by Black Death at the Golden Gate- The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague (retail) (epub)
San Francisco had one final humiliation waiting before it would let Kinyoun leave. On the day that he was scheduled to board a train eastward with his family, he was arrested while riding an early morning ferry to Tiburon. A deaf and mute man had come forward with a story that Kinyoun had fired several rounds from a rifle at his boat as it passed by Angel Island, each one barely missing his head and tearing holes in his sail. Police officers hustled Kinyoun before a judge that same morning to answer to a charge of attempted murder. Angry and stunned, Kinyoun testified that he had not fired the shots and instead had saved the man’s life. Marine Hospital Service officers at Angel Island had noticed the boat and wrongly assumed that it carried an escapee from the nearby island prison of Alcatraz. Kinyoun, hearing the commotion, had raced out from his laboratory and ordered his men to stop shooting. The judge dismissed the charge, though the damage had been done.
Kinyoun had come to San Francisco expecting that he would continue to push science forward and help change the world; now he slunk away in defeat, with newspapers gleefully reporting on his arrest as if intent on seizing their one last chance to defame him. As he boarded a train that would take him away from a city he loathed, Kinyoun remained haunted by his failures. Plague was still there, and it was spreading. He prayed that whoever replaced him would find a way to accomplish what he could not.
CHAPTER 9
AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK
The breakdown started as soon as Kinyoun boarded the train heading east.
Joseph White, the man who replaced him, found his calls unreturned by city and state officials responsible for funding the cleanup the California delegation had agreed to in Washington. State health officials who had been placed under White’s command began finding novel excuses to disobey orders, going so far as to claim that removing furniture from a building suspected of housing a plague victim was against city regulations. The Chinese Six Companies, meanwhile, dodged all efforts to bring in independent physicians to examine residents of Chinatown, though it had promised the Marine Hospital Service its full cooperation if Kinyoun was removed from his post. Every morning, White requested that the organization identify all sick residents of Chinatown for inspection by a doctor employed by his agency. The district’s population of 15,000 would result in a sick rate of about 150 patients per day under ordinary circumstances, White estimated. Instead, the Six Companies pointed him to only two or three residents with minor illnesses, a gesture that White took as a greater insult than an outright denial of his request.
Though he had just taken command on Angel Island, White was rapidly losing hope. It was now clear to him that Kinyoun, while a constant source of irritation to the Surgeon General, and hated by everyone in power in San Francisco, had been the only person standing in the way of chaos. Wyman, sensing that the situation was rapidly deteriorating, assured White in a telegram that he would soon have reinforcements. He was assembling a team of the best officers in the Service, he promised, and they would arrive by the end of the month. Yet White believed that even with an infinite number of doctors at his disposal, the problem would not change. The gulf between the Chinese and white health officers was too large, with too much distrust on both sides, to ever be breached.
“I yesterday inspected rooms in the cellars of some of the worst districts, which I do not believe to have been entered before by any white man in many months, and some of these rooms, partially underground and separated from either street or alley by flanking rooms on either side, are absolutely devoid of light and ventilation, are filthy beyond anything that may be imagined by the Caucasian mind, and filled with a stifling odor suggesting months of opium smoking, with occasional urination upon the floors. I can best describe it by saying that it is the accentuated odor of a rat den,” White wrote in a long letter to Wyman admitting he was overwhelmed by the amount of work that needed to be done. “This letter being only one for the information of the Bureau, I shall speak quite plainly about this matter, both as to inspection and disinfection, and say that from present appearances the thorough cleansing of Chinatown appears to be a lost physical impossibility, and that I am certain of the absolute dishonesty of the Chinese in the promises that they have made, and well satisfied that they will fulfill nothing that they can possibly avoid. I shall in this instance, as I have ever done, perform the duties assigned to me to the best of my ability, but feel that it is only justice not only to myself but to the Service to say that I do not feel hopeful regarding the results.”
Wyman alerted White in the following days that he would soon have a deputy by the name of Rupert Blue, a thirty-two-year-old physician in the Marine Hospital Service who was then en route from Milwaukee. White did not know it, but Blue was neither Wyman’s first or second choice to fill the role. Wyman had selected him only after other candidates had threatened to leave the Service rather than take on the impossible task. For Blue, the move would amount to something of a return voyage: he had worked in San Francisco briefly as a quarantine officer five years earlier, and had more familiarity with the city and its intricacies than most men in the Service. Despite that experience, Blue carried a reputation for laziness that soon reached White and soured him on a man he had never personally met.
Already feeling like he was leading a losing war, White wrote a blunt letter to Wyman requesting that Blue be replaced before he set foot in San Francisco. “The difficulties here are so great that never before in our history has there been a greater need for tactful and forceful officers and mediocrity is I think clean out of place,” he wrote. “I learn that Blue has [no tact] and is inert beside. I don’t know Blue and have not a reason under Heaven to dislike him, so there is nothing personal in this matter at all, but I am fully persuaded that he cannot take the lead in this matter now or in the future.”
