November 01, 2006
San Francisco in 1891
Written by Annie Haskell (one of the people Stacy is learning about in her dissertation work)
We, some of us, watched our baby lie, sick and feverish and heard with sinking heart the doctor say: "The child needs fresh air; the house is full of sewer gas; boil the water before drinking, it is a mass of microbes; boil the milk, there is danger of tuberculosis." Then each month we dreaded the rent bill for the sewer-haunted house; we fled before the collector for the microbe water, and we worried about money to pay for the tuberculosis milk.
Kaweah Commonwealth, 2(8), page 2, January 10, 1891
