200 thousand The city with a population was saved from the plague by the idea of ​​a woman

Esther Clayton was born in the current state of Washington in 1869, and her parents soon moved to Oregon. When she was a child, the family’s financial situation was not stable, so she decided very soon that she did not want to live a simple life. When her younger sister was born, Esther made a big impression on the midwife who accepted the birth, so she decided to link her life to medicine, according to thevintagenews.com.

In 1894, he entered the University of Oregon School of Medicine and, four years later, graduated with the best grades of the entire course. She specializes in midwifery and women’s health, writes Changing the Face of Medicine. After graduating from college, she married fellow student Emilio Pohlo and the two took private practice in Portland. At the time, Esther was studying further in Chicago, and a few years later, both her husband and I moved to Alaska, where her siblings lived.

Esther’s brother Frederick died two years later, and she returned to Portland, spending only summers in Alaska. 1911 her husband also died. Esther went to study in Vienna, Berlin, Paris. 1912 she married Portland businessman George Lovejoy, but a few years later they took different paths.

Throughout her life, Esther helped establish American women’s hospitals, wrote several medical books, chaired the Portland Medical Commission, helped establish the International Association for Women’s Medicine, and ensured Portland’s reputation as one of the cleanest cities in America.

After the bubonic plague that broke out in the early 14th century, everyone thought it was over. However, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It still exists today, but the difference is that we know what causes it, how it spreads, and most importantly, the vaccine that controls the disease.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the bubonic plague entered America: it was distributed by ship rats that had arrived from Asia. The San Francisco outbreak ended in 1904, but in 1907. the plague returned, this time the outbreak broke out on the west coast, and Esther Pohl Lovejoy practically rescued Portland in the state of Oregon virtually alone. According to Smithsonian magazine, Lovejoy was the country’s first health official.

Lovejoy knew that the plague was spreading through fleas carried by rats from cargo ships, and he launched a cleanup campaign in Oregon. In Hawaii and San Francisco, several people had already died from the plague, and E. Lovejoy understood that he had to convince the locals that the cause of the disease was not Asians, as most thought at the time.

She invited journalists to walk with her under the pier and showed them open sewers, rotting rubble on the streets, discarded rusty tools, and terrible dirt in general.

When he reported this to the Health Commission, he received support and the matter was referred to the City Council. He advised city leaders to hire rat extermination specialists, to clean and cover the debris, and to protect food from contamination. The city administration has given Mr. Lovejoy permission to receive as much money as necessary to achieve these goals.

At the time, it was common to blame people of Asian descent for the plague, including Oregon state bacteriologist Ralph Matson in 1907. “If we cannot compel Indians, Chinese and others to meet our standards of cleanliness, and if they continue living in slums like animals … even total exclusion will not be too hard for them. ” That was how San Francisco decided, by the way. 1900 a plague outbreak: quarantining Chinatown and preventing news from spreading.

Lovejoy rejected such a version and stressed the importance of cleaning the docks. She asked for help from rat hunter Aaron Zaik, who had experience killing rats in New York and Seattle. He did so well that Mr. Lovejoy invited him to join the Health Commission. To keep the cleanup accomplished, Lovejoy announced to residents that they would be paid a five-cent bonus per rat and provided precise instructions on what to do with trapped rats to prevent their fleas from spreading and how to get them to the city crematorium.

1907 in the end the plague was overcome and it left the western hemisphere again. Portland was the only one of all coastal cities to have a single case of plague and, as Portland Monthly’s Merilee Karr wrote, “Bubon’s plague has not been recorded within a 100 mile radius of Portland.”