Pox

by Michael Willrich

  36 NCBOH 1899–1900, 173. “Smallpox in Nashville, Tenn.—Vaccination Compulsory,” PHR, 15 (Feb. 16, 1900), 325. Wertenbaker, “Plan of Organization,” 1769. On Savannah, see “Kick Against Vaccination,” AC, Mar. 29, 1900, 3.

  37 C. P. Wertenbaker, “Report on Inspection of Smallpox at Winston, High Point, and Greensboro, N.C.,” PHR, 15 (Feb. 16, 1900), 324. “Doctors Roughly Treated,” AC, Feb. 15, 1901, 7. W. P. McIntosh, “Smallpox in Girard and Phoenix, Ala., and Columbus, Ga. ,” PHR, 16 (Jan. 11, 1901 ), 47.

  38 W. C. Hobdy, “Smallpox in Georgia,” Public Health Reports, 16 (June 7, 1901), 1253.

  39 KBOH 1898–99, 130. NCBOH 1899–1900, 21. “Vaccination in Raleigh,” CO, Apr. 19, 1899, 8.

  40 See, e.g., Michael Dougherty, “Diary of Michael Dougherty, December 1863,” Prison Diary, of Michael Dougherty, Late Co. B., 13th Pa., Cavalry: While Confined in Pemberton, Barrett’s, Libby, Andersonville and Other Southern Prisons (Bristol, PA: C. A. Dougherty, 1908), 16–17; Oliver Otis Howard to Joseph Hooker, Apr. 19, 1863, in Chronicles from the Nineteenth Century: Family Letters of Blanche Butler and Adelbert Ames . . . , vol. 1, comp. by Blanche Butler Ames (Clinton, MA, privately issued, 1957); Mason Whiting Tyler, “Memoir of Mason Whiting Tyler,” in Recollections of the Civil War: With Many Original Diary Entries and Letters Written from the Seat of War (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 47. Donald R. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants, 273–82. Jonathan B. Tucker, Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), 32.

  41 Col. A. W. Shaffer, “Small-pox and Vaccination for Plain People. By One of Them,” NCBOH 1897–98, 176.

  42 KBOH 1900–01, 79. NCBOH 1899–1900, 13, 21. “The Old, Old Enemy,” DMN, Mar. 9, 1900, 6.

  43 C. P. Wertenbaker, “Investigation of Smallpox at Columbia and Sumter, S.C.,” PHR, 13 (May 13, 1898), 470. KBOH 1896–97, 80.

  44 KBOH 1902–03, 172. “Precautions Against Smallpox,” Columbus Daily Enquirer (Georgia), Mar. 10, 1899. “Vaccination: Ugly Accidents Arising from the Smallpox Preventive,” DMN, May 14, 1899, 3.

  45 Kinyoun in NCBOH 1897–98, 114. NCBOH 1899–1900, 49. Smock in KBOH 1898–99, 149. W. P. McIntosh, Surgeon, MHS, “Smallpox in Houston County, Ga.,” PHR, 15 (Dec. 14, 1900), 3029. KBOH 1900–01, 18.

  46 Washington quoted in Finding a Way Out: An Autobiography, by Robert Russa Moton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1921), 182.

  47 C. P. Wertenbaker, “Smallpox in Georgia,” PHR, 14 (Nov. 3, 1899), 1891.

  48 G. M. Magruder, “Passed Assistant Surgeon Magruder’s Report on Smallpox at Little Rock, Ark.,” PHR, 13 (May 6, 1898), 437. D. S. Humphreys, “Smallpox in Greenwood, Miss.,” PHR, 15 (Mar. 9, 1900), 516. According to the 1900 Census, African Americans constituted one third of the population of North Carolina, and less than one quarter of the population of Tennessee. Census Bureau, Negroes in the United States, 109. See, e.g., “Brunswick and the Smallpox,” AC, Jan. 7, 1900, 4.

  49 C. P. Wertenbaker, “Report on the Smallpox Situation in Danville, Va.,” PHR, 14 (Jul. 27, 1899), 1038. KBOH 1898–99, 135, 79. KBOH 1902–03, see photo between 36 and 37.

  50 W. F. Brunner, “Report of Smallpox in Montgomery County,” PHR, 14 (Jul. 21, 1899), 1124.

  51 C. P. Wertenbaker to Dr. H. L. Sutherland, Chief Health Officer, Bolivar Co., Mississippi, July 30, 1910, CPWL, vol. 5.

