by Black Death at the Golden Gate- The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague (retail) (epub)
Still the city denied the danger that it was in. Newspapers did not elaborate on the cause of Murphy’s death and politicians ignored it. Neither the city or state Board of Health took further action to contain the disease despite undeniable evidence that it had breached the barriers of Chinatown. Soon more residents fell victim. Over the following four weeks, city Board of Health officials discovered six confirmed cases in Chinatown, including the body of Yung Wah Noui, a nine-year-old Chinese girl who had watched her mother, Moon Li Chee Yung, die from plague the day before. Yet nothing seemed enough to shake the city out of its complacency as its population continued to grow.
Soon hospitals were no longer safe. Anne Roede, a twenty-year-old-white nurse, fell victim while working in the isolation ward of Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. An autopsy revealed a prominent bubo in her left armpit. As she lay dying, Roede refused to answer a health officer’s questions about her life before she contracted the disease, leaving them with no obvious connections to Chinatown. Her death marked the twenty-first confirmed fatality from plague in the eight months since Wong Chut King’s body was found in the Globe Hotel, though the true number was undoubtedly higher.
Kinyoun’s warnings were slowly coming true, though the city refused to listen. Instead of confronting the disease, it looked for ways to further disguise the danger. As plague spread, Governor Gage and his allies feared that Kinyoun would once again violate Morrow’s orders despite the jail time that would be sure to follow. What the governor needed was a way to remove Kinyoun from his post, silencing him permanently. That October, he saw an opportunity.
The Coptic, a vessel in the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company line, sailed into San Francisco Bay from Hawaii and docked at Angel Island for inspection. Quarantine officers approached it with trepidation. Earlier that summer, the same ship had left San Francisco bound for Honolulu. There it picked up passengers, including a twenty-seven-year-old farmer by the name of Ah Sow, and continued on its journey to Kobe, Japan. As it approached port, passengers alerted the ship’s doctor that Ah Sow had fallen into a stupor. Officers found the man suffering from a fever above 105 degrees and discovered a black lump the size of an egg on his right thigh. The man died shortly after he was carried ashore, becoming the first known case of bubonic plague on a westbound ship that had departed from the United States or its territories. In order to avert a quarantine of its ports now that the plague had been eradicated from Honolulu, health officials in Hawaii argued that rats that had boarded the ship in San Francisco must have infected the man.
The ship itself was fumigated and doused with chemicals, and with a new crew continued on its return trip across the Pacific. Though its captain reported no illnesses aboard, quarantine officers took few chances as it neared Angel Island. Passengers were separated by gender and ordered to go into the ship’s smoking rooms and strip for bodily inspection. First-class passengers found themselves standing naked next to men and women from third-class bunks. Marine Health Service officers went from person to person examining groins and armpits, searching for evidence of plague. Only when every person was cleared were the ship’s passengers free to board ferries for San Francisco.
Complaints about the indelicate treatment were amplified in the press. Passengers vowed to never again sail into the port of San Francisco as long as Kinyoun was in charge of Angel Island, blaming him for the actions of his officers. The Chronicle ran a headline that asked “Has Kinyoun Gone Mad?” At the moment, he was nearly a thousand miles away in Vancouver, British Columbia, on an unrelated assignment. Governor Gage called the incident evidence that Kinyoun’s “disregard for the welfare of the state” had filtered down to his staff. Unaware of the trouble brewing, Kinyoun returned to the city and resumed his post. A few days later, he ordered a Chinese ship carrying live animals into quarantine, citing their potential to carry the germs of plague. Such short-term detention was to be expected when hauling live cargo, and shipping companies often built in extra travel time in anticipation. This time, however, Kinyoun’s enemies pounced. The president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Charles Nelson, publicly berated Kinyoun for his interference, labeling him “a menace to our trade and commerce.” A bill was introduced in the state senate in Sacramento calling upon President McKinley to relieve Kinyoun from his position and prohibit him from setting foot in any city on the Pacific Coast. When criticized by a fellow state senator that the bill sentenced a federal health officer without trial, its author, William Cutter, declared on the floor of the senate that Kinyoun deserved to be hanged for his attempt to ban any outward travel from California. “Even now this man of black and malignant heart asserts that bubonic plague still exists in San Francisco. There is not a day in which Kinyoun may not impose another quarantine on the state,” he said. After a few days of deliberation, the bill passed.
Gage, in his annual address to the state legislature in Sacramento, devoted a third of his nearly twenty-thousand-word speech to what he saw as Kinyoun’s treachery. The number of tourists visiting San Francisco had plummeted in the days following Kinyoun’s short-lived travel ban, he said, while the reputation of the state’s produce had fallen so low that merchants in other states were now hanging banners stating “No California Fruits for Sale.” All for a disease that had never been proven to exist in the state, Gage thundered. “Dr. Kinyoun, who has been so persistently obstinate in his reports of plague, never had any experience with the disease proper, his experience being derived wholly from books and laboratory work and not from practice among victims of the plague,” he said, challenging not only Kinyoun personally but the ability of any bacteriologist to use microscopes and cultures to determine what the naked eye could not.
