Samuel Jay Crumbine

Samuel Jay Crumbine (September 17, 1862 - July 12, 1954) was a pioneer in public health who campaigned against the common drinking cup, the common towel, and spitting in public in order to prevent the spread of tuberculosis and other germs. Dr. Crumbine was born at Emlenton, Pa., Sept. 17, 1862, the son of Samuel D. Crumbine and Sarah (Mull) Crumbine, both natives of Pennsylvania. His mother was of German and English descent; his father, who was of German descent and a mechanic, served the Union during the Civil war as a member of the One Hundred and Third Pennsylvania infantry, being first sergeant of Company H. He was captured by the Confederates and confined in Libby prison, where he died of sickness, his death occurring prior to the birth of his son, Samuel. The mother of Dr. Crumbine died in Pennsylvania, in 1902, aged sixty-two years. At the age of twenty-one, Dr. Crumbine entered the Cincinnati College of Medicine and Surgery, where he worked his way through and graduated in 1888. Upon receiving his diploma, he moved to Kansas and engaged in the practice of his profession at Dodge City. While there, he was appointed to the State Board of Health by Gov. W. E. Stanley. Then on Sept. 1, 1911, he assumed the duties of Dean of the School of Medicine of the University of Kansas. Dr. Crumbine was married Sept. 17, 1890, his twenty-eighth birthday, to Miss Catharine Zuercher, of Cincinnati, Ohio. They had two children: Warren, born Jan. 29, 1892, and Violet, born March 5, 1896.

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  Brick - "Don't Spit on the Sidewalk" in the collection of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, AFIP in Washington, DC

Life in Dodge City

Dr. Crumbine began his medical practice “in rip-roaring, untamed Dodge City during its heyday,” the late 1880s and early 1890s. Fresh from medical school in 1885, he was taken on a tour of the saloons in the unsavory South Side. “I heard peals of laughter,” he related in later days, “staccato calls of the floor manager, occasional whoops of cowboys, and constant shuffling of heavy boots. At one end of the hall was a bar, doing a rushing business. At the other, on a small platform, was an orchestra—fiddle, guitar and banjo. The women were house entertainers, servants or demimondes.”

Dr. Crumbine was the model for "Doc Adams" on the long running TV show "Gunsmoke". The legendary lawmen of Dodge City—Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Luke Short and Bill Tilghman—were his contemporaries. On one occasion, he saw Tilghman through a severe siege of pneumonia. The lawman became one of the few to live to a ripe old age.

Life after Dodge City

He moved to Topeka to become secretary of the Kansas Board of Health and eventually became nationally known for his work with the U.S. Public Health Service. He is the inventor of the flyswatter, an improvement on the earlier "flybat" produced by Frank H. Rose.^{[citation needed]} In 1905, he titled one of his fly bulletins, which warned of flyborne diseases, “Swat the Fly,” after a chant he heard at a ballgame. Crumbine took an invention known as the Fly Bat — a screen attached to a yardstick — and renamed it the Fly Swatter, which became the generic term we use today. He died in New York City in 1954.

Family

He had two children: Violet and Warren. Violet had one child, Carolyn, who never married. Warren, who died in China in 1918, had one child, also named Warren, who in turn had four children, Peter (wife: Bea; children: Dennis, Wendy, David), Dennis (wife: Maureen; son: Jeffrey), Nancy (sons: Jacob, Matthew), and Katie (husband: Albert Galli, daughters: Christine, Elizabeth). As of August 2012, Dr. Crumbine had 19 living descendents.

Legacy

• The Crumbine Award is given in his honor.

Publications

• Frontier Doctor: The Autobiography of a Pioneer on the Frontier of Public Health

External links

• Article about Crumbine and a photograph of brick with the slogan "Don't spit on sidewalk."