Inside the Barbary Coast Timeline
Book characters and settings appear in boldface

1776 - Mission Dolores is constructed in San Francisco.

1847 - American Medical Association formed.

1848 - Explorer and settler John C. Fremont names the Golden Gate.

California Gold Rush begins.

1850 - California joins the Union.

1850s - First use of clinical thermometer.

1860 - Oliver Wendell Holmes condemns quackery.

1864 - Toland Medical College founded in San Francisco.

Mark Twain serves as a reporter for the San Francisco Daily Morning Call.

1865 - Civil War ends.

Louis J. Jordon arrives in San Francisco; establishes office at 211 Geary and opens the Pacific Museum of Anatomy at 318 Montgomery.

1866 - John Andrew Pitman (“Jack”) is born.

James J. Corbett (future world-renown boxer) is born.

1869 - Donaldina Cameron is born.

1870 - Marie Louthan is born.

1872 - A California doctor is named president of the American Medical Association.

1873 - Toland Medical College becomes the Medical Department of the University of California.

San Francisco’s trademark cable-car system is launched.

1874 - Andrew Taylor Still develops theory of osteopathy.

1875 - John Pitman Sr., personal physician to San Francisco civic leader William Chapman Ralston, declines Ralston’s invitation to join him for a swim in San Francisco Bay. Ralston dies; various causes are suspected, including heart failure and murder by poison.

1876 - San Francisco physician Dr. Daniel Coit Gilman becomes first president of Johns Hopkins _University and its medical school.

1878 - Listerian procedures begin in San Francisco.

1880s - Thermometers commonly used.

1881 - Massachusetts Metaphysical College opens to train Christian Scientists in the art of healing.

Pacific Anatomical Museum moves to 751 Market Street.

1884 - On Christmas Eve, Judge Sullivan declares Senator William Sharon the lawful husband of Sarah Althea Hill.

Edwin Klebs and Friedrich Loeffler identify a club-shaped bacillus as the cause of diphtheria.

Leland Stanford Jr. dies at age 15.

1885 - Famous quack “Dr.” John Brinkley is born in North Carolina.

Adolph Sutro begins construction of his famous bathhouse by the sea on the western edge of San Francisco.

1886 - America’s first brain tumor is removed in San Francisco.

President Cleveland, 49, marries Frances Folsom, 21, in the White House.

1887 - AMA fails to reorganize.

1888 - President Cleveland is defeated by Benjamin Harrison.

1889 - Justice Field’s bodyguard kills David Terry, Sarah Althea Hill’s lover, on Aug. 14

Radium is discovered by Prof. and Madame Curie.

1890 - Story of Inside the Barbary Coast begins. Jack saves the life of Prince Li, a child in the medical show of quack doctor Pierre Louthan and his assistant Marie.

Divorce trials of Senator Sharon and Sarah Althea Hill continue.

Compulsory small pox vaccination of school children begins in San Francisco but meets with opposition.

Diphtheria antitoxin is developed in Germany, then in the U.S.

Major East Coast hospitals begin setting up clinical laboratories to provide diagnostic services; until then, physicians did their own.

Pasteur Institute opens in Chicago.

Singer actress Lotta Crabtree begins a 9-month West Coast revival tour; plays in San Francisco at Lucky Baldwin’s theatre.

1891 - King David Kalakaua of Hawaii dies at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Earthquake kills 10,000 in Japan.

On April 27, reception is held at the Palace Hotel for President Harrison.

On Sept. 28, Sarah Althea Hill appeals Sharon ruling unsuccessfully; starts to go mad.

Stanford University opens as a memorial to Leland Stanford Jr.

Ambrose Bierce publishes In the Midst of Life.

William Osler publishes Principles and Practice of Medicine, which lasts as a standard text in America.

Westinghouse standardizes alternating current at 60 cycles per second.

Hans Louthan is born.

1892 - Ellis Island opens on January 1.

On St. Valentine’s Day, Sarah reappears in San Francisco, suffering from pneumonia. A few weeks later Mammy Pleasant has her arrested for going insane.

Josette Morgan is born.

Little Pete is released from jail.

Highly discriminatory Chinese Exclusion Act is extended for 10 years.

Cholera scare in San Francisco.

Grover Cleveland is elected president, defeating Benjamin Harrison.

James J. (“Gentleman Jim”) Corbett knocks out John L. Sullivan in New Orleans.

1893 - Economic recession causes 15,000 of the nation’s business to fail, putting 4 million out of work. But San Francisco begins to pull out quickly due to the discovery of gold in the Alaskan Klondike and troops needing supplies as they begin to transit San Francisco en route to fighting in the Philippine-American War.

Leland Stanford Sr. dies.

Chinese Presbyterian Mission Home (later renamed Donaldina Cameron House) opens at 920 Sacramento Street.

Supreme Court declares the Chinese Exclusion Act unconstitutional.

Colorado adopts woman’s suffrage.

Arthur Conan Doyle kills his Sherlock Holmes character, enraging the public.

1894 - Amil von Behring, Paul Ehrlick and Emile Roux produce and clinically test a diphtheria antitoxin.

AMA convention is held in San Francisco.

Kitasato and Alexandre Yersin separately discover the bubonic plague bacterium.

First use of antitoxins in San Francisco.

Adlph Sutro is elected mayor of San Francisco.

Cremations are popularized in San Francisco because of a growing shortage of burial space in the city.

Strongman Eugen Sandow appears at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

California Midwinter International Exposition at Golden Gate Park attracts 2.5 million visitors.