Like other so-called modern advances that had come out of New York or Europe, the science of bacteriology was suspect in his eyes, another step forward into a future in which an individual’s own good sense was no longer considered enough. Regardless of whether an individual doctor could be trusted with these new and unproven tools, importing the germs responsible for deadly diseases, even for study, was fraught with the chance that they could be used for evil, Gage continued. “Who can tell what unscrupulous or negligent men, scientific or otherwise, might not do while possessing plague bacilli and knowing how to use the same?” he said, the implication that Kinyoun was among the corps of dangerous men all but shouted. Gage proposed a penalty of life imprisonment for any person who brought plague bacilli into the state or took tissue samples from a suspected plague victim with the intent to make a culture from it without the permission of the Governor. If it passed, the bill would silence not only Kinyoun but any future bacteriologist who tried to confirm the existence of plague in the state without being preselected by Gage or his successors.
Gage’s campaign against the new era of science was not over. He announced that he would back legislation that would make it a felony to publish anything that suggested that bubonic plague was present in the state. “The circulation of such untrustworthy publications disseminated the plague scare broadcast, and wrought much of the injury which the people of the State have sustained. No state should permit such an outrage to be committed against its citizens by any man, set of men, or corporation,” he said.
Under his proposals, the whole of public health—from its methods of study to its procedures of examination to its responsibility to report its findings—would be moved out of the realm of fact and into politics, a practice that the Occidental Medical Times, a medical journal in the state, found appalling. “The absurdity and falsity of these statements is most apparent, and the charge is a serious one,” it wrote in an editorial. “If allowed to stand unchallenged, it will destroy all influence and power of medical opinion in California, and render similar evidence of the existence of disease null and void.”
Kinyoun, who stubbornly refused to leave San Francisco until he was vindicated, could no longer contain himself under the assault. He wrote to Wyman, demanding that the Marine Hospital Serv
ice conduct an independent investigation into the existence of plague in San Francisco in order to clear his name and his reputation. “Governor has by implication charged me [with] being accessory to inoculating dead bodies with imported plague germs in order to foist upon community plague scare,” Kinyoun wrote in a telegram. “Great stress now being laid [on] press dispatch from Washington stating that Surgeon-General has no longer any confidence in reports sent by me regarding plague here, as no further mention is made in Public Heath Reports, I [am] being disgraced and discredited.” Wyman responded with a short telegram assuring Kinyoun that the Service had not lost its faith in him despite the governor’s speech, which persuaded Kinyoun, for one of the few times in his life, to refrain from making a public show of his anger. “Kinyoun exercises more self-restraint than I thought possible,” a fellow Marine Hospital surgeon in San Francisco privately wrote to Wyman.
Yet Wyman did not know that Kinyoun had already turned his fire against the man he blamed for upending his life’s path. He sent a private letter to Francis Cockerel, the sitting U.S. senator from his home state of Missouri, requesting his assistance. The presence of plague “has been proven by every test that science demands, and has been confirmed by some of the best bacteriologists in the United States,” he wrote. Now, he said, it was time for Wyman to fully support him and repay his years of service. “My exoneration rests upon Dr. Wyman openly avowing his responsibility for my official actions. This he should, and will do, if he possesses the courage of a man, and wishes to do what is honorable . . . All these years I have stood loyally by the side of Dr. Wyman, fought hard his battles, shielded him in his mistakes, and propped up many of his weak-kneed policies, and on more than one occasion used my best efforts, and not without success, in keeping his political head from rolling into the basket,” he wrote.
All the while, the number of deaths continued to rise. Three confirmed cases of the disease were discovered over the first two weeks of 1901, bringing the unofficial death total to twenty-five. Among them were Angelo Colombo, an immigrant from Switzerland who lived at 5 Lafayette Place, a building a half mile south of City Hall that was more than a forty-minute walk from Chinatown. A police officer on patrol had discovered the man lying unconscious with a high fever, and a subsequent autopsy revealed black marks on his feet and hands and plague bacilli in his bloodstream. With Kinyoun’s urging, Wyman announced that he would send a team of three independent doctors with no federal affiliation to San Francisco to settle the question of whether plague existed in the city. Their findings were expected to be published in medical journals nationally, ending months of rumors.
Kinyoun waited for the public exoneration that he felt was his due, knowing that his professional survival was at stake. He was at war with everyone in California, he wrote in a letter to an East Coast friend, and could only console himself with thinking that his enemies would receive their punishments in the end. “I believe that the old Jewish law is right,” he wrote. “We know surely, that if we transgress the law of nature we pay the penalty, and if you do someone wrong, the same will be meted out to you in the end. While I do not wish to visit retribution upon those who have been so short-sighted as to cause innocent people to suffer, I am sure that such will occur sooner or later.”
CHAPTER 8
AN INFAMOUS COMPACT
The room was filled with empty seats. On January 26, 1901, three graying scientists stared out into an elegant ballroom at the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco. The men had traveled across the continent, having been appointed by officials in Washington to serve on a commission “for the purpose of ascertaining the existence or non-existence of bubonic plague in the city of San Francisco.” As a show of the transparency of their inquiry, they had pledged to hold open meetings at the hotel every morning at eleven o’clock, where anyone with information to share or an interest in the proceedings could take a seat. As their first meeting began, they gazed out upon only a handful of spectators.
