CRADLING AUTOPSY SAMPLES from Wong Chut King in glass vials, city bacteriologist Wilfred Kellogg boarded a streetcar. When the driver signaled the Ferry Building stop, Kellogg got off and bought a ticket for Angel Island. Ascending the ramp to board the ferry, he no doubt saw the water afloat with garbage, the screaming gulls swooping down to pluck tidbits from the waves, and the rats gorging at low tide.
The ferry churned north, over waters ruffled into whitecaps by the stiff bay winds. Past the stony outcrop of Alcatraz, the ferry continued on toward to the tree-dotted, tan hulk of Angel Island. In mid-bay, as the ferry slapped over swells, Kellogg clutched his samples more tightly for safety. One misstep could send the stoppered tubes crashing to the cabin floor, and the translucent pink lymph fluid and bits of bloody pulp would be lost amid shards of glass. The mystery of Wong’s death would remain unsolved.
Forty minutes later, the vessel swung around the north side of Angel Island, cut its engines, and nosed into Hospital Cove. Kellogg steadied his sea legs and lurched down the ramp onto the pier, then walked on to the headquarters of the quarantine officer, Joseph J. Kinyoun. Kinyoun’s job was to inspect arriving ships, check the passengers and crew, isolate the sick, fumigate the cargo, and keep diseases out of the country. It was his duty to impose federal standards of hygiene on this port city that, after Washington, D.C., must have seemed like a frontier outpost. Sent to San Francisco from the capital just ten months before, he was a disease warrior. Angel Island was his fortress, and all San Francisco Bay was his moat.
Kinyoun was a “Pasteurian,” a doctor trained in Europe in the new science of bacteriology founded by the patriarch of infectious diseases, Louis Pasteur. He was thirty-nine years old, portly and balding, with a cleft chin and an obstinate streak. He had a tender ego and a gut to match. Kinyoun was unsuited to his politically turbulent job. A public health officer needs the hide of a pachyderm, he told colleagues.1 Instead, he had the skin of an onion.
Conceived on the eve of the Civil War, Joseph James Kinyoun was born in East Bend, North Carolina, in November 1860. The son of a Confederate army surgeon, John Hendricks Kinyoun, and his wife, Bettie Ann, Kinyoun spent his infancy in the care of his mother, who prayed and pined for her soldier husband. The Sunday after Christmas of 1861, Bettie Ann took up her pen to send him all the home news of churchgoing, hog raising, and Negro sales. The centerpiece of the letter was a sketch of their thirteen-month-old Joe, a whirlwind who was just then playing at her feet.
“Our little darling,” she wrote, “…has improved a great deal in walking, and you would be pleased to see him running across the room which he does sometimes twenty times before he seems tired. He has a fashion of walking with his little hands laid upon his breast, which makes him totter a good deal…. [H]e eats as hearty as a little shoat.”2
When the Civil War ended, the elder Dr. Kinyoun returned to practice medicine. His son would follow in his footsteps. Despite upheaval in family life—relocation to Centre View, Missouri, and the death of his mother when he was twelve—Joseph Kinyoun found his calling early as his father’s apprentice. Following his training at St. Louis Medical College in Missouri, and then at Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York, where he completed his M.D. in 1882, he returned to Missouri to join his father’s medical practice.3
While at home in Centre View, he met a young Missourian named Susan Elizabeth Perry—Lizzie—and married her. They were both twenty-three. Within a year Lizzie bore a girl who died in childhood.4
While working with his father, Joseph Kinyoun started reading exciting reports about the French chemist Louis Pasteur, who was exploring the world of microbes. Through the lens of a microscope, Dr. Kinyoun immersed himself in the study of bacteria as agents of disease.
Kinyoun returned east with his bride to continue his study of bacteriology at Bellevue Hospital, and in 1886 he joined the U.S. Marine Hospital Service, the federal agency that inspected ships for disease, imposed maritime quarantines, and tended sick seamen. The service needed doctors like Kinyoun, with a passion for bacteriology, who could infuse service operations with the powerful new science. So the fledgling physician was asked to set up a bacteriology laboratory at the quarantine station in New York. It was in an unimposing one-room lab, up in the attic of the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, that he started to make his name.
