100 years ago in Spokane: News from around the medical community

A Hillyard man was “at the point of death” after being bitten by a tick.

He had contracted Rocky Mountain spotted fever two weeks earlier “at Crescent” (possibly meaning Crescent, Idaho, in Latah County). He did not even know he had been bitten by a tick until he contracted a fever.

When it became worse, he was admitted to the Payne Sanitarium, where he continued to decline.

The paper noted the disease was “seldom found west of the Rocky and Bitterroot Mountains,” although the Inland Northwest was, of course, not very far west of the Bitterroots.

From the fever beat: Another fever-related item indicated that Spokane had plenty of brave young nurses. The city health officer, Dr. John B. Anderson, issued a call for volunteer “contagion nurses” to staff the contagion ward at Rivercrest Hospital.

Nine nurses responded to the doctor’s call. Three were Sacred Heart nurses and six “came from other sources.”

The ward was currently holding three scarlet fever patients after an outbreak of that disease.

From the dental beat: The state examination for dental licenses was being held at the Masonic Temple, and a reporter noted that one of the candidates took far longer to fill out the answers than the others. However, the examiners were content to patiently wait for that candidate to finish.

They said he was the sole Japanese candidate for the dental license.

“We realize that it must take him longer to tell what he knows in English than our own boys,” said one of the examiners. “Just think how long it would take us if we were writing our answers in his language.”