Chicago is a fix-it, get-well type of town. When sewage fouled the city’s water supply–causing thousands of deaths from typhoid, cholera and dysentery in the 1800s–leaders took decisive action. First, in 1855, they began to raise municipal sidewalks by as much as 12 feet to escape the overflow of the Chicago River during rainstorms.
By 1871, city officials realized the river was still frequently backing up into the Lake Michigan drinking water, so the river’s current was reversed. That worked until Aug. 2, 1885, when an unprecedented 5 1/2-inch rainfall overpowered the man-made river correction. About 80,000 people are estimated to have died in the following months from using the tainted water without boiling it properly.
Surveying the devastation, the Tribune editorial pages pushed hard for the construction of an ambitious drainage system to end the epidemic. The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal took a whopping $40 million and eight years to build, but it led to a river reversal still in effect a century later.
In 1892, the same year the canal was started, an unnamed Tribune reporter filed dispatches from Europe about how the renowned French scientist, Louis Pasteur, inoculated him against cholera before the writer successfully lived disease-free among cholera victims in Hamburg, Germany.
As it turned out, Pasteur’s process for destroying bacteria in milk by heating it to a prescribed temperature was an inspiration to the Tribune’s first medical editor, Dr. W.A. Evans. As the city health commissioner from 1907 to mid-1911, Evans tweaked more than a few profit-minded dairy tycoons with his highly controversial and successful campaign to pass the country’s first compulsory law requiring pasteurization of milk. The ordinance, which prompted similar laws in dozens of other municipalities, resulted in many fewer cases of tuberculosis and other diseases but higher production costs.
Evans continued his “safe milk” campaign as the Tribune’s first health-advice columnist. His “How to Keep Well” column debuted Sept. 10, 1911. The first of its kind in a daily newspaper, it was syndicated and later widely imitated.
The column had a 77-year run. Evans’ successors included Dr. Irving S. Cutter and Dr. Theodore R. Van Dellen, who in 1945 started the longest period on the job, 32 years.
Van Dellen was a trusted adviser and companion to Tribune owner Col. Robert R. McCormick, especially during the Colonel’s dying days. The doctor started a second column in 1959, “Keep Your Child Well,” which appeared in the women’s pages. Dr. G. Timothy Johnson, perhaps better known as a television personality, handled that column from Feb. 1, 1977, to Aug. 22, 1986. After that, Dr. Allen H. Bruckheim was hired and the column was renamed “Family Doctor.”
Evans explained the column’s distinction upon his retirement in 1934–after 23 years and 1,087,447 reader letters: “When the Tribune, seeing that the general public could be interested in health education, decided to run a column from which no one would be able to profit personally, it was something new. It was stipulated in my contract that I would do no private practice and accept no fees from anybody; that the public would not be exploited; and no one medicine or medical or surgical method be promoted.”
It didn’t come too soon for this newspaper or its readers. The Tribune and other newspapers of the 1800s and early 1900s were filled with ads promoting the health value of nostrums, patent medicines and sanitariums.
Tribune Editor Joseph Medill was not opposed to the medical promotions; his personal files reveal many clipped ads for patent medicines, perhaps because he battled a form of rheumatism during his adult years.
In fact, Medill went one step further in 1879 when he sent a reporter to investigate a chloride of gold cure for alcoholism claimed by a Dwight, Ill., institute and its chief physician, Dr. Leslie Keeley, formerly of Rush Medical College. The report was favorable, so Medill asked a doctor friend to send several hopeless cases to the institute. The health of these patients improved, leading the Tribune to publish a glowing editorial that urged the “gold cure” be further put to the test at the local Washingtonian Home, where “treatment has only been a bracing up of drunkards, with speedy relapse.” When Keeley later spoke in Chicago, the Tribune printed 8,000 words of his text.
Sometimes it could be difficult to determine where the editorial copy ended and ad pitches started during the late 1800s. For instance, an ad in the Jan. 1, 1899, Sunday Tribune showed a bold headline and illustration of state Sen. P.V. Fitzpatrick with what appears to be a newspaper story underneath it. Instead, readers got a testimonial about the value of Paine’s Celery Compound.
Such ambiguity with ads started to end in 1905 when James Keeley, managing editor and general manager, ordered out of the paper all medical ads “whose purpose was to attract women exclusively or which had the expressed purpose of treating female irregularities or female ailments.” This edict developed after a meeting with Chicago physician Dr. Rudolph Holmes, who selected the Tribune as his first stop on his campaign against thinly veiled ads that promoted “criminal abortion.”
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The Tribune was not short on such come-ons. In the late 1800s, Dr. Cheeseman promised to cure “irregularities or obstruction of the menses, whatever may be the cause of those obstructions.” Even in March 1905, as many as 17 similar if toned-down ads might run in a typical issue; by year’s end, no such ads were present.
In 1912, less than a year after Evans started his column, the Tribune launched a progressive campaign to eliminate “quackery and clairvoyance” advertisements from newspapers.
The Tribune set an example by refusing all ads for patent medicine nostrums and closely screened the credentials of any doctor or dentist who wanted to promote services. Yet the paper’s news columns appeared slow to pick up on the trend that year.
On Mother’s Day, it was reported that knitting was an “effective antidote against nervousness in women.” One 1912 headline promised a “sure cure of cancer” from a French physician injecting a copper compound, while a front-page story examined how a “telephone makes people crazy,” with German doctors warning “excitable persons against trying to converse by wire.”
While columnists Evans and Cutter were addressing personal wellness, Tribune staff writers were assigned to the public-health beat in a town that has featured many medical breakthroughs, including the world’s first blood bank at Cook County Hospital in 1937.
Six years later, Northwestern University was the original academic institution to establish a penicillin research laboratory, following heroic work by scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture center in Peoria. The USDA researchers helped rush the mold-oriented antibiotic into use for American soldiers during World War II. Tribune war correspondents such as William Strand and Robert Cromie reported numerous healings from the wonder drug, while stateside reporters covered the excruciating shortage for sick and dying civilians back home.
Peter Gorner and Jeff Lyon won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1987 by writing the earliest comprehensive series on gene therapy, visiting the laboratories of more than 60 scientists in the process. Ronald Kotulak won journalism’s top prize for explanatory journalism in 1994; he wrote two series on early brain development that spawned all sorts of government and academic projects, including a recent summit at the White House.