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todaysdocument · 6 months

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Telegram to Bureau of Indian Affairs Officials

Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Series: Subject Correspondence Files File Unit: Contagious Epidemics

This telegram was sent to Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school officials to alert them to the danger of the 1918 influenza epidemic. It advised that specific precautions be taken to ensure the best care for students.

[stamped in upper right corner] TELEPHONED [illegible] _____ Haskell _____ BY _____ Nell _____ TIME _____ 533 p _____ ?SP'N _____ Male _____ [/stamped in upper right corner] WESTERN UNION Form 1512 [logo of Western Union] SPECIAL NEWCOMB CARLTON, PRESIDENT GEORGE W. E. ATKINS, FIRST VICE-PRESIDENT ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ NUMBER SHEET LETTER 129KSS 153 GOVT NITE 1/76 1 Dated TO WA WASHINGTON DC OCT 11 PEAIRS SUPT LAWRENCE KS SPANISH INFLUENZA OF VIRULENT TYPE SPREADING OVER COUNTRY WITH ALARMING RAPIDITY MANY SUPERINTENDENTS REPORT SERIOUS CONDITIONS INDIAN PUPILS AT OUR SCHOOLS AND INDIANS OLD AND YOUNG ON RESERVATIONS MUST BE GIVEN BEST CARE AND PROTECTION POSSIBLE IMPORTANT THAT INHABITED SCHOOL BUILDINGS BE KEPT AT UNIFORM TEMPERATURE FROM SIXTY EIGHT TO SEVENTY DEGREES GOOD VENTILATION MAINTAINED AND ALL FORMS OF DETRIMENTAL EXPOSURE OF PUPILS VERY CAREFULLY AVOIDED PARTICULARLY DURING ILLNESS AND CONVALESCENT PERIOD DISCONTINUE CLASS ROOM AND OTHER ASSEMBLAGE WHEN CONDITIONS WARRANT ALLOWING NO INTERMINGLING OF PUPILS OR EMPLOYEES UNDER CONDITIONS OF OVERCROWDING AND TO [struck through] BE [/struck through] [handwritten] THE [/handwritten] EXTENT YOU FIND IT DESIREABLE ENFORCE ISOLATION QUARANTINE FOR PREMISES CONSULT AND COOPERATE WITH LOCAL HEALTH OFFICERS AND SERVICE PHYSICIAN WHEN CONDITIONS JUSITFY YOU ARE AUTHORIZED TO CEASE ALL ACTIVITIES NOT URGENTLY REQUIRED SO EMPLOYEES MAY BE AVAILABLE FOR NURS [struck through] UR [/struck through]ING AND OTHER INFLUENZA WORK EMPLOYING EXTRA HELP WHEN STRICTLY NECESSARY KEEP OFFICE ADVISED SELLS COMMISSIONER 530PM [handwritten] 12 [/handwritten] [stamped in lower right corner] RECEIVED OCT 14 1918 Haskell Institute, LAWRENCE KANSAS [/stamped in lower right corner]

#archivesgov #October 11 #1918 #native american #influenza #Spanish flu #1910s

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ausetkmt · 7 months

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Pharmacist Lunsford Richardson made Vicks a household name throughout the nation, but his popular product did not do the same for him.

Even in his native North Carolina, where his most celebrated of chemical concoctions has been right under our stuffy noses and on our congested chests for generations, the mention of Richardson’s name elicits blank stares from all but those who study and cherish history.

Richardson’s salve, Vicks VapoRub, helped the world breathe easier during the devastating influenza pandemic of 1918 and during the countless colds and flus of our childhoods, yet most of us couldn’t pick Lunsford Richardson out of a one-man police lineup, much less a who’s who of medical pioneers.

Why didn’t Richardson — by all accounts a creative inventor and smart businessman — ever become as famous as those vapors packed into the familiar squat blue jar?

Because his name wouldn’t fit on the jar.