Sitting at a long table in the front of the room were Simon Flexner, a professor of pathology at the University of Pennsylvania, Frederick Novy, an assistant professor of bacteriology at the University of Michigan, and Lewellys Barker, a professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago. All had had firsthand experience of the disease in India. Flexner and Barker, in addition, had independently sailed to the Philippines and Hong Kong and evaluated the methods doctors used in treating plague victims there. Though he did not have a personal relationship with any of the men, Kinyoun was well aware of their professional reputations and considered them his peers. Had he chosen a life of academic study over the treatment of patients in the Marine Hospital Service, he could have very well been sitting in their spots, his rough edges perhaps sanded away by the assurance that he was respected.
As the lone bacteriologist in the group, it was Novy who instead represented the coming age of laboratory science. Kinyoun hoped that the man’s high reputation and professional air would make the commission’s findings unassailable, even as Novy followed the same techniques and procedures that he had followed in his laboratory on Angel Island. Privately, Novy had his doubts. “The Governor of California denies the existence of the disease in San Francisco,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, Grace, shortly after arriving in the city. “The press and people are unanimously against the idea that plague exists here . . . The newspapers and governor feel that they must not be guided by bacteriological evidence. They will in the end lambaste us just as they have done to Kinyoun should we find plague.”
The presence of more outsiders was the last thing Governor Gage wanted. Before the commission members arrived, the Occidental Medical Times, the most powerful medical journal on the West Coast, announced that doctors outside San Francisco considered their work above reproach and were prepared to accept their findings without question. “They are men whose knowledge and integrity are beyond impeachment by the chief executive or the newspapers of this state, and we trust that their verdict will settle for all times the most disgraceful, most pitiable, and the most humiliating chapter in the medico-political history of California,” it noted in an editorial. The commission members, meanwhile, were determined not to make the same mistakes as Kinyoun and focused on presenting a humble, open face to the city. “We are now at work, seeking only the truth,” Barker said during his first meeting with the press.
Governor Gage had tried to stifle the inquiry before it began. After officials in Washington named the commission officers, he sent a wire to President McKinley complaining that he had not been allowed a hand in selecting its members. “I hope that in this matter of vital interest to the people of California there is no intentional discourtesy,” he wrote. Unable to pack it with doctors he considered allies, the governor announced that he would not accept the commission’s findings unless they could produce living patients with the disease, a feat that had long eluded Kinyoun. When the commission members arrived in San Francisco and began searching for laboratory space, Governor Gage ordered the president of the University of California to deny them use of facilities on campus and refused to meet with them in person, believing that by denying them recognition he could undercut their authority. The doctors were forced to turn an empty office in City Hall into a makeshift laboratory, purchasing microscopes and other vital equipment on the fly. Though Kinyoun offered supplies and assistance, the commission officers rejected them, not wanting the appearance of association that could later be used to cast doubt on their work. The small room in City Hall was soon packed with instruments, leaving no suitable space for autopsies. In the coming weeks, the men had to conduct the procedures in funeral homes and in the rooms where bodies were found.
Their laboratory complete, the doctors took their first tour of Chinatown, accompanied by police officers. The district was “shockingly unsanitary,” they would later write. Its “rooms are small; they are often entirely devoid of light or means of ventilation . . . many of them are filthy; some of them, especially those situated in bas
ements, are damp and emit a foul stench.” Prostitution was rife, allowing venereal disease to spread without constraint. Yet even so, they noted with grim irony, the rooms in which the prostitutes lived were “on the whole, more wholesome in some regards [such as] air space, light, ventilation and cleanliness than those of the other inhabitants of the district.”
On their tenth day in San Francisco, they found their first plague victim. The body of Chu Ah Chon, a forty-four-year-old actor, was discovered in a room above a theater at 814 Washington Street and carted to a nearby undertaker’s shop. The commission members examined the corpse in a dimly lit back room. Large bluish spots, a sign of internal bleeding that was often present on plague victims in India, dotted the man’s legs, while the glands in the neck, groin and armpits bulged. Typically, such clear evidence of plague would have pressed the doctors into conducting an immediate autopsy. Yet owing to the protests of their Chinese interpreter, who voiced his revulsion at any form of bodily mutilation, they agreed to make only the minimal incisions required to take tissue samples. They rushed the material back to their City Hall laboratory, where Novy, like Kinyoun before him, inoculated a guinea pig with cultures he isolated from the man’s body. The animal soon developed symptoms of plague and died a few days later, confirming that Chu was the twenty-sixth known victim of the epidemic. “Plague was present beyond possible doubt,” Novy wrote in his notebook.
Perhaps recognizing that the men he was now working with were more willing to respect Chinese customs than Kinyoun, who would concede nothing in his search for medical evidence, their interpreter soon informed them of several people suffering from apparent plague symptoms whose identities were known to the Chinese Six Companies but who had remained hidden from Western health officials. The commission members examined more than a dozen patients, marking the first time that living carriers of the disease were officially recorded.