A ship landed in New York Harbor with passengers racked by cramps and relentless diarrhea. Local clinicians feared the worst—cholera—but nobody knew for sure. The symptoms were variable and vague; they could mimick those of other diseases. It was Kinyoun’s job to confirm it or rule it out. From the ailing passengers, he obtained samples and prepared slides. Squinting through the microscope lens, he saw a swarm of short, rod-shaped bacteria with hairy little fringes called flagellae, swimming around on the glass slide. It was Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that causes cholera.
This was the first bacteriologic diagnosis of cholera in the United States, or anywhere in the western hemisphere.5 At age twenty-seven, Joe Kinyoun was a force to reckon with.
In 1891, Kinyoun moved his one-room operation to Washington, D.C., to what came to be called the National Hygienic Laboratory, where he gained broad powers to pursue bacteriologic diagnoses of other epidemic diseases. Out of his slides and test tubes emerged the embryo of a vast biomedical research empire that decades later would become known as the National Institutes of Health.
But back in 1899, Kinyoun was simply helping America catch up with Europe, where the original microbe hunters, like Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany, had begun the revolution in infectious disease study. Kinyoun now made a pilgrimage to the mecca of microbiology, studying at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and at Koch’s laboratory in Berlin. From Koch he learned the classic protocol, essentially a recipe for how to prove a germ caused a disease: 1) isolate the germ from a patient; 2) grow the germ in pure culture; 3) inoculate the germ into a lab animal and reproduce the disease; and 4) isolate the identical germ from the test animal. A century later, this circle of proof would continue to govern the diagnosis of infectious diseases. He also learned how to make an antitoxin against diphtheria by harvesting disease-fighting antibodies from the blood of horses exposed to the germ.
When he returned to the National Hygienic Laboratory in the United States, Kinyoun brought with him the European techniques that helped to transform the practice of medical diagnosis, from the ancient bedside art of observing symptoms to a lab science using microscopes, cultures, stains, and slides. Symptoms like fever and pain could be vague and misleading. Bacteriology offered a way to test a diagnostic hypothesis. Its truths were verifiable; it had the beauty of certainty. Or so he thought.
Just after Kinyoun’s National Hygienic Laboratory marked its first decade, his boss cut short his tenure and gave him a job far away. The supervising surgeon general of the Marine Hospital Service was Walter Wyman, a great gruff walrus of a man. A brusque bachelor, Wyman regarded the men of the corps as his family, and he was famed for abrupt transfers. He also regarded his primary mission as the imposition of the police powers of quarantine.6 Now, quarantine duty was calling from the Pacific Coast, and he had Kinyoun in mind for the job.
With bubonic plague now ravaging China, Wyman rightly knew that the Pacific portal of the United States was vulnerable, so he enlisted Joseph Kinyoun to combat it. He told Kinyoun to pack up his family—which now included three children and a pregnant Lizzie—and go west.
Kinyoun was shocked by this abrupt transfer. After running the National Hygienic Laboratory, being sent back to police a port city against disease must have been a humiliating demotion. But Wyman had homed in on Kinyoun’s replacement at the Hygienic Lab, so Kinyoun was California bound. Although Kinyoun was a brilliant bacteriologist, he was decidedly the wrong man for the job of quarantine officer on the Golden Gate. The port, a melting pot simmering with racial tensions, needed a doctor with a diplomat’s touch. Instead, the city got an intellectually acute but autocratic scientist with a bruised ego who expected a level of deference the city wasn’t prepared to give.
On the eve of Kinyoun’s reluctant departure from Washington, D.C., his fellow physicians feted him with a farewell banquet at Rauscher’s Restaurant. Their toasts were printed up in a cream-colored program bound with blue silk cord. Rumpled and stained from the night’s festivities, a copy would rest with his papers until he died.
