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A podcast about the intersection of public health, cultural history, and war in Kansas. School closures, mask mandates, infection waves, front line workers, debates over the disease’s origin, disparities in health care access, quarantine fatigue. All of these descriptions could easily apply to both current times and a century ago. In the midst of the current Covid-19 pandemic, many have started looking back to the last global health catastrophe of this magnitude - the 1918 influenza pandemic ...
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The invisible line that runs through the middle of Kansas City may be an important political boundary, but in 1918, like today, diseases do not respect these human divides. This episode compares the Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO responses to the flu pandemic, including differences in business closures, compliance, and other “social distancing…
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Samuel Crumbine was a physician and public health pioneer known throughout Kansas and the nation for his evidence-based methods of promoting food safety, sanitation, and combating communicable diseases. Many Kansans may still tread on his “Don’t Spit on the Sidewalk” bricks or have heard his catchy “swat the fly” campaign. he also helped Kansas nav…
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Mini-episode: A History of the Haskell Institute
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Kansas is home to Haskell Indian Nations University, today the premier institution of higher education for Native Americans in the United States. However, Haskell has a long and complicated history, including experiencing two deadly outbreaks of the 1918 influenza pandemic (as told in Episode 3). In this mini-episode, we talk with Prof. Eric Anders…
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Just weeks after the March 1918 “first wave” flu outbreak at Camp Funston, the Haskell Institute in Lawrence saw a similar rash of influenza infections. Around one-third of the Native American students were hospitalized, and 17 died. In this episode, we’ll talk to historian Mikaëla Adams about this early outbreak of the 1918 flu at the Haskell Inst…
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In this mini-episode, we tell the story of Dr. Loring Miner, a physician in Haskell County in southwest Kansas who, in early 1918, may have encountered the first outbreak of the flu pandemic. Dr. Miner was a little different than the stereotypical country doctor. Dr. Miner was "gruff" and one who "didn't suffer fools," but he also was extremely ded…
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Did the deadly 1918-1920 influenza pandemic begin in Kansas? While this pandemic is often called the “Spanish flu”, there is a strong possibility it originated in Camp Funston, a training camp for WWI recruits at Fort Riley. We will follow the paper trail to trace the origins of this theory. So how did it get to Camp Funston? To help answer this qu…
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Welcome to Pandemic on the Prairie, a podcast about the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic in Kansas and what local stories tell us about the American experience more broadly. But before we explore local stories, for this episode we zoom out and get an introduction to what was happening a century ago. Why was this influenza pandemic was so deadly, how di…
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