  52 S. B. Jones, “Fifty Years of Negro Public Health,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 49 (Sept., 1913): 138–46. See Edward H. Beardsley, A History of Neglect: Health Care for Blacks and Mill Workers in the Twentieth-Century South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), esp. 11–36; W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, An American Health Dilemma: Volume 1, idem, An American Health Dilemma: Volume 2: Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States 1900–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2000), esp. 80; James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, expanded ed. (New York: Free Press, 1993), esp. 16–21; Todd L. Savitt, “Black Health on the Plantation: Masters, Slaves, and Physicians,” in Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 351–68; Steven M. Stowe, Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Werner Troesken, Water, Race, and Disease (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

  53 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; reprint ed., New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 147–63, esp. 163. U.S. Census Bureau, A Discussion of the Vital Statistics of the Twelfth Census, by John Shaw Billings (Washington, 1904), 10–11. Byrd and Clayton, American Health Dilemma, Vol. 2, esp. 80.

  54 Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 162. See Beardsley, History of Neglect, 11–36; Byrd and Clayton, American Health Dilemma, Vol. 1, 355.

  55 Jones, “Fifty Years of Negro Public Health,” 142. Beardsley, History of Neglect, 35. See Todd L. Savitt, Race and Medicine in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century America (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007).

  56 NCBOH 1897–98, 79, 88. KBOH 1898–99, 79, 139. J. C. Ballard, “Smallpox in Concordia Parish, Louisiana,” PHR, 14 (Nov. 3, 1899), 1893.

  57 “Why Smallpox Is Not Checked,” AC, Aug. 9, 1897, 2. C. P. Wertenbaker, “Report on the Investigation of Smallpox in North Carolina and Georgia,” PHR, 15 (Feb. 2, 1900), 216. C. P. Wertenbaker, “Review of Operations in Advisory Capacity in Suppressing Smallpox in Georgia,” PHR, 14 (Nov. 3, 1899), 1844.

  58 KBOH 1898–99, 74.

  59 Ibid., 139, 140. See Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 412–64.

  60 “General Vaccination Ordered,” WP, Dec. 20, 1900, 1.

  61 KBOH 1898–99, 96.

  62 Ibid., 81, 80, 98, 145. NCBOH 1897–98, 35.

  63 “Itching Skin Diseases,” WM, advertisement, Jan. 26, 1898, 2. John D. Long, “Report on the Inspection of a Gang of Workmen En Route from Clarksburg, W. Va., through Washington to the South,” PHR, 61 (Jan. 4, 1901), 1–2. See Wertenbaker, “Investigation of Smallpox at Columbia and Sumter,” 468–70.

  64 NCBOH 1899–1900, 172.

  65 KBOH 1898–99, 29. KBOH 1896–97, 72.

  66 C. P. Wertenbaker, “Investigation of Smallpox at Charlotte,” 140–41. Wertenbaker, “Smallpox Situation in Danville, Va.,” 1038. On rumor, see Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet.

  67 W. G. Dailey to State Board of Health, Aug. 11, 1898, KBOH 1898–99, 63–64. B. W. Smock in ibid., 104. KBOH 1900–01, 107. NCBOH 1899–1900, 158.

  68 USSGPHMHS 1898, 598–99. See, e.g., “Bullitt County,” in KBOH 1898–99, 64–65.

  69 Wertenbaker, “Review of Operations . . . Georgia,” 1884.

  70 Shirley Everton Johnson, “Conquering a Small-Pox Epidemic in Kentucky,” in KBOH 1898–99, 107–14, esp. 108.

  71 Wertenbaker, “Review of Operations . . . Georgia,” 1884.

  72 Wertenbaker, “Report on Inspection of Smallpox at Winston, High Point, and Greensboro,” 324.

  73 Wertenbaker, “Plan of Organization,” 1779.

  74 See, for example, Wertenbaker, “Report on Inspection of Smallpox at Winston, High Point, and Greensboro,” 323–24; Wertenbaker, “Smallpox Situation in Danville, Va.,” 1038. Wertenbaker may have picked up this technique from North Carolina health officials, who in the fall of 1898 had staged a sort of whistle-stop campaign around the state to “preach the propaganda of vaccination.” NCBOH 1899–1900, 13–16.

  75 Wertenbaker, “Investigation of Smallpox at Charlotte,” 140–41; Wertenbaker, “Investigation of Smallpox at Columbia and Sumter,” 468–70; Wertenbaker, “Measures to Prevent the Spread of Smallpox in Georgia,” PHR, 14 (Mar. 3, 1899), 273–78. See “Vaccination: Ugly Accidents,” DMN, May 14, 1899, 3. See also W. C. Hobdy, “Report on Smallpox in Wilson, N.C.,” PHR, 17 (Jan. 24, 1902), 164–65.
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  76 NCBOH 1897–98, 35.

