Samuel Crumbine

Samuel Jay Crumbine (September 17, 1862 – July 12, 1954) was a pioneer in public health who campaigned against the common drinking cup, the common towel, and spitting in public in order to prevent the spread of tuberculosis and other germs.

Crumbine was born at Emlenton, Pennsylvania on Sept. 17, 1862, the son of Samuel D. Crumbine and Sarah (Mull) Crumbine, both natives of Pennsylvania. His mother was of German and English descent; his father, who was of German descent and a mechanic, served in the Union Army during the American Civil War as a member of the One Hundred and Third Pennsylvania infantry, being first sergeant of Company H. He was captured by the Confederates and confined in Libby prison, where he died of sickness, his death occurring prior to the birth of his son, Samuel. The mother of Crumbine died in Pennsylvania, in 1902, aged sixty-two years.

At the age of twenty-one, Crumbine entered the Cincinnati College of Medicine and Surgery, where he worked his way through and graduated in 1888. Upon receiving his diploma, he moved to Kansas and engaged in the practice of his profession at Dodge City. While there, he was appointed to the State Board of Health by Gov. W. E. Stanley. Then on Sept. 1, 1911, he assumed the duties of Dean of the School of Medicine of the University of Kansas. Dr. Crumbine was married Sept. 17, 1890, his twenty-eighth birthday, to Miss Catharine Zuercher, of Cincinnati, Ohio. They had two children: Warren, born Jan. 29, 1892, and Violet, born March 5, 1896.

Brick - "Don't Spit on the Sidewalk" in the collection of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, AFIP in Washington, DC

Dr. Crumbine began his medical practice “in rip-roaring, untamed Dodge City during its heyday,” the late 1880s and early 1890s. Fresh from medical school in 1885, he was taken on a tour of the saloons in the unsavory South Side. “I heard peals of laughter,” he related in later days, “staccato calls of the floor manager, occasional whoops of cowboys, and constant shuffling of heavy boots. At one end of the hall was a bar, doing a rushing business. At the other, on a small platform, was an orchestra—fiddle, guitar and banjo. The women were house entertainers, servants or demimondes.”

Dr. Crumbine was the model for "Doc Adams" on the long running TV show "Gunsmoke". The legendary lawmen of Dodge City—Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Luke Short and Bill Tilghman—were his contemporaries. On one occasion, he saw Tilghman through a severe siege of pneumonia. The lawman became one of the few to live to a ripe old age.

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