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
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Sentinel
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