That’s one version of the story. According to company and family lore, Richardson initially dubbed his promising new product Richardson’s Croup and Pneumonia Cure Salve. Realizing that this name didn’t exactly roll off the tongue nor fit when printed on a small medicine jar, Richardson changed the name to honor his brother-in-law, Dr. Joshua Vick. Another account suggests the inventive druggist plucked the name from a seed catalog he’d been perusing that listed the Vick Seed Co.

The truth may never be known. What is known, though, is that Lunsford Richardson created a medicinal marvel for the ages, the likes of which may never be equaled.

Croupy beginnings

A Johnston County native born in 1854, Richardson loved chemistry and hoped to study it at Davidson College. The college’s chemistry program at the time wasn’t as strong as he’d hoped it would be, so he studied Latin instead, graduating with honors in three years. He returned to Johnston County and taught school, but it wasn’t long before the young man’s love of chemistry got the best of him. In 1880, he moved to Selma to work with his physician brother-in-law, Dr. Vick. It was not uncommon in those days for doctors to dispense drugs themselves, but Vick was so busy seeing patients that he teamed up with Richardson, allowing him to handle the pharmacy duties for him. Richardson relied on his knowledge of Latin to help him learn the chemical compounds required to become a pharmacist, and that’s when he began to experiment with recipes for the product that would become Vicks VapoRub.

It wasn’t until Richardson moved to his wife’s hometown of Greensboro in 1890 that his magical salve and other products he created began to take off.

“He was a man of great intellect and talent,” says Linda Evans, community historian for the Greensboro Historical Museum, which has an exhibit devoted to Richardson and Vicks.

“Druggists at the time fashioned their own remedies a lot, and he created a number of remedies, in addition to his magic salve, that he sold under the name of Vick’s Family Remedies. He was obviously a man of such creativity.”

In Greensboro, working out of a downtown drugstore he purchased (where he once employed a teenaged William Sydney Porter, the future short story writer O. Henry), Richardson patented some 21 medicines. The wide variety of pills, liquids, ointments, and assorted other medicinal concoctions included the likes of Vick’s Chill Tonic, Vick’s Turtle Oil Liniment, Vick’s Little Liver Pills and Little Laxative Pills, Vick’s Tar Heel Sarsaparilla, Vick’s Yellow Pine Tar Cough Syrup, and Vick’s Grippe Knockers (aimed at knocking out la grippe, an old-timey phrase for the flu).

These products sold with varying degrees of success, but the best seller in the lineup of Richardson’s remedies was Vick’s Magic Croup Salve, which he introduced in 1894. And by all accounts, necessity was the key to its success.

“He had what they referred to as a croupy baby — a baby with a lot of coughing and congestion,” explains Richardson’s great-grandson, Britt Preyer of Greensboro. “So as a pharmacist, he began experimenting with menthols from Japan and some other ingredients, and he came up with this salve that really worked. That’s how it all started.”

Another version of the story suggests that all three of the Richardson children caught bad colds at the same time, and Richardson, dissatisfied with the traditional treatment of the day, which included poultices and a vapor lamp, spent hours at his pharmacy developing his own treatment.

Richardson’s salve — a strong-smelling ointment combining menthol, camphor, oil of eucalyptus, and several other oils, blended in a base of petroleum jelly — was a chest-soothing, cough-suppressing, head-clearing sensation. When the salve was rubbed on the patient’s chest, his or her body heat vaporized the menthol, releasing a wave of soothing, medicated vapors that the patient breathed directly into the lungs.

Vicks in the mailbox

In 1911, Richardson’s son Smith, by now a successful salesman for his father’s company, recommended discontinuing all of the company’s products except for Vick’s Magic Croup Salve. He believed the salve could sell even better if the company stopped investing time and money in the other, less successful remedies. He also suggested renaming the salve Vicks VapoRub, according to the company’s history timeline, to “help dramatize the product’s performance.” Richardson agreed, and a century later, the name’s still the same.