“Ah, happy, proud America! Thrice happy to possess men of Kinyoun’s stamp, with all their faculties calmly and resolutely bent upon the fulfillment of a noble duty to mankind,” intoned the toastmaster that night. “I wish you God-speed in your journey across the continent to the Golden Gate of the Pacific Ocean, where new fields of activity and new friends await you….”7
After a week on the train with a pregnant wife and three small children, Kinyoun reached his foggy exile. Temporarily ensconced in the plush and gilt Palace Hotel, with its liveried doormen, he found rates that no health officer could afford. It was “the spider’s trap for the eastern fly, and everyone pays tribute to these money sharks, on setting foot in San Francisco,” he wrote to relatives and colleagues back East.8
He checked out. Kinyoun bundled his family into a carriage that clopped down Market Street to the Ferry Building, where they boarded the steamer George Sternberg. Five miles and forty minutes later, the boat swung into a sheltered inlet on the northern shore of Angel Island.
Facing north, away from San Francisco toward the tiny Marin County hamlet of Tiburon, his new headquarters was an eyesore in paradise. The biggest island in the bay, Angel Island was an ancient Miwok Indian camp, now occupied by U.S. quarantine and military officers. Its 740 acres were canopied with oak, madrone, bay laurel, and eucalyptus. Washed by the blue-green waters of Raccoon Strait, Hospital Cove might have made a beautiful spot for a resort hotel, Kinyoun mused. Then he beheld the primitive quarantine station and sparsely furnished cottage. His wife, Lizzie, was appalled. Kinyoun’s heart sank.
The ramshackle wharf and quarantine station’s dirt roads melted into mud rivulets in the rainy season. And if the quarantine officer’s quarters were primitive, facilities for immigrants were even worse. There was no shed to shelter immigrants after their disinfecting bath. So the new arrivals had to stand, soaked and shivering, in the bay wind. It was a cold hygienic threshold to what would become in later years the Ellis Island of the Pacific Coast.
His new island home had few neighbors, no school, and little amusement for the children: Mary Alice, Conrad, Perry, and their new redheaded baby, John Nathan. There was a pier for fishing, but Kinyoun found Pacific fish to be insipid fare. Lizzie had a bad foot that kept her housebound. Too frail for more than one evening out in fourteen months, she was often in a raw temper.9 They were isolated and made few friends. At night, it seemed that they were the ones in quarantine, bound by the sigh of the waves, the tolling of fog bells, and the pulse of the lighthouse.
The bright spot in their island exile was photography: Lizzie spent evenings in her darkroom, conjuring blurry portraits of her children out of the vinegary chemical bath. This hobby kept a kind of peace; Joseph had his lab, and Lizzie had hers.
Kinyoun chafed in the epaulets of his federal public health officer’s uniform, which made him look ridiculous, he said, like a “major-domo” or a “government mule.”10 He’d been a young star in the Marine Hospital Service, nailing the cholera diagnosis while still in his twenties. Why had Dr. Wyman rewarded him with a transfer to this rude place, remote from the nerve center of public health? Kinyoun bitterly joked that Dr. Wyman had sent him out West to bury him. Writing to one of his mentors, Kinyoun swore that if that were the case, he would prove to be “a rather lively corpse.”11
For certain, his scientific pedigree wasn’t worth a wooden nickel in this rowdy town, where bankers, bosses, and broadsheets ruled. Kinyoun resented the grip of merchants on the life of the city and its public health. “You know,” he wrote the folks back East, “San Francisco is frequently called ‘Jew Town.’ Well named.”12 He imagined that the city’s Jewish businessmen were trying to get rid of him. About that, Kinyoun was wrong; all the city’s businessmen wanted to get rid of him. His plague work was bad for business. The more the city reviled him, the more Kinyoun relished his image as the hero of a lonely public health crusade.
“I fortunately for one time in my life assumed the role of Dav[ey] Crockett… knowing that I was right,” he confided to a friend.13 Guarding the nation’s health, he felt that he was under siege, much like his coonskin-capped hero in the Alamo.
