Paul Julian Weindling
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198206910
- eISBN:
- 9780191677373
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206910.003.0025
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Confident in an imminent German victory in 1918, Prussia's medical department planned elaborate sanitary measures on the extended frontiers. The returning troops and civilians were to undergo a ...
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Confident in an imminent German victory in 1918, Prussia's medical department planned elaborate sanitary measures on the extended frontiers. The returning troops and civilians were to undergo a rigorous medical regime of smallpox vaccination, delousing, disinfection of clothing and possessions, and twenty-eight days' quarantine at a border station, followed by medical examination for tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases on arrival at their final destination. Demobilization, the realignment of borders, and population transfers generated immense sanitary upheavals. German bacteriologists accused the Poles of destroying the German epidemiological defences, and of mounting a crude form of human biological warfare — by deporting ethnic Germans who were infected with typhus into Germany without any effort to delouse them. After World War I, hydrocyanic acid gas was deployed for pest control. Cremation and Zyklon gas were components of a new state-regulated and technological approach to public health, which conserved natural and financial resources.Less
Confident in an imminent German victory in 1918, Prussia's medical department planned elaborate sanitary measures on the extended frontiers. The returning troops and civilians were to undergo a rigorous medical regime of smallpox vaccination, delousing, disinfection of clothing and possessions, and twenty-eight days' quarantine at a border station, followed by medical examination for tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases on arrival at their final destination. Demobilization, the realignment of borders, and population transfers generated immense sanitary upheavals. German bacteriologists accused the Poles of destroying the German epidemiological defences, and of mounting a crude form of human biological warfare — by deporting ethnic Germans who were infected with typhus into Germany without any effort to delouse them. After World War I, hydrocyanic acid gas was deployed for pest control. Cremation and Zyklon gas were components of a new state-regulated and technological approach to public health, which conserved natural and financial resources.
Scott Christianson
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520255623
- eISBN:
- 9780520945616
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520255623.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
Five months after the enactment of Nevada's Humane Execution Law, prosecutors identified a crime with all the makings of a ready-made test case. It occurred on the evening of August 21, 1921 in Mina, ...
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Five months after the enactment of Nevada's Humane Execution Law, prosecutors identified a crime with all the makings of a ready-made test case. It occurred on the evening of August 21, 1921 in Mina, a tiny copper mining boomtown gone bust, when Tom Quong Kee, a seventy-four-year-old laundryman and nominal member of the Bing Kung Tong, was shot dead. The suspects were two Chinese men, Hughie Sing and Gee Jon, who were convicted by a jury convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to die by lethal gas. In the end, Hughie Sing was spared, but not Gee Jon, who went on to become the first person in the world to be legally executed by lethal gas. Hydrocyanic acid was introduced into the lethal chamber, killing Gee Jon. Word that Americans had become the first to use the gas chamber to execute a human being flashed across the world, including Germany where the right-wing Bavarian radical Adolf Hitler was awaiting trial at the People's Court in Munich for his role in the failed November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.Less
Five months after the enactment of Nevada's Humane Execution Law, prosecutors identified a crime with all the makings of a ready-made test case. It occurred on the evening of August 21, 1921 in Mina, a tiny copper mining boomtown gone bust, when Tom Quong Kee, a seventy-four-year-old laundryman and nominal member of the Bing Kung Tong, was shot dead. The suspects were two Chinese men, Hughie Sing and Gee Jon, who were convicted by a jury convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to die by lethal gas. In the end, Hughie Sing was spared, but not Gee Jon, who went on to become the first person in the world to be legally executed by lethal gas. Hydrocyanic acid was introduced into the lethal chamber, killing Gee Jon. Word that Americans had become the first to use the gas chamber to execute a human being flashed across the world, including Germany where the right-wing Bavarian radical Adolf Hitler was awaiting trial at the People's Court in Munich for his role in the failed November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.