Boxing title holder Jim Corbett sends his parents to Ireland for vacation.

Fire at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition destroys much of the city.

Cliff House, owned by Sutro, burns on Christmas Day.

1895 - Doctors begin collecting throat cultures for diagnostic purposes.

The great photographer Arnold Genthe arrives in San Francisco.

Richard Beverly Cole, M.D. is named president of the AMA.

Pacific Anatomical Museum moves to 1051 Market Street. Other parts of the museum are located at 986 Market Street.

President Cleveland calls on U.S. citizens not to give aid to Cuban rebels fighting against Spanish rule.

German physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen observes a strange phenomenon in his laboratory that within a short time revolutionizes the medical profession.

1896 - X-rays are put into practice, first in Europe, then in the U.S. William Randolph Hearst and the Examiner run a free X-ray clinic for 300 San Franciscans.

Diphtheria antitoxin is supplied free in California.

McKinley is elected president.

U.S. anti-Spanish sentiment increases; many people advocate intervention in the Cuban rebellion.

Second Cliff House is built by Sutro; the Sutro baths are completed and opened to the public.

Nobel prizes are created; Olympic Games revived.

Earthquake and tidal waves kill 27,000 in Japan.

1897 - State Lunacy Commission is established in California.

Chinatown’s Little Pete is killed.

Michael McCormick of San Francisco patents the male genital cage.

Little Egypt debuts at the Midway Plaissance.

California legislature establishes a state medical school but provides no funds, permitting student fees to be distributed to faculty directly in lieu of salaries.

Bubonic plague strikes Bombay, Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines.

Boxer Jim Corbett is defeated by Bob Fitzsimmons, an Englishman.

Japanese bacteriologist Shiga Kiyoshi discovers the bacterium responsible for dysentery.

Anti-spitting ordinance passed is passed in San Francisco.

$750,000 in Klondike gold ore arrives in San Francisco aboard the steamer Excelsior.

1898 - Spanish-American War begins and lasts five months.

Malpractice becomes an issue.

The Baldwin Hotel and Theatre burns in San Francisco.

Patrick Corbett, Jim Corbett’s father, murders his wife, then commits suicide.

Sir Ronald Ross determines malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes.

1899 - First bubonic plague cases in San Francisco.

Oliver Wendell Holmes condemns quackery.

Aspirin is commercialized.

Philippine-American War begins.

Secretary of State John Hay establishes Open Door policy for China, stressing freedom of trade for U.S. merchants.

1900 - Boxer Rebellion in China.

Kiyoshi develops an antiserum to combat dysentery.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors forbids burying the dead within city limits; no more room.

McKinley reelected president; Theodore Roosevelt is vice president.

1901 - U.S. military rule in the Philippines ends.

President McKinley is assassinated in Buffalo, NY. Teddy Roosevelt becomes president.

Federal commission established to study plague in San Francisco; orders sanitary cleansing of the city.

California Board of Medical Examiners established.

AMA reorganizes.

Bloody Teamsters strike in San Francisco.

Eugene Schmitz, conductor at the Columbia Theatre and president of the Musician’s Union, is elected San Francisco’s new mayor.

Different blood types identified by Landsteiner.

Labor unrest in Chinatown.

Nobel prize for physics goes to Röntgen; medicine prize goes to Von Behring, for his discovery of the diphtheria antitoxin.

Stage version of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz is produced.

1902 - Number of unions in San Francisco increases to 162.

President Roosevelt publishes Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, marking the beginning of an interest in open-air living; joined by John Muir and others.

1903 - Schmitz reelected San Francisco mayor, backed by unionist Abe Ruef.

AMA adopts a code of ethics.

The Wright Brothers fly at Kitty Hawk.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin leads radical wing of the Bolsheviks and advocates revolution in Russia.

1904 - Architect Daniel Hudson Burnham is hired by San Francisco to redesign the city.

Roosevelt is reelected president; brings jui-jitsu instructor to the White House.

First Olympic Games in the U.S. are held in St. Louis.

The Municipal Crib, San Francisco’s largest brothel, opens in the heart of Chinatown with three stories and 90 rooms.

1905 - Investigative reports on medical quackery appear in the Chicago Tribune and Collier’s magazine.

Physician Albert Einhorn produces Novacaine, the trade name for procaine, a new local___ anesthetic.

Einstein proposes his theory of relativity.

First train with electric lights, from Chicago to California.

1906 - Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle about horrors in the meat-packing industry.

Federal Pure Food and Drug Act signed into law on June 30.

San Franciscans collect money for victims of a Vesuvius eruption in Italy.

San Francisco earthquake and fire devastates the city on April 18; bubonic plague reappears.

Pierre Curie dies in a traffic accident; Madame Curie becomes the first woman professor at the Sorbonne.

District attorney William Langdon begins raiding San Francisco brothels.

1907 - Dr. Edward R. Taylor becomes mayor of San Francisco; institutes brothel reforms.

Abe Ruef is sent to San Quentin on charges of graft.

1910 - Halley’s comet appears.

1912 - Police commissioner Jesse B. Cook cracks down on Barbary Coast prostitution.

1913 - On Sept. 13, the City resolves that “no dancing shall be permitted in any café, restaurant, or saloon where liquor is sold.”

1915 - First transcontinental telephone conversation by Alexander Graham Bell in New York and _Thomas Watson in San Francisco.

1917 - California Supreme Court passes the Red Light Abatement Act; police raid and close 83 brothels in San Francisco, virtually shutting down the Barbary Coast.

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