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Sunday 9 December 2007

More recent history -- Christmas seals

This year the American Lung Association is celebrating 100 years of Christmas Seals® by launching a new Christmas Seals(R) website, http://www.christmasseals.org. "Most Americans alive today have no vivid memories of how widespread deadly tuberculosis was before the 1950s, but it claimed entire families in this country, struck down people from all walks of life, often in their prime."
Jacob Riis, a journalist best known as the author of How the Other Half Lives, pleaded in a newspaper article for someone in America to develop a stamp or seal like the ones he saw being sold in Denmark as a method of raising funds to provide treatment to those without means. Emily Bissell, an American Red Cross volunteer from a prominent Delaware family, took up Riis' challenge. She designed the first Christmas Seal using the American Red Cross proprietary cross and sold them in her local post office. While not a substitute for official U.S. postage, she encouraged people to buy and affix these seals to holiday packages to demonstrate commitment to helping treat tuberculosis. Sales, however, were slow. Leigh Mitchell Hodges, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, came to the rescue, convincing his editor to run a picture of the seal every day leading up to Christmas and to publish stories about tuberculosis. Buoyed by this publicity, Ms. Bissell succeeded beyond her wildest dreams, and the American Lung Association, then known as the National Tuberculosis Society, gained a means of raising funds.

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