D is for DANGER DAYS!

[write-light.livejournal.com]

From the Children's Health Department!  (of Ralston Purina Co., 1927)

Just the first paragraph is a gem:
Inside that room there are whispers -- tiptoes -- tear-stained cheeks.  ... Danger Days have come.

This must be a result of the influenza epidemic of 1918.

I wonder what the "Magic Blackboard" was, or if the 32-page brochure is around...

Comments

[singeaddams.livejournal.com]

Buy our product or THE KID GETS IT!

[teamrodent.livejournal.com]

I wonder how well Ralston would've done against the 456...

[laurel-hardy.livejournal.com]

Umm…given that penicillin wasn't introduced until the 40s and they didn't even have sulfa drugs yet, I don't know that this can rightfully be called fear-mongering.

[write-light.livejournal.com]

Good point! I'm not sure that Ralston will protect from anything either, though, other than malnutrition.

Penicillin *was* known and noticed, but ignored. O Proud March of Science:

Penicillin was originally isolated from the Penicillium chrysogenum (formerly Penicillium notatum) mould. The antibiotic effect was originally discovered by a young French medical student Ernest Duchesne studying Penicillium glaucum in 1896, but his discovery was ignored by the Institut Pasteur.

It was then rediscovered in 1928 by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming, who noticed a halo of inhibition of bacterial growth around a contaminant blue-green mould on a Staphylococcus culture. Fleming concluded that the mould was releasing a substance that was inhibiting bacterial growth. He grew a pure culture and discovered that the fungus was Penicillium notatum — he later named the bacterial inhibiting substance penicillin after the Penicillium notatum that released it. Fleming was convinced after conducting some more experiments that penicillin could not last long enough in the human body to kill pathogenic bacteria and stopped studying penicillin after 1931. It would prove to be the discovery that changed modern medicine. In 1939, Howard Walter Florey and a team of researchers at Oxford University made significant progress in showing Penicillin's ability to kill infectious bacteria which eventually led to commercial production of penicillin.

[laurel-hardy.livejournal.com]

I suppose I can forgive the Institut Pasteur, they probably got all involved in trying to convince doctors to wash their hands between patients. Which may not all have been human. Yeah, let's pine for the good ol' days, when if there was a doctor at all he probably tendend farm animals and may have been mucking about in a barn before heading off to help Mrs. deliver her baby. And to think they sneered at midwives. It wasn't that long ago that for most there was no such thing as a hospital, people were born and died at home at got most of their patching up there. My 90 year old aunt has told me of being quarantined as a little girl for scarlet fever, her mother staying with her to nurse her, the other kids and her father decamping for the duration. She also tells of attending her paternal grandmother's funeral. Grandma Black was laid out on the table in the dining room of the old farmhouse until the burial. My aunt being small was terrified that Grandma was coming up the stairs to get her and so had a restless night. Now it's not like they were on the frontier or anything, the aunt was living in Cleveland, the farm was in rural central Ohio in the 20s.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

My thoughts exactly. In a land with no swords, you grab the best cudgels you can find.

[laurel-hardy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I'm allergic to penicillin! Got screamer earaches as a kid (both parents were smokers) until my tonsils came out, but before that they pumped me full of the stuff. Blue cheese? Thank you, no.

[mellzie-1963.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the "Magic Blackboard" was

I'm picturing something akin to the old "Magic Slate (http://www.flickr.com/photos/60585948@N00/255617523/)" we used to play with when I was a kid.

[miss-october.livejournal.com]

Yikes.

[chaosdancer.livejournal.com]

It might be polio, too, which tended to strike in the summer. My mother remembered not being allowed to go to public swimming pools because her mother was so afraid of polio. Or maybe just the usual cold and flu season, which was a lot more worrisome then.

Side note: when I was at school at Berea College a couple of years back, I had the job one summer of scanning in all the old notes from meetings of the trustees. It shocked me to see them giving thanks that few students had died of disease one particular year - it had never occurred to me that such things were normal then! Particularly in that population, which was medically underserved and many of the students had never been off their farms before. I imagine they had very little immunity.