The last great public health emergency in Chicago on the scale of COVID-19 was the influenza epidemic in the autumn of 1918. Even though 8,510 Chicagoans died of influenza and pneumonia over a period of eight weeks, Mayor William Hale Thompson made no public pronouncements about the epidemic. The city’s response to the crisis was left to Health Commissioner John Dill Robertson, a man distrusted by Chicago’s medical establishment.
To his credit, Robertson gave young men from disadvantaged backgrounds a shot at the medical profession. Ben Reitman, Chicago’s famed hobo doctor, was a former student. Even though Robertson had opened his own hospital, his grasp on contagion remained shaky, even by the standards of the day. In 1911, he gave a speech to a brewers’ convention in Chicago in which he elaborated how beer kills the “malaria germ.” Robertson personally had noticed that Welsh teetotalers in one Kansas town were susceptible to malaria, whereas German residents, who drank bitter, homemade brew, were not. After operating on dog spleens, Robertson concluded the “bitter principle” in bile stopped malaria and “other germs.”
On April 2, 1916, Sachs committed suicide. For reformers and the medical establishment, Sachs was a martyr to grotesque political corruption. Although The Republican, a propaganda sheet literally published in an office in City Hall, sneered that suicide “occasionally has been a haven of moral cowards who preferred the shelter of death to public exposure of their shortcomings,” Robertson took a less confrontational tone after Sachs’s death. Still, he refused to step down.
Robertson wasn’t shy in claiming his role in seeing the city through the epidemic, but it wasn’t enough to undo his image as a political hack. He resigned as health commissioner in 1922 but didn’t leave politics behind. Managed by Lundin, Robertson challenged Thompson for the Republican nomination for mayor in 1926. Thompson held a deranged “debate” at the Cort Theater, in which he berated two caged rats named Fred and Doc. Telling the audience that he had given Doc his first bath in 20 years, Thompson asked the rat if he remembered “how many people came to me to protest against my appointment of you as health commissioner?”