  77 Ibid., 39, 37, 113.

  78 NCBOH 1899–1900, 156. NCBOH 1897–98, 91.

  79 Wertenbaker, “Plan of Organization,” 1779.

  80 M. J. Rosenau, “Report on the examination of dried lymph and glycerinized vaccine lymph,” Apr. 2, 1900, CPWL, vol. 1.

  81 Wertenbaker, “Smallpox Outbreak in Bristol,” 1891. Henry F. Long, “Smallpox in Iredell County,” in NCBOH 1897–98, 210.

  82 Wertenbaker, “Plan of Organization,” 1766, 1770, 1780.

  83 Ibid., 1779.

  84 C. P. Wertenbaker to Walter Wyman, Feb. 11, 1900, CPWL, vol. 6.

  85 C. P. Wertenbaker, Colored Antituberculosis League: Proposed Plan of Organization (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909). “Death, Here, of Noted Surgeon.” “Oral History Interview with Alicia Wertenbaker Flynn,” July 14, 1976, Library of the University of Virginia, Special Collections.

  86 On the history of this beautiful cemetery, see David Mauer, “Set in Stone: The Serenity of U.Va.’s Cemetery Belies a Colorful Past,” University of Virginia Magazine, Spring 2008, 40–44.

  FOUR: WAR IS HEALTH

  1 Margherita Arlina Hamm, Manila and the Philippines (London: F. Tennyson Neely, 1898), 89–95. The Official Records of the Oregon Volunteers in the Spanish American War and Philippine Insurrection , comp. by Brigadier General C. U. Gantenbein, 2d ed. (Salem, OR: W. H. Leeds 1906), 449–52.

  2 J. N. Taylor, “On Pacific Swells,” BG, Oct. 18, 1899, 7. Taylor, “Ready to Sail,” BG, Sept. 21, 1899, 7; “Like Two Worlds,” ibid., Oct. 22, 1899, 9; “Voyage of 26th,” ibid., Nov. 29, 1899, 7. See also “Small-pox Among Troops,” ibid., Sept. 21, 1899, 7; “John N. Taylor, Long Globe Employee, Dead,” ibid., Sept. 9, 1918, 3.

  3 J. N. Taylor, “Cleaning Cities,” BG, Mar. 16, 1900, 3. Jose P. Bantug, A Short History of Medicine in the Philippines During the Spanish Regime, 1565–1898 (Manila: Colegio Medico Farmaceutico De Filipinas, 1953), 103.

  4 Taylor, “Cleaning Cities.”

  5 Ibid.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Vincent J. Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli: The Spanish-American War and Military Medicine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), esp. 1.

  8 Pirogoff quoted in Victor Robinson, Victory over Pain: A History of Anesthesia (New York: Henry Schuman, 1946), 167. See Ken De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp. ix; M. R. Smallman-Raynor and A. D. Cliff, War Epidemics: An Historical Geography of Infectious Diseases in Military Conflict and Civil Strife, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  9 Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden,” McClure’s Magazine, February 1899, 290–91. Arthur J. Stringer, “Kipling: His Interpretation of the Female Character,” NYT, Dec. 10, 1898, BR 835. Roosevelt quoted in Patrick Brantlinger, “Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and Its Afterlives,” English Literature in Translation, 1880–1920, 50 (2007), 172.

  10 Kipling, “White Man’s Burden.” There is a large literature on colonial health in India. See especially David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), esp. 116–58; Arnold, “Smallpox and Colonial Medicine in Nineteenth-Century India,” in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies , ed. David Arnold (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988), 45–65; Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Mark Harrison, and Michael Warboys, Fractured States: Smallpox, Public Health, and Vaccination Policy in British India, 1800–1947 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005).

  11 Hall quoted in “News and Other Gleanings,” Friends’ Intelligencer, Mar. 4, 1899, 180.

  12 Rudyard Kipling, “The Tomb of His Ancestors,” in The Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), vol. 13: The Day’s Work, 128, 170. “Vaccination in India,” BRMJ, Jun. 3, 1899, 1341. Kipling, “White Man’s Burden.” On the idealism and violence of colonial public health, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia (Delhi: Edward Arnold, 1997), 242–43.

  13 “Taft Declares Americans Lead in Disease Fight,” PI, May 5, 1911, 1. For a lucid conceptual discussion of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, see Julian Go, “Introduction: Global Perspectives on the U.S. Colonial State in the Philippines,” in The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, ed. Julian Go and Anne L. Foster (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2003), 1–42.

  14 “Taft Declares Americans Lead.” John E. Snodgrass, “Sanitary Achievements in the Philippine Islands, 1898–1915,” Part 1 in Sanitary Achievements in the Philippines, 1898–1915; Smallpox Vaccination in the Philippine Islands, 1898–1914; Leprosy in the Philippine Islands (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1915). See Christopher Capozzola, “Empire as a Way of Life: Gender, Culture, and Power in New Histories of U.S. Imperialism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 1 (2002): 364–74; Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History, 88 (2001): 829–65; and Robert J. McMahon, “Cultures of Empire,” ibid.: 888–92.