Meanwhile, Richardson intensified his marketing efforts by providing free goods to druggists who placed large orders and publishing coupons for free samples in newspapers. He also advertised on billboards and sent promotional mailings to post office boxes, addressed to Boxholder rather than the individual’s name, thus earning him the distinction of being the father of junk mail.

In 1925, Vicks even published a children’s book to help promote the product. The book told the story of two elves, Blix and Blee, who rescued a frazzled mother whose sick child refused to take nasty-tasting medicines. Their solution, of course, was the salve known as Vicks VapoRub.

Expanding and experimenting

As successful as the marketing campaign was, nothing sold Vicks VapoRub like the deadly Spanish flu outbreak that ravaged the nation in 1918 and 1919, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. Loyal Vicks customers and new customers stocked up on the medicine to stave off or fight the disease.

According to the company’s history timeline, VapoRub sales skyrocketed from $900,000 to $2.9 million in a single year because of the pandemic. The Vicks plant in Greensboro operated around the clock, and salesmen were pulled off the road to help at the manufacturing facility in an effort to keep up with demand.

As the flu spread across the nation, Richardson grew ill with pneumonia in 1919 and died. Smith took over the company. Vicks continued to grow, buying other companies until Procter & Gamble bought it in the 1980s. Through the years, Vicks continued adding new products to its arsenal of cold remedies: cough drops, nose drops, inhalers, cough syrup, nasal spray, Formula 44, NyQuil. And whatever success those products attained, they got there standing on the broad shoulders of Richardson.

Richardson will never be a household name, but his salve has held that status for more than a century — and may do so for the next hundred years. And for Richardson, were he still around, that ought to be enough to clear his head.

A cure-all salve

Vicks users have claimed the salve can cure and heal many maladies. Even though Vicks doesn’t say the salve works for these problems, people still believe.

Toenail fungus: Rub the salve on your toenails, cover with socks, and sleep your fungus problems away. Cough: For a similar fix to a nagging cough, some believe rubbing Vicks on the soles of your feet can fix the problem. Dandruff: Rub Vicks directly on the scalp, and your flakes may just disappear. Chapped lips: Petroleum jelly is one of the ingredients in Vicks, and some say the ointment can help heal cracked lips. Mosquito bites: If you smooth Vicks on the red bumps on your legs and arms, it can supposedly take the itch right out. Warts: Dab Vicks on the wart, cover with duct tape, and it may fall off in a few days.

Greensboro Historical Museum 130 Summit Avenue Greensboro, N.C. 27401 (336) 373-2043 greensborohistory.org

See historical Vicks VapoRub bottles and learn about Lunsford Richardson.

#VICKS #Vicks vapo rub #Lunsford Richardson #Vicks VapoRub #spanish american flu #Spanish flu outbreak #1918 #1919 #pneumonia #Black Inventors

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reality-detective · 8 months

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If that 👆 doesn't tell you, this 👇 should. 🤔

#pay attention #educate yourselves #educate yourself #knowledge is power #reeducate yourself #reeducate yourselves #think for yourselves #think about it #think for yourself #do your homework #do some research #do your own research #ask yourself questions #masks #bacterial pneumonia #do not comply

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fox-bright · 13 days

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In Response to the H5N1 Ask:

I'm not answering the ask with your name on it, because I think you came off poorly, and I'm not in the habit of pointing my followers at people when I feel this angry at them. But having had some fresh chocolate chip cookies, some cat snuggles, some sifu-husband hugs, some delightful kindly asks from people who are prepared to behave like equals today and no shortage of groupchat “Would you look at the fucking cojones on THIS one?!” mockery, I now feel settled enough to take this line by line.

So let’s do it.

Hello. I am someone who works alongside people in ornithology. Hi! I work alongside a master of IT and frequently work arm-in-arm with medical doctors. What does that make me? I’m not a sysadmin and you’d better not trust me to install an arterial stent.

