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lottiewander.bsky.social

@lottiewander.bsky.social

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Ben Collins@bencollins.bsky.social · 14h ago

This is a wildly prescient story about Chicago's proto-RFK Jr., in charge of public health during the Spanish Flu. He thought beer killed malaria and that bathing could kill you. He had a feud with an actual TB doctor, who insisted bathing is good. He bullied the TB doctor until he killed himself.

Sachs believed that the new administration was undermining patient care by making hiring and contract decisions based on political connections. Thompson and Robertson in turn accused Sachs of being financially extravagant, incompetent, and dictatorial. As Sachs resigned from the sanitarium he had worked tirelessly to build, Frank Billings, one of the most respected physicians in the city, called Robertson “utterly unqualified.” On April 2, 1916, Sachs committed suicide. For reformers and the medical establishment, Sachs was a martyr to grotesque political corruption. Although The Republican, a propaganda sheet literally published in an office in City Hall, sneered that suicide “occasionally has been a haven of moral cowards who preferred the shelter of death to public exposure of their shortcomings,” Robertson took a less confrontational tone after Sachs’s death. Still, he refused to step down.