This day in The Record in 1916
Wednesday, August 30, 1916
After two deaths from polio in as many days, Troy city health officer Dr. Calvin E. Nichols tells The Record that “There is really no cause for alarm.”
The past two days have seen the city’s first fatalities during the statewide polio epidemic. Benjamin Streichman of Division Street passed away on Monday, August 28, while Thomas Smith of Stow Avenue died last night. More than 2,000 people have died in this year’s outbreak, most of them in New York City.
“We have the situation as well in hand as possible and are exerting ourselves to prevent the disease from making headway,” Nichols says. He points out that “No new cases have been reported and premises where two cases developed are now under strict quarantine. Conditions are favorable to the restriction or abatement of the disease general.”
Earlier this summer, Mayor Cornelius F. Burns sent Dr. E. J. Hannan to New York City to studio polio treatment in the hot zone. Hannan returns today to report that “the average of recoveries is eighteen per cent” in the metropolis.
A concerned former Trojan sends our paper a copy of the quarantine rules in his current home town of Belmar NJ. Belmar strictly regulates the movements of children under 16, the group most vulnerable to polio.
They can’t leave town without the consent of the city’s board of health, and must submit to two weeks’ surveillance when they return. Children newly arriving in Belmar are automatically subjected to two weeks surveillance.
MEXICAN STUDENT RETURNS
Jesus Castro Carranza hopes he can actually finish his studies and earn his degree during his third stint at RPI If he can, it will be proof that conditions in Mexico have stabilized after years of revolutionary conflict.
Carranza is the nephew of Mexican president Venustiano Carranza. He first enrolled in RPI, before his uncle took power. He was on schedule to graduate with the Class of 1916 but returned to Mexico following a 1913 coup d’etat to join a resistance movement led by the elder Carranza.
After President Carranza took power in the summer of 1914, his nephew returned to Troy to resume his studies at RPI. Jesus Castro went back to Mexico when Carranza’s former ally, Pancho Villa, turned against the new government. Villa attacked an American town earlier this year, leading to a U.S. punitive expedition into Mexico and the assignment of Troy’s National Guard troops to border patrol duty in Texas.
The younger Carranza is “reticent” about conditions in Mexico, but friends in Troy believe his return has “strengthened the impression that Mexico is emerging from her troubled dream.”