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Kitchen collective. adequate,” Maya Dukmasova reports. 2 CHICAOREADER - MAY ll Dr. John Dill Robertson LOYOLAUNIVERSITY CHICAGOARCHIVESANDSPECIALCOLLECTIONS CITY LIFE noticed that Welsh teetotalers in one Kansas es. Even Robertson’s critics admitted he had a town were susceptible to malaria, whereas Ger- talent for organization, which was badly need- man residents, who drank bitter, homemade ed in coordinating relief efforts. Surrounded brew, were not. After operating on dog spleens, by scientists and experienced public health Robertson concluded the “bitter principle” in experts on the commission, Robertson couldn’t bile stopped malaria and “other germs.” unilaterally chase get-well-quick schemes. Robertson was a gifted political operator. Even if he had wanted to, Robertson couldn’t Alongside Fred Lundin, a former congressman touch anything related to the war effort. Mayor who’d been a patent medicine salesman, Rob- Thompson was under close federal scrutiny ertson worked on Thompson’s mayoral cam- for his passive-aggressive statements against paign and was effective in getting out the vote. the American war effort. Robertson had to Thompson awarded Robertson the plum job have known that Chicagoans who cared deeply of the head of the Chicago Health Department. about the war or were dependent on high-pay- To the embarrassment of City Hall, Health ing jobs in essential industries at a time of Commissioner Robertson gave homeless men high inflation would not have, in all likelihood, in the city-run lodging homes the option of stood for radical stay-at-home measures. The cleaning up with either cottonseed oil or soap epidemic peaked in Chicago after a packed and water. But the Chicago Health Department parade for war bonds in the Loop. under Robertson made strides in expanding Yet the need to protect the war effort did city sanitation, food inspection, water purifica- strengthen Robertson’s hand in shutting down tion, and vaccinations. theaters, restaurants, and other “nonessential” On the other hand, Robertson quickly made gathering places whose ownership normally an enemy of Dr. Theodore Sachs, the head had significant clout in Chicago. Robertson of the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium. threatened landlords who didn’t heat apart- Robertson had not only once claimed that an ments and hospitals that turned away flu pa- sightseeing anti-bathing movement might stop the spread tients. Some of Robertson’s pronouncements, of tuberculosis, he had backed a quack tuber- such as placing a piece of paper over telephone culosis cure peddled by a politically connected receivers, walking home from work instead of The maverick at the center doctor. In contrast, Sachs was president of the taking streetcars, wearing masks, and substi- National Tuberculosis Association, working for tuting handshakes and kisses with saluting, tuberculosis prevention in Chicago slums for may have seemed kooky before COVID-19, but of Chicago’s 1918 fl u response decades. have a certain air of wisdom today. Sachs believed that the new administration Robertson wasn’t shy in claiming his role Meet Dr. John Dill Robertson, the “utterly unqualifi ed” head of the city’s was undermining patient care by making hir- in seeing the city through the epidemic, but it health department ing and contract decisions based on political wasn’t enough to undo his image as a political connections. Thompson and Robertson in turn hack. He resigned as health commissioner in By JN accused Sachs of being financially extrava- 1922 but didn’t leave politics behind. Managed gant, incompetent, and dictatorial. As Sachs by Lundin, Robertson challenged Thompson resigned from the sanitarium he built, Frank for the Republican nomination for mayor in he last great public health emergency in Bathing, Robertson claimed, was a pro- Billings, one of the city’s most respected phy- 1926. Thompson held a deranged “debate” Chicago on the scale of COVID-19 was the foundly unhealthy habit that encouraged infec- sicians, called Robertson “utterly unqualified.” at the Cort Theater, in which he berated two Tinfl uenza epidemic in the autumn of 1918. tious diseases. The problem wasn’t the purity On April 2, 1916, Sachs committed suicide, caged rats named Fred and Doc. Telling the Even though 8,510 Chicagoans died of infl uen- or temperature of water, but the way washing and for reformers and the medical establish- audience that he had given Doc his first bath za and pneumonia over a period of eight weeks, caused “overheating the body,” thus leaving ment, he was a martyr to political corruption. in 20 years, Thompson asked the rat if he Mayor William Hale Thompson made no public “the internal organs without their necessary Still, Robertson refused to step down. remembered “how many people came to me pronouncements about the epidemic. The amount of nourishment.” Robertson concluded Given his checkered past, it’s a wonder more to protest against my appointment of you as city’s response to the crisis was left to Health his speech by telling the story of an Inuit boy, Chicagoans didn’t die of influenza in October health commissioner?” Commissioner John Dill Robertson, a man brought from Greenland to Boston, who died 1918. With 58 reported cases on September 24, Thompson went on to win the general distrusted by Chicago’s medical establishment. of pneumonia after taking a bath. Robertson 1918, Robertson laughed as he told the Chicago election for mayor the following year, with Dr. Robertson was a certain kind of Chicago confirmed to the Chicago Record-Herald that Daily News there was “no cause whatever for Robertson garnering under six percent as a success story. After stints as a telegraph oper- he hadn’t taken more than four or five baths alarm.” Within a week, reality set in. splinter candidate. In March 1931, Robertson ator and train dispatcher, he graduated in 1896 in the last decade. Doctors and newspapermen Because influenza was a threat to the war was knocked unconscious in the Illinois senate from Bennett Eclectic Medical School in Chica- alike portrayed Robertson as a crackpot. “Prof. effort, the Council of National Defense found- during a loud argument over licensing truck go. In December 1903, Dr. Robertson, a surgeon John Dill Robertson Points to Latest Human ed the Illinois Influenza Commission, a task drivers. Never regaining his health, he died at Cook County Hospital and a professor at the Peril, Water,” remarked the Chicago Tribune. force made up of the public health leadership, that October at Dill-Crest, his comfortable Lake American