-air schools — and a model of this unusual form of education — was the Horace Mann School, operated by the Teachers College at Columbia University.

Horace Mann’s students had to meet a certain unfortunate criteria.  “The children who make up the classes were chosen because they were nervous, or irritable, or anaemic, or undernourished.” [source]

Library of Congress/National Child Welfare Association : Co-operating with Natl. Assn. for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, [between 1920? and 1923?]

But while the open-air school was created for the prevention of one illness, it most likely encouraged another — pneumonia.

And that’s where the sitting-out bag comes in.

Not cool: “Boy wearing coat with attached bag covering feet, seated at table, outside of classroom, reading, New York City.” Courtesy Library of Congress

The sitting out bag was like a potato sack, a thick sheath of material that allowed the student to study even in freezing temperatures.

The device was basically the sleeping bag for daytime, used to warm the body and keep students alert during open-air classrooms.

Below: An advertisement promoting “fresh air in abundance” featuring the same boy as above

It was by no means a pleasant ensemble.  One guide to open-air schools described the sitting-out bags as “made of a brown, pliable, hairy, felt-like cloth bound with tape and fitted with snap fasteners.”

Because the sitting-out bags were often used by several students — and reused, over many years — parents were encouraged to make their own sitting-out bags at home for their children.  

As with masks today, parents were encouraged to make their own. An article in a 1910 Survey Magazine offered tips to adults on how to make homemade sitting-out bags. (If you’d like to make your own sitting-out bag, find the instructions here, but you’ll need lots of braid and cotton batting.)

Many sitting-out bags came with hoods, leading to the alarming sight of an entire classroom of hooded children in stiff uncomfortable cocoons.

Below is pictured a hooded version, advertised in the Journal of the Outdoor Life in 1922. A sporting magazine?  Sadly, no. The publisher of this guide to open-air living was the National Tuberculosis Association.

But the sitting-out bag played a small part in keeping children safe during this moment of crisis. Better understanding of the disease and the invention of an effective vaccine would lower the infection rate by mid-century:

“Rates of death from tuberculosis in the United States decreased from 194 per 100,000 persons in 1900 to 40 per 100,000 persons in 1945, in part because the epidemic of tuberculosis in the western world was running its course and in part because of public health initiatives and improved socioeconomic conditions.” [source]

Categories
Health and Living

The Turtle Cure: In New York, a German doctor offers an unusual remedy for tuberculosis

“I am here to show what the serum will do,” said the visiting doctor from Berlin. “That is my only answer to those who have natural doubts before they have made observations.”

Library of Congress

Dr. Friedrich Franz Friedmann had come to New York in February 1913 to tackle one of the city’s most persistent scourges upon its population.  

Tuberculosis (or “consumption”) had killed thousands during the 19th century and showed few signs of abating in the new century.

It was considered a “disease of the working class,” ransacking neighborhoods of crowded tenements.  Hospitals on Blackwell’s Island and others around the city were devoted solely to those afflicted by it.  Parents sent their children to open-air schools, inspiring all sorts of strange costume, anything to avoid the dread disease.

So one could imagine the excitement which greeted the visiting doctor, invited here from Berlin where he had announced his marvelous and unusual cure.  

According to Friedman, a serum had been created taking a sample of tubercule bacilli and “passing it through a turtle” in a laboratory, creating a non-virulent strain that could function as a vaccine.  Dr. Friedmann had come upon this discovery in 1902 while experimenting with turtles at the Berlin Zoo.

New Yorkers affected by the disease were anxious to see Dr. Friedmann’s miracle serum. Wealthy banker Charles Finlay, president of Aetna National Bank, immediately sent for the doctor and conspicuously put him up at the Waldorf-Astoria at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, the finest hotel in New York.  

The invitation also had a challenge attached — if Dr. Friedmann could cure 95 out of a 100 patients (including Finlay’s own son) using the turtle cure, he would be awarded one million dollars. (About $26 million in today’s currency.)

Dr. Friedmann leaving a New York hospital. Library of Congres

Friedrich arrived on February 25 and readied his remedy from his room at the Waldorf. Meanwhile, hundreds of interested parties gathered in the lobby, including members of the press and desperate family members whose loved ones sat in tuberculosis hospitals.

Friedrich eventually rejected the million-dollar challenge — 95 out of 100 is probably ambitious, even for an early vaccine people were confident with — but came armed to the Waldorf with his little red box containing the vaccine and apparently a host of future plans, including the opening of a dispensary somewhere in the city.  

As soon as the vaccine was thoroughly tested and approved, that is.

The doctor stayed in New York for several weeks but he was eventually ejected from the Waldorf.  Manager Oscar Tschirsky rightly feared the hotel would soon be filled with tuberculosis patients begging to be test subjects for the vaccine.  

Soon after a near-riot erupted in the lobby, a sick man collapsed and was taken away in an ambulance.  The Waldorf evicted Dr. Friedmann on March 5th.  He then escaped to the equally tony Ansonia Hotel in the Upper West Side.

Philip Chase, a young Washington DC resident cured of tuberculosis by the ‘turtle cure’. This cleaned image courtesy Shorpy. See a full-sized version here.

Friedmann’s secretive activities soon caused great doubt in the city. He administered the vaccine to a few patients from an office at W. 51st Street but no results were reported.  People quickly grew skeptical of this miracle cure.

The ‘turtle man’, as Friedmann was soon called in the press, soon became distracted by a  potential thief in his midst —  Dr. Maurice Sturm, the house physician at the Ansonia.  In May, Sterm claimed an improved version of the turtle vaccine, one he was eager to share with reporters (if not actually with patients).

Accused of outright stealing the vaccine, Dr. Sturm declared, “I do not care whether my name is smudged, if I can give the public the benefit of this discovery….I want the cure in proper hands.”

Sturm then produced three turtles in a pail, one of which was named Friedrich Franz.

At hearing of Sturm’s announcement, Dr. Friedmann reportedly replied, “Ach, Gott!” and threatened to sue the former Ansonia confidante.  Amazingly, Sturm eventually counter-sued, citing a lack of payment for services rendered to Dr. Friedmann.

Further pandemonium arrived on the RMS Mauretania on May 17th with another doctor who claimed an even more improved “turtle germ,” using vastly superior turtles from South India.

Hyteria over all these turtle cures died down when it was quickly revealed that they didn’t actually work. “POOR RESULTS FROM THE TURTLE GERM” declared the New York Tribune in late May.

Even still, Friedmann eventually cashed in, selling the American rights to the turtle vaccine for $125,000 and almost $1.8 million in stocks for a planned series of dispensaries in his name (which never materialized).  

Friedmann died in Monte Carlo in 1953.  The most successful tuberculosis vaccine — the BCG vaccine — would not be tested on humans until after World War I.