Your bird flu post was linked to me and I would like to privately share some reassurance about H1N1 as well as some problems I have with your post.

My post was about H5N1. H1N1 is the swine flu.

Bird flu has been studied for years and indeed is very lethal to humans, but it does not have the same viral characteristics as a mammal-originating virus like COVID does. This is not a useful statement. Bird flu has been studied for decades—over a century, in fact, as the 1918 flu was an avian influenza. You know, the one that killed tens of millions of people, to the point that it derailed a world war? Personally, I have been paying attention to and reading research papers about H5N1 since 2015, and giving my very close attention to it for the last five years.

Since the SARS outbreak, vaccines and treatments for these rare case of direct bird-to-human flu transmission have been developed and have been poised to be deployed immediately should direct bird-to-human transmission ever occur. Let’s be clear: bird-to-human transmission is occurring too frequently. More than eight hundred times in the last twenty years, and more and more rapidly in recent years, and again, more than half of those were lethal. That tends to be from exposure to wild animals hunted for food, or exposure to home-raised animals who get sick from wild animals. Bird-to-human transmission is not yet occurring frequently in the States, where our food is generally factory-produced and hunting is less common, but it is occurring with increasing regularity outside of the US. No vaccine will be useful to a person who is already infected (useless!); currently the treatment for infected people is antivirals and supportive care, alongside strict quarantine. Current H5N1 vaccines may or may not be very effective against any human-to-human variant, as it may have mutated to evade them. We do not have enough H5N1 vaccine doses to go around, and the ones we do will be concentrated first on the military and medical personnel.

The reason monitoring agencies and professionals are on “high alert” for these bird-to-cow-to-human incidents is because they are taking it seriously on a more theoretical level essential to their profession. Why are you so smugly, confidently incorrect? “We have never seen this scale of infections in mammals, and in such diversity of mammals. We have now seen more than 40 species of mammals infected during the last outbreaks, which is unprecedented.”

In this case, the people and cows who contracted H1N1 did not die. It’s literally been days since the human contracted it from the cows, and we do not yet know that he’s the only one. We are NOT in a position to say “okay, so things are peachy!” We also do not know how many cows have it (we’re up to what, fifteen farms now?) and we do not know how rapidly it’s evolving in those massive groups of mammals.

My first concern about your post is its lack of linked to sources and the framing of it as an advice post. The New York Times has an article available on this issue as well as the Audubon Society and various wildlife agencies. Some of these articles are a year or two old, This is the point where I started getting really pissed at you. You demand I provide citations, but you provide none. You suggest I go to the fucking New York Times to read outdated articles? So you haven’t read anything more recent, or from anywhere more reliable, and thus you don’t imagine that I have, either? Arrogance.

but that is because this strain is a very slow-moving development ABSOLUTELY not the case. It is mutating rapidly, over and over and over again. You demanded sources, so I expect you to read those, but if you’ve only got time for one, pick the last of them.

with no immediate signs of consequences for humans outside of people working directly with cattle getting sick— and these humans have neither transmitted the virus to others or suffered anything worse than pink eye from it. So since it hasn’t happened, we don’t need to worry about it happening, hmm? Are you familiar with the term “gain-of-function research?” It’s when an organism is changed, in a lab, to make it more powerful, more infectious, more virulent, something along those lines. When you put a disease into tens of thousands of animals, you’re performing a natural gain of function experiment, as it has tens of thousands of chances to mutate. The “Spanish flu” pandemic, which actually was first noted in a Kansas army base, was almost certainly the result of an avian flu infecting pigs. Pigs are really similar to us, in terms of receptors; what makes them sick is much more likely to make us sick; when this hits pigs-to-pig transmission, it’s time to batten down the hatches. Cows aren’t nearly as similar, but they’re still mammals, so they bring it a lot closer to us; and when you can get unaltered H5N1 from bodily fluids, guess what? Meat and milk are disease vectors. And we don’t actually know that pasteurization of milk inactivates the virus. As I said in my previous post, now is the time to prepare, and to be wary.

