(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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Samuel Jay Crumbine was born on September 17, 1862 in Emlenton, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the only child to survive infancy of Samuel Jacob Krumbine and Sarah Mully Krumbine. Crumbine's father, a blacksmith and small farmer, served in a Pennsylvania regiment during the Civil War; after his capture by Confederate forces he died in Libby prison, at Richmond, Virginia, a month before Samuel Jay was born.
The boy attended the Soldiers Orphan School, an elementary and high school at Mercer, Pennsylvania, from 1870 to 1878. He completed his medical studies at the Cincinnati College of Medicine and Surgery in 1889, graduating at the head of his class and winning a gold medal.
Crumbine worked in pharmacies and went west in the mid-1880's. He got a job in a drugstore at Spearville, Kansas, and practiced medicine there and at nearby Dodge City.
He opened a general practice, sometimes including emergency dentistry and kitchen-table surgery, spanning the years in which "Dodge" evolved from a notorious, wide-open cattle town to a modern western community.
Moving to Topeka in that year, he found his life's calling in the field of public health. This work brought him prominently into the nationwide struggle against adulterated foods and drugs and fraudulent patent medicines, which often involved him in litigation and subjected him to heavy political pressures. At the same time Crumbine carried on a varied campaign exposing the fallacies and superstitions of folk medicine. His work on milk inspection, sewage disposal, and such major diseases as typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and venereal infection drew national attention to his innovative sanitary measures, and especially to his facility in translating scientific knowledge into terms the public could understand.
Early in his career Crumbine revealed a gift for capturing attention. After an exhaustive study of the housefly as a carrier of disease, the doctor searched for a slogan and found it in 1905 while attending a baseball game. When an excited spectator shouted "Swat that ball!" Crumbine jotted down the felicitous imperative, "Swat the Fly. " The catchphrase swept the country and led to a wider use of window screening and the manufacture of the "fly bat, " to which the doctor gave the permanent name of fly swatter. While traveling on a train to investigate a smallpox epidemic, Crumbine saw a little girl drink from a common drinking cup after a passenger with a tubercular cough had used it. His bacteriological tests confirmed the danger of contagion from this practice, and in 1909 he persuaded the Kansas legislature to outlaw the common drinking cup in public places. A sequel to this sanitary precaution was the invention by a fellow Kansan, Lawrence Luellen, of the cone-shaped paper cup and the establishment of a new industry manufacturing disposable products for food service. Another chain of communicable diseases was broken when Crumbine focused attention on the roller towel as a health hazard and in 1911 obtained an order banning it. In each instance, as he noted in his autobiography, "this regulation was the first of its kind ever officially promulgated. "
During World War I, the War Department placed Crumbine in charge of venereal disease control in army cantonments of six western states. After instituting prophylactic measures, he counseled the soldiers, "If a chicken smiles at you--safety first!"
Crumbine served as dean of the University of Kansas Medical School from 1911 to 1919, and in 1923 was appointed medical consultant to the American Child Health Association by Herbert Hoover, then president of the association.
In the latter post Crumbine attempted to lower the infant mortality rate by promoting milk pasteurization on a national scale. He became the director of the association in 1925, holding the position until he retired in 1936. During this period Crumbine was sent by Hoover, then President of the United States, to make a two-year study of health, nutritional, and social conditions in Puerto Rico as they affected children. His report led to a six-year program for rehabilitation and relief.
Subsequently Crumbine acted as consultant to the Save the Children Federation (from 1938 until his death) and to the Paper Cup and Container Institute.
He died in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York.
Crumbine's writings include Graded Lessons in Physiology and Hygiene, with William O. Krohn (1912); The Most Nearly Perfect Food, with Dr. J. A. Tobey (1935); and an autobiography, Frontier Doctor.
He has been ranked as a sanitarian with such major figures as James A. Tobey, Thomas Parran, William C. Gorgas, and Edward L. Trudeau.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Small in stature, wiry, energetic, quick-witted, and modest, Crumbine combined rigorous scientific accuracy with a flair for popularization and an ability to stir public officials to action.
He married Katherine Zuercher. The Crumbines had two children.
