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About Cottage Grove sentinel. (Cottage Grove, Or.) 1909-current | View Entire Issue (April 27, 2016)
COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL April 27, 2016 Cottage Grove Retrospective Offbeat Oregon History A look back at a Sentinel story from 30 years ago April 23, 1986 Expo week kicks off Oregon Trail Medicine; or, How to Not Die of Dysentery Expo ’86 week has begun in Cottage Grove. To kick off the event, local Expo commit- tee members gathered at city hall Monday with freshly-produced buttons to sell and to generate excitement for the week’s activi- ties. Expo committee button chairman Jim Reeves says the proceeds from the sale of the buttons (which cost $1) will be used to help fund the committee’s work toward pro- viding a city display at Expo on July 5. Reeves said the buttons are available at The Sentinel or city hall. Buttons arre also available from committee members or at Bauder and Young, Specialty Tours, Siuslaw Valley Bank, The Baker on Main, McCoy’s Pharmacy, The Cottage Grove Bank, First Interstate and Roud-tu-it. However, he urged residents to buy their buttons early because only 1,000 were pro- duced. “I think people ought to buy them in a hurry because they aren’t going to last very long,” said Reeves. He added that the committee should net about $700 from the button sale. Jim Bailor designed the button logo. BY FINN J.D. JOHN For the Sentinel R Jim Reeves and Mayor Jim Gilroy helpe kick off Expo week in Cottage Grove Monday with the announcement of a button sale. The button sale was one of several events designed to help link the community to the Expo which begins May 2 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Leading up to the Expo, Cottage Grove will hold its own week of POLICE BLOTTER Cottage Grove Police Department 24-Hour Anonymous Tip Line: 767-0504 of the covered area. April 18 Patrol Request, E. Main St. A reporting person requested a patrol car to come by the loca- tion during graveyard shifts due to skateboarders skating on the porch and rails around her loca- tion. Foot Patrol, Riverside Park During a routine foot patrol, offi cers contacted a group of seven males drinking in public. The offi cers obtained no names. Drug Info, Bohemia Park A complainant advised that a male is sitting under a covered area at the location, wearing a black T-shirt and a black hat and doing exchanges with teenagers that have showed up. The sub- ject was sitting in the open end April 19 Abandoned Vehicles/Illegal Parking, various locations Between 1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m., a total of 10 cars were ei- ther moved or cited for illegal parking. Five of the six aban- doned vehicles were moved, and the illegally parked cars were cited for parking in the wrong direction. Locations for these incidents include Carver Pl, South 8th St., 13th St., Tay- lor St., and Harrison St. Suspicious Subject, S 6th St. An anonymous caller report- ed of a male subject appearing to be “tweaking.” The subject CITY BEAT Drug take-back The Cottage Grove Police De- partment is participating in the 11th annual Prescription Drug Take-Back Day on Saturday, April 30. Everyone is encour- aged to check their medicine cabinets for prescription medications that are outdated or unused and bring them to the collection box located in the Police Department, which is available seven days a week in the lobby. Bikes to Blooms On Saturday, May 7 from 8 6 events which includes a “Friendship Relay,” a sneak preview of Cottage Grove’s Expo display at the National Guard Armory, a bicycle rally and a community-wide Expo open house at the Armory on Saturday, From the City's Friday Update a.m. to 2 p.m., six free wild- fl ower tours will be offered at Row Point and Bake Stewart Park. Lane Workforce Partnership open house The Mayor and City Council have been invited to an open house that Lane Workforce Partnership will be holding on Friday, May 6 from 3-7 p.m. at their new location, 1401 Wil- lamette Street (Eugene Cham- ber of Commerce building) in -day weather forecast THURSDAY April 28 FRIDAY April 29 43° | 64° 43° | 66° Poss. Showers Partly Cloudy SATURDAY April 30 SUNDAY May 1 45° | 68° 48° | 77° Sunny Sunny MONDAY May 2 TUESDAY May 3 49° | 73° 47° | 65° Partly Cloudy Poss. Showers CALL FOR A QUOTE had been outside all night, talk- ing loudly and causing a noise disturbance. The subject was riding a girl’s bike and still talk- ing loudly. Another call reported that the same subject approached a complainant when he went outside the get the mail. April 20 Disturbance, N 16th St. A caller advised of a distur- bance that occured at the loca- tion and a male subject broke out all the windows of a mo- torhome with a pipe. April 23 Criminal mischief, Johnson St. The free library at the near- by park had been demolished. There were no suspects or wit- nesses to the demolition. Wanted Subject, Douglas Ave. An offi cer was out with a subject who was wanted for the unlawful use of a vehicle and theft. The subject was taken into custody and transported to the station to be booked. April 24 Reckless Driving, Row River Rd. An orange Mustang was do- ing donuts and burning rubber in the parking lot. The driver was contacted and cited for careless driving. Eugene. Yard of the Week White trucks in the roads The 19th season of the Yard of the Week will begin with the fi rst 2016 Yard of the Week awarded on May 6. The Yard of the Week program will run through to the last full week of September. The City asks the public to be on the lookout for those members of the community that deserve recognition for their efforts to beautify it. Single- family residences within the City of Cottage Grove are eligible for the award. To en- courage more participation and recognize more homes within the community, all recipients of the Yard of the Week must wait two years before receiving the award again. In addition to the