Word: 1870s
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Prairie Godiva. The trail-end towns seemed to be designed with two things in mind: receiving cattle and raising hell. The very names of towns like Dodge City, Ellsworth and Abilene made decent folk shudder in the 1870s. When a drunken cowboy boarded a train and demanded a ride to hell, the conductor told him: "Well, give me $2.50 and get off at Dodge." In a hair-triggered town, Dodge City's cemetery, Boot Hill, became the resting place of such characters as Horse Thief Pete, Broad Mamie, the Pecos Kid and Toothless Nell. Ellsworth was just about...
Cricket at Dartmouth. Here is the surrender of the British at Yorktown, here a glimpse of covered wagons heading West, a brassy photo of Dodge City's Main Street in the 1870s. A picture of a squalid "Bandit's Roost" in the New York of the 1880s turns up close to a sedate shot of Fifth Avenue lined with fashionable carriages. Among Davidson's other exhibits: Dartmouth students playing cricket in 1793, women prospectors on their way to the Klondike, Coney Island in the 1890s, child labor in a Virginia glass factory...
...Iowa farm in the 1870s, life was hard but wondrously uncomplicated. "The farm families were their own lawyers, labor leaders, engineers, doctors, tailors . . . That economic system avoided strikes, lockouts, class conflicts, labor boards and arbitration. It absolutely denied collective bargaining to small boys. The prevailing rate for picking potato bugs was one cent a hundred and if you wanted firecrackers on the Fourth of July you took it or left...
Complete Recoveries. Coxsackie has been studied so seldom that doctors know almost nothing about it. A similar disease was noted in Europe in the 1870s; doctors called it epidemic muscular rheumatism. In the 1880s, an epidemic struck Bornholm Island, off the coast of Sweden; it was dubbed Bornholm's Disease. In 1947, some of the patients in a polio epidemic in the Hudson River town of Coxsackie, N.Y. turned out to have an altogether different virus. The doctors who isolated the new bug named it the Coxsackie virus. The Coxsackie study showed that the virus had many...
...surgery. In 1816, Surgeon Philip Syng Physick was the first American to use animal tissue to sew up wounds. In 1887, Dr. Thomas G. Morton performed the first successful operation for the removal of a diseased appendix. Some other surgeons are remembered for odd reasons: as late as the 1870s, Dr. David Hayes Agnew insisted on stropping his scalpel on his boot sole, and Dr. George C. Harlan, for handiness, held instruments between his teeth...