Mr. Crumbine and Tuberculosis

Have you ever heard about Samuel Crumbine? Chances are you haven’t, though you should be quite thankful for what he did. Do you know about a disease by the name of tuberculosis? During Samuel's time this was a huge problem. A large amount of people were getting this disease and Samuel Crumbine wanted to fix this. Having a profession in the medical field and being head of the state health board for Kansas. He started a campaign with four ways to stop the spreading of tuberculosis. Those points being bugs, public drinking containers, public spitting, and towels.

Bugs. They have always been a huge source of disease, but Samuel knew how to fix this. In 1905 Samuel started an advertising campaign to tell people to swat the fly by using a device he came up with called the “fly bat”. This helped when it came to bugs, but he also encouraged more use of screened windows to stop bugs from getting into the house.

Public drinking containers. In this campaign he aimed towards drinking cups in restaurants, including the Harvey House. He wanted to ban regular drinking glasses, which are not disposable. He suggested changing all the cups to paper cups, as back then cleaning cups wasn’t the best. While the campaign somewhat succeeded back then, today we're just back to regular cups, due to advanced cleaning machines.

Towels, being very similar to the drinking container campaign, he aimed it at restaurants especially ones on trains. He told resteraunts to give people disposable towels instead of their regular cloth ones, due to cloth ones being over used and collecting bacteria over time. It succeeded as today most restaurants just use paper napkins.

Public Spitting, this is obviously quite unsanitary, but people didn’t realize that back then. He started another campaign telling people that body liquid can transfer tuberculosis and to avoid spitting in public areas. He even went so far to have some bricks with the slogan on it “don’t spit on the sidewalk”. This campaign was kind of hard to monitor, as we all know that people today still spit in public.

As you can see Samuel Crumbine did a lot for modern society even if you’ve never heard of his name before. He made napkins, a much more commonly used thing. He’s gotten many restaurants to use disposable cups like ones at a fast food restaurant. He made the flyswatter which makes flies much easier to kill, and stopped a decent amount of public spitting. If he didn’t do this there would be many more people with tuberculosis and multiple other diseases.