attractive Yard of the Week sign in their yard, the recipients of the award also receive a credit for a free month of water from the City and a gift certifi cate from the Chamber of Com- merce good at local businesses. Residents may have noticed offi cial looking white trucks parked in streets over the last couple of weeks running equipment down manholes and workers checking sewer cleanouts or gas meters. The City said the workers are contractors for Northwest Natu- ral Gas and are conducting a “Crossbore” program, which aims to check existing sewer lines and laterals for intrusions from gas line installations. When boring to install gas lines, occasionally the line may go through a sewer line and go unnoticed for years compared to the immediate indication if a water line is damaged. The information gathered on the lines, including video, will be provided to the City at the com- pletion of their project which the City said will “continue for a while.” eaders old enough to remember the Rex Morgan, M.D., comic strip will have a good sense of the glory years of medicine in Oregon, and across the coun- try too. For the past 75 years or so, doctors have enjoyed probably the most prestigious position in American society. But of course, 75 years is not all that long a time. You don’t have to go too much far- ther back to fi nd a very differ- ent kind of medical profession – one shot through from end to end with sadistic vivisec- tionists, skulking grave rob- bers, incompetent dabblers, ruthless dogmatists, delusion- al amateurs – and, of course, plenty of predatory swindlers. It’s hard for modern people to believe, but in the mid- 1800s medical practice had much more in common with religion than science. Mi- crobes were completely un- dreamed-of, and no one knew why people got sick; so every- thing from “too much blood” to the vengeance of an angry god got blamed for things like cholera and malaria. And, as is the case with religious in- struction, followers of par- ticular “sects” could get pretty fi erce with one another. Of course, the Native Amer- icans had their own healing traditions, many of which are now lost. But back when the United States was founded, European medicine was still mired in the imagineerings of Galen, a Roman physician from the second century A.D. who claimed that a balance of “humours” – blood, phlegm, “black bile” and “yellow bile” – was the key to wellness, and that all sickness stemmed from an imbalance in these four simple things. To cure disease, one simply had to re- store that balance by various combinations of bleeding and purging. By the time the Lewis and Clark expedition showed up in Oregon back in 1805, Eu- ropean medicine had barely moved from this position. The main innovation had been a sort of mania for “heroic” ap- plication of the bleedings and purgings – forcing already- sick people to endure the loss of pints of blood and spend hours straining and retching over chamber-pots and out- houses. Naturally, this abuse killed plenty of people who otherwise would have sur- vived. Everyday people had started to notice this, and the respectability of mainstream medicine was probably at its lowest ebb. And that was the kind of medicine that was being prac- ticed by the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition, on its way to Oregon. Promi- nent in the voyagers’ fi rst-aid kit were hundreds of beefy white tablets of mercury chlo- ride, marketed as “Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills” – a concoction of American founding father Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Indepen- dence. The pills were designed to restore a patient’s bile balance by inducing “heroic” purg- ing, but mostly what they got used for was suppression of syphilis symptoms and as an emergency laxative. The men called them “Thunder clap- pers.” But, of course, the lore of medical men like Dr. Rush was supposed to be good for more than just temporary re- lief of constipation. By Lewis and Clark’s time, the effective moral bankruptcy of main- stream medicine was common knowledge and was leading to fresh approaches such as ho- meopathy (“like cures like”) and hydropathy (the hot-and- cold “water cure”), and to the witches’-brew formulations of herbalist Samuel Thompson. And it was those schemes that most characterized the state of the medical arts in early Oregon — especially Thomp- son’s ideas, which borrowed heavily from Native American traditions. By the 1840s when emi- grants started coming out to Oregon on wagon trains, most regular people had little use for mainstream medicine and looked to Thompson’s folk remedies to get them through tough times. The lucky participants in Sol Tetherow’s wagon train, back in 1845, got better medi- cal treatment than most when they were sick, despite wag- onmaster Tetherow’s lack of medical credentials. What he did have, though, was a little book of remedies, courtesy of a Thompsonian practitioner named Dr. William Dains. Everyone who’s ever played the Oregon Trail educational videogame — that is, everyone who attended public school in Oregon in the last 30 years or so — knows what happened in the game when Little Sally got “dysentery.” Despite ad- ministrations of Epsom salts, Please see OFFBEAT, Page 11A Cottage Grove Sentinel www.cgsentinel.com e v @ i t o m o t u A s e i t l a i c e S p Better cgsentinel @cgsentinel #cgsentinel PRACTICING THE ART OF TRANSMISSION REPAIR SINCE 1991 Manual & Automatic Transmission Repair Tune ups 30-60-90K Services Brakes, belts, hoses and cooling system services Muffl ers & Custom Exhaust Drive-train repair such as clutches, u joints and differentials All makes and models. MAINTAINING YOUR VEHICLE AFFORDABLY WE LIVE IN THE SAME TOWN WE WORK IN “ NO MONKEY BUSINESS!” 5A Cottage-Grove-Sentinel together. + = SAVE The more you protect, the more you save. I can do a lot more than just protect your car. 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