Act III

Act L In November 1933, as A Century of Progress was closing, President Herman Niels Bundesen of Chicago's Board of Health revealed that an outbreak of amebic dysentery, beginning in Chicago in mid-August, had spread over the U. S. Already many a Fairgoer, his physician having failed to recognize the comparatively rare ailment, had died and on many another Fairgoer the disease had laid its grip (TIME, Nov. 20).

Act IL In February 1934 a committee of medical and sanitation experts, after an investigation, blamed defective plumbing in the two chief centres of infection, Chicago's Congress and Auditorium hotels, for the epidemic. By that time 721 cases of amebic dysentery had been reported throughout the land and 41 Fairgoers lay dead (TIME, Feb. 12).

On Act III of Chicago's tragedy the curtain went up last week when attorneys for Dr. Clarence Boren & wife of Marinette, Wis., both of whom had stayed at the Congress Hotel and had contracted dysentery, filed the first suit resulting from the epidemic. It asked $300,000 damages each from Dr. Bundesen and the Congress. The charge : To protect his reputation and its financial interests Dr. Bundesen and the hotel had "wilfully and wantonly" sup pressed news of the epidemic. In defense, publicity-loving Dr. Bundesen pointed only to the following statement by Dr. Roscoe R. Spencer of the U. S. Public Health Service : "Dr. Bundesen and the Board of Health are to be congratulated on the promptness, aggressiveness and thoroughness with which the situation [epidemic] has been handled.'' Against Dr. Bundesen stood a report on Dr. Bundesen's actions issued in abstract last month by the Chicago Medical Soci ety. Charging him with "negligence'' and "petty politics," the Society, itself suspected of petty politics by many a Chicagoan, declared : "Physicians of Chicago have never approved the mixing of political ambitions with the serious matter of health protection."

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