This strain is lethal and highly viral between birds and will likely remain this way for a very long time.

This strain has been rapidly, monstrously lethal to MANY animals. Sometimes in huge numbers. You may remember the mink farm where it mutated to spread mink-to-mink (those are mammals), or the sea lions (which I will point out to you are also mammals), where it spread sea lion-to-sea lion and rapidly killed them by the thousands. It’s killing polar bears. It’s killing other predators. It’s killing all manner of US mammals singly and in multiples. However, the mammal-killing mutations don’t stop it from still killing birds.

My final concern— Spring is coming and that means horny birds are about to start hitting windows. Wildlife rehabbers are currently updating the public’s general info on what to do with stunned birds— they often do not recover if left on their own to fly away after a window strike and concerned citizens need to take these birds to a rehabber immediately if found. If people read your post, they will likely conclude that bird-to-human crossover is likely and be afraid to touch a downed bird that needs emergency medical care. I want to be absolutely, painfully clear to any non-doofus reading this right now: I have loved birds since infancy. I grew up with a smalltime conservationist; I have spent no small amount of my photographic hours on birds. I have saved wild birds—poisoned by farmers, wingshot by rednecks, window-struck, sick, attacked by feral cats, orphaned by agricultural machinery--long enough to get them to rehabbers on many occasions, and I have on three occasions assisted with that rehab, including keeping very odd hours to feed nestlings with a dropper. I have assisted with ecological rehabilitation and rewilding programs to provide them with territory; I have written my politicians and donated to wildlife efforts. So know that this is not coming from a place of not respecting or loving the wildlife. This is not “framed as” or “presented as” advice, this is absolutely the advice I would give you face to face, in absolute conviction. This year? If you see a fallen bird? You WALK THE FUCK AWAY. H5N1 gives birds seizures, disorientation, clumsiness and gasping. Or, sometimes, it is completely asymptomatic, and a perfectly healthy-seeming bird could still give you the disease. You can not tell if that bird hit the window because it’s horny and stupid and you forgot to put the stickers up, or because it’s in the grip of a disease that could kill you if the creature breathes too closely to you.

Given all of this, I ask that you please delete your original bird flu post before it has the chance to scare a lot of people and potentially hinder them from helping birds. Yeah, that's not going to be happening.

If you’d like to repost it, please add linked sources and resources for those concerned about avian flu. As previously mentioned, the New York Times has an article with the latest developments on monitoring this virus. Fuck you and your ignorant superciliousness sideways. You do not walk into my fucking Asks with this bullshit like you know ANYTHING when you plainly haven’t read jack shit about the situation as it’s evolving on the ground.

Bird flu is indeed very scary but not nearly in the same league as Covid or even the seasonal flu for most people. You’re absolutely right, in absolutely the wrong direction. If-when this goes human-to-human, it will rapidly outstrip covid’s dangerousness to a shocking degree. Today, it is not dangerous to anyone who leaves birds the fuck alone, but that’s today, and we need to prepare for the potential of tomorrow.

I hope this information helps and please excuse my stiff language. I suspect I sound really angry and condescending when I haven’t had much sleep. Yeah, you came off as a total jackwagon. “This information,” you say, as if you brought ANYTHING with you but attitude.

Sorry if that’s the case, but I didn’t want anything picking up steam before sharing this with you! Please educate yourself more adequately before you attempt again to correct someone. I have myself in the past been raring to go with a correction, checked to make sure that I had my phrasing right, and been caught flatfooted by new information. It’s better to feel that embarrassing moment of “oh, shit,” and realign your understanding silently, than to go in without doing any of the work and waste someone else’s time having to educate you.

If you reply to this in any way that is even slightly confrontational, I'm just going to block you. You aren't worth my time--you weren't worth this time! I have things I am supposed to be doing!--and I genuinely hope you do better in the future.

#I have shit to DO!

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