For all of his life, Rupert Blue had shouldered the weight of not meeting other people’s expectations. The sixth of eight siblings, Blue was born on May 30, 1868, into a prominent Southern family still adrift three years after the end of the Civil War. His father, John Gilchrist Blue, had been a member of the North Carolina delegation that voted to secede from the Union, and then served as a colonel in the Confederate Army, fighting alongside Robert E. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia until the surrender at Appomattox. When Rupert was three the family moved to Marion, South Carolina, in order to be closer to the home of Rupert’s mother, Annie Maria Evans, whose family included past governors of the state. Thanks to their influence, the Blues were given a second start. John Gilchrist Blue settled his family into a 300-acre plantation he named Bluefields and opened a law practice. Before long he was elected to the South Carolina state legislature, which made him one of the most recognizable people in Marion.
Rupert grew up in a town small enough that everyone knew who his parents were, and in a family prominent enough that any misstep would be recounted in each one of the stately Greek Revival mansions that lined Marion’s streets. A natural introvert with a slight stammer, he retreated from the watchful eyes of his neighbors and into the open expanses of the plantation, where along with his siblings he would sneak into the fields early in the morning and burst open melons with his fists before devouring them bare-handed. Though physically strong, growing to stand above six feet tall with a wide boxer’s build that he would put to use in the ring later in life, Rupert could more often than not be found holed up alone with a book. The boy feasted on history, devouring any account of ancient Rome he could get his hands on, and soon developed a lifelong fascination with the military campaigns of Napoleon. Those reading sessions were as close as he would come to military service, however, and he chose to stand in the shadows as his older brother, Victor, took up a family tradition that included a grandfather who had served as a colonel in the War of 1812 and great-grandfathers who fought on opposing sides in the Revolutionary War.
It was soon clear that Victor was everything that Rupert was not. Though only two years apart, the boys seemed cut from different stone. Where Victor was ou
tgoing, Rupert retreated; where Rupert was a great listener, Victor was bombastic, expecting that his natural charm would smooth over any wrinkles that life threw at him. Victor soon became “the family paragon, and entirely worthy of the great love his parents, brothers and sisters bore him,” his sister Kate Lilly once wrote. “Rupert is very different. He just cannot stand on the street corner and give the glad hand to somebody he might have gone to school with.”
Victor’s decision to enter the military only brought him closer to his father, cementing his status as the favorite son. Rupert, indifferent to the pageantry of rank in the service, searched for another way to make a mark. He found it in the rapidly professionalizing world of medicine. The nation was growing and industrializing, and a new class of doctor was needed to care for it.
Smart young men were filling the halls of the hundreds of medical schools sprouting up across the country, drawn as much by the prospect of opening a lucrative private practice as by the promise of healing the sick. While the students received some exposure to the new sciences of bacteriology and immunology, most were content to become what was then known as a commercial physician, their degree essentially functioning as a pass that allowed them to set up a small general practice and be their own boss.
The boomtown nature of the field naturally brought uneven results. “These enterprises—for the most part, they can be called schools or institutions only by courtesy—were frequently set up regardless of opportunity or need, in small towns as readily as in large, and at times, almost in the heart of the wilderness,” noted the Atlantic in a 1910 article about the transformation of medical education then happening in America. “Nothing was really essential but professors . . . little or no investment was therefore involved. A hall could be cheaply rented, and rude benches were inexpensive. Janitor service was unknown and is even now relatively rare. Occasional dissections in time supplied a skeleton—in whole or in part—and a box of odd bones. Other equipment there was practically none.”
Rupert enrolled in a small medical school in Latta, South Carolina, studying what was then known as practical pharmacy. Despite a distance of just eleven miles from Marion—a length he could walk in a day if it came to it—he was painfully homesick, spending solitary nights in his boardinghouse room dreaming of the comfortable confines of Bluefields. He attempted to show a brave face to his family, unwilling to fall short once again of the standard that Victor had set. “Thanks to a nature that is cosmopolitan, I am content to live anywhere,” he wrote in a letter, full of the bluster of a young man away from home for the first time.
That Christmas, his father suffered a heart attack, brought on by years of heavy tobacco use and the lingering damage from a childhood bout of rheumatic fever. Rupert rushed home to be at his side, and remained there until he died on January 6, 1889. His death changed something in Rupert, then just twenty-one years old. With his mother and two older unmarried sisters left with few resources and little income, he realized that there was no longer any place for boyhood. He vowed to provide for them as well as possible, in ways that Victor, whose military service flung him around the world, could not.
Rupert entered the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, determined to become a higher caliber of doctor, capable of commanding both money and respect. He willed himself to compete, wringing out the last of his retiring nature and replacing it with a sense of purpose that had long been lacking. He masked his newfound determination under the façade of a polite Southern gentleman, though his letters home left little doubt as to his new life’s direction. “I will not assimilate the vices of others,” he wrote to his sister Kate. “If I am spared to good health I can accomplish something for I have the will & the ambition.”