  15 “Origin and Spread of Typhoid Fever in the United States Army during the Spanish War,” MR, 59 (Jan. 19, 1901), 98.

  16 “School of Tropical Medicine,” DMN, Feb. 5, 1899, 8. Reprinted from BS. See Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 462–92. For a marvelous analysis of the anxieties involved in U.S. colonial medicine in the Philippines, see Warwick Anderson, “The Trespass Speaks: White Masculinity and Colonial Breakdown,” American Historical Review, 102 (1997): 1343–70.

  17 Azel Ames, M.D., “Compulsory Vaccination Essential. The Example of Porto Rico,” MN, Apr. 19, 1902, 722. James C. Scott has argued that a central challenge of modern states is “to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.” This process was particularly important in colonial spaces, such as the U.S.-controlled Philippines, where the terrain and its people were at first so little known to the colonizers. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 2.

  18 On public health and police power, see esp. William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 191–233. See also Lawrence O. Gostin, Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); James A. Tobey, Public Health Law.

  19 When the global eradication campaign came in the 1960s and 1970s, it was to be an enormous international effort, overseen by the World Health Organization, with the United States playing one of several leading roles. See Ian Glynn and Jenifer Glynn, The Life and Death of Smallpox; D. A. Henderson, Smallpox.

  20 Whitman quoted in Ira M. Rutkow, Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine (New York: Random House, 2005), 232; see ibid., 217–18. George M. Sternberg, “Medical Department,” in DODGECOM, vol. 1, 179. Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli, 20–30, esp. 30.

  21 Dr. Carroll Dunham, “Medical and Sanitary Aspects of the War,” American Monthly Review of Reviews, 18 (October 1898), 417. DODGECOM, vol. 1, 265. Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli, 32–33.

  22 Roosevelt in “Military Surgeons Meet,” NYT, June 6, 1902, 6. The Military Laws of the United States, 4th ed. (Washington, 1901), 350–65. See Edgar Erskine Hume, “The United States Army Medical Department and Its Relation to Public Health,” SCI, new ser., 74 (1931): 465–76; and Mary C. Gillett, The Army Medical Department, 1865–1917 (Washington: U.S. Army, 1995); Champe C. McCulloch, Jr., “The Scientific and Administrative Achievement of the Medical Corps of the Un
ited States Army,” Scientific Monthly, 4 (1917), 410–27.

  23 George M. Sternberg, A Text-Book of Bacteriology, 2d ed. (1896; New York: William Wood and Company, 1901). Martha L. Sternberg, George Miller Sternberg: A Biography (Chicago: American Medical Association 1920). See Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli, 20–30.

  24 “Officers of the Medical Department of the Army shall not be entitled, by virtue of their rank, to command in the line or in other staff corps.” Military Laws, 353. Line officer quoted in Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli, 4. Whitman quoted in M. Jimmie Killingsworth, The Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9.

  25 USMCSW. For a very thoughtful treatment of this issue, see Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2006), 22–30.

  26 DODGECOM, vol. 1, 113, 169.

  27 Hoff quoted in Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 30. See Sternberg, “Medical Department,” 169–70, esp. 170; Sternberg in DODGECOM, vol. 1, 113.

  28 Hoyt quoted in Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 31. “Dr. Azel Ames Dead,” BG, Nov. 13, 1908, 8. “Groff, George G.,” The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: J. T. White, 1904), vol. XII: 301. Henry F. Hoyt, M.D., “Sanitation in St. Paul,” in PHPR, 14 (1888): 33–39. “Brevet Rank for Gallant Conduct,” MR, 61 (Mar. 29, 1902), 500.

  29 C. P. Wertenbaker, “Investigation of Smallpox at Columbia and Sumter, S.C.,” PHR, 13 (May 2, 1898), 468–70. USWDAR 1898, 622.

  30 Sternberg, “Medical Department,” 176. DODGECOM, vol. 5, 1684. John Van Rensselaer Hoff, “Experience of the Army with Vaccination as a Prophylactic Against Smallpox,” Military Surgeon, 28 (1911), 498, 502.

  31 USMCSW, 167–93, esp. 178. “Origin and Spread of Typhoid Fever in the United States Army during the Spanish War,” MR, 59 (Jan. 19, 1901), 98.

  32 “Horrors of Chickamauga,” NYT, Aug. 27, 1898, 3. “Camp Alger a Pest Hole,” ibid., Aug. 6, 1898, 2. USMCSW, 167–93, esp. 190. Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli, 57–90.