Money remained so tight that in his letters home he crammed as many words onto a single sheet of paper as he could, not only filling the margins but sometimes flipping it sideways and continuing to write lengthwise until no blank spot was left. His lack of funds made courting a woman an impossibility, an embarrassment that he tried to hide from wealthier classmates. When fellow students assumed that a photo of his sister Kate hanging in his room was his girlfriend, Rupert readily went along with the ruse until “sophisticated-eyed Joe Guthrie detected the resemblance and gave the deception away,” he wrote in a letter home. After two years, he moved farther north to Baltimore to enroll in the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the first public medical school in the country and one of the few that he could afford. Never a prodigy, Rupert got through the demanding program by grit alone, holing up in his room with wads of tobacco and devoting every moment to mastering the material. “I am working like a Trojan,” he wrote in a letter home. “There is so much to learn.”
In those lonely hours of study, Rupert slowly developed an ambition to become something greater than the common physician he had first imagined himself, focused more on the bottom line than on his patients’ health. He had willed himself to get through medical school, and he did not want to feel that the effort was wasted. Victor was rising through the ranks of the military, and Rupert was determined not to be left behind again. The day after his graduation, he wrote a letter to Kate in which he spelled out the kind of doctor he hoped to be. “I begin my professional career today with perfect cognizance of the many responsibilities that rest upon my shoulders. When I listened to the valedictory address I mentally determined that I should ever be found on the side of the right—let the consequences be as they may.”
He soon found a venue that supplied not only a way to provide for his family but the excitement that he had longed for as a boy. Upon graduation, he applied to the Marine Hospital Service, thrilled at the prospect of traveling to exotic locations and treating illnesses that he had only read about. “Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world,” Hans Zinsser would later write in his influential Rats, Lice and History, a 1935 tract which described the state of the medical profession around the turn of the twentieth century. “The dragons are all dead, and the lance grows rusty in the chimney corner. Wars are exercises in ballistics, chemical ingenuity, administration, hard physical labour, and long-distance mass murder. . . . However secure and well-regulated civilized life may become, bacteria, protozoa, viruses, infected fleas, lice, ticks, mosquitoes, and bedbugs will always lurk in the shadows ready to pounce when neglect, poverty, famine, or war lets down the defenses.”
Like Victor, Rupert was ready to travel the world and serve his country; unlike his brother, however, Rupert’s purpose was to heal rather than to hurt. He soon learned that he was one of only four candidates to gain acceptance into the Service that year. He received an annual salary of $1,800—equivalent to roughly $50,000 in today’s dollars—and began sending a hefty portion of every paycheck home to his mother and sisters. As he donned his dark gray Service uniform for the first time, he saw in his reflection the man he had always wanted to be.
One of his first postings sent him to investigate an outbreak of yellow fever in Galveston, Texas. The bustling coastal city sat on an island jutting into the Gulf of Mexico, separated from the mainland by a short bridge that connected the Texas of sagebrush and cowboys with the wider modern world. Over forty-five steamship lines provided direct connections to destinations ranging from New York to Europe, funneling people and goods into the busiest cotton port in the nation. Electric streetcars ran down its broad streets, passing ornate mansions. A jumble of nationalities and languages enlivened its stores and restaurants, creating a society so cosmopolitan that the New York Herald dubbed the city “New York on the Gulf.”
It took weeks for Rupert to acclimate to the fast pace of the West, so different from the cotton fields of home. Yet he soon found a welcome diversion: a young actress by the name of Juliette Downs, the daughter of a prominent railroad executive, who looked past Rupert’s lack of money and devotion to his work and saw a life of adventure traveling the globe alongside him. The pair wed in 1895, and not long afterward left for a posting in San Franci
sco, where they settled into a barrack on Angel Island. A winter rainstorm turned half of the island into mud, prompting Rupert to put Juliette up in a hotel in the city while he roughed it alone. For the first time in what would soon become a pattern in his life, he found his mind torn between his professional duty and concern about his young wife’s increasing unhappiness as she faced the realities of a serviceman’s life for which she was ill-prepared. His supervisors at Angel Island noticed that Blue’s attention often seemed to be elsewhere. While he demonstrated diligence and tact on the job, he was still “somewhat disposed to be hurried,” noted an officer in an early job evaluation.
Rupert was next transferred to Portland, Oregon, where to bring in extra money he took a side job as associate editor of the Medical Sentinel, a publication that billed itself as “The Local Journal of the Doctors of the Pacific Northwest.” But even with a second source of income there was never enough cash at the end of the day. The pressure of supporting Juliette’s tastes while also sending money home to his sisters and mother weighed heavily on his mind. “Ask mother if she can get along until May 30th or June 1 without a remittance,” he wrote his sister Kate on yellow letterhead. “I promised Victor to send funds right away to her, but my finances are exceedingly low.”