One night, his wife, Lizzie, dreamed that the surgeon general came unannounced to Angel Island and requested a candle from her so he could inspect the quarantine station in the dark. Wait for my husband, she protested. What does it mean, Joe? she asked Kinyoun later. The surgeon general was in the dark, and he needed Kinyoun to light his way—it seemed clear enough. Kinyoun longed to be like his namesake, the biblical Joseph, honored by Pharaoh for his interpretation of the nightmare about to unfold on this alien coast.14
THE SPECTER OF PLAGUE had risen up before here. In June 1899, the Japanese steamship Nippon Maru had docked in San Francisco after two deaths at sea and two stowaways who jumped overboard with alleged plague ravaging their bodies. It had been impossible to prove the diagnosis. Indeed, Kinyoun’s own lab analysis disputed it.
But now the memory of another ship haunted Kinyoun—the steamer Australia, which arrived from plague-stricken Honolulu in January 1900. It moored at the dock where the sewers from Chinatown emptied. The Chinese soon observed great numbers of rats dying on their roofs and in their courtyards. It seemed probable the rats had gained entrance to Chinese homes through the sewer pipes.15
Quarantine officers were always under pressure to grant ships a speedy permission to dock. Still, Kinyoun had always tried to be vigilant. In January 1900, he ordered ships coming from the infected zones of Hong Kong, Honolulu, Sydney, and Kobe to fly the yellow warning flag, the sign of a ship that has come from a plague port.
Kinyoun’s letters to Dr. Wyman in Washington warning of the plague threat had grown increasingly shrill. He feared that inbound military ships from Manila might be capable of importing the plague into San Francisco. He thought the authorities overseas were concealing the risk.16 Could he have missed something?
With Kellogg hovering at his side, Kinyoun peered through the microscope at the bacteria from Wong’s tissues and blood. He felt a throb of recognition. Yes, this was it—the rose-tinted rods, dark at the ends. To be sure of his diagnosis, Kinyoun had to isolate it in pure culture and inoculate test animals to replicate the illness of Wong Chut King. After filling a syringe with bacteria from the dead man, he injected a rat, two guinea pigs, and a monkey. If the rod-shaped germs were plague bacteria, the animals would sicken. If they died with the same symptoms, he would biopsy their lymph nodes. If he found plague germs in their lymph fluid, he would have his proof. He placed the test animals back in their cages, and then inside large earthenware vessels for safety, and waited.
Kinyoun wired the first of a string of telegrams conveying the alarming news to Dr. Wyman in federal code, using strange phrases like “suspected bumpkin.”17
Translated, the word bumpkin meant plague. Suspected plague in Chinatown. The encrypted messages eluded the Western Union operators and reporters hanging around the telegraph office. Singing over the wires, the messages traveled eastward over the cryptic signature of Kinyoun under his code name, “Abutment.”
Downtown, the San Francisco Chronicle and other papers ridiculed the plague scare as a comic opera, a bubonic opera buffa. Political pundits believed the quarantine was a bit of jobbery staged to win funds and clout for the city’s board of health. There were jokes about the “bubonic board of health.” Kinyoun was branded a charlatan. The San Francisco Bulletin lampooned him in a rollicking rhyme:
Inside Chinatown, it was hell. Anxious, hungry, fearing for their lost wages and unattended jobs, the Chinese were sick with dread. Those who believed the disease was plague feared being trapped in the infected zone. Those who doubted that plague was real—by all accounts, the majority—feared that the quarantine was merely a pretext for more discrimination, a prelude to fire or demolition, imprisonment or detention. Discrimination was the bitter taste they swallowed with their daily rice, but who knew what new torments the whites might contrive? Outside the quarantine, whites chafed at the inconvenience of it all: Launderers, cooks, and laborers were absent from duty. Hostesses and hoteliers found meager pickings without their chefs and servants. Guests in downtown hostelries went hungry because kitchen staffs were trapped inside the barricades. Food, mail, and supplies were passed between the zones with difficulty or not at all.
After three days of quarantine, no new cases of the so-called plague had materialized. The test animals were still alive. Moreover, the Chinese were threatening to file a lawsuit protesting the blockade and asking for damages. The city health department now felt foolish and had no choice but to lift the quarantine.
Rumors of the blockade’s end brought people pouring into the streets of Chinatown in anticipation of freedom. At four P.M. on March 10, the cordons came down and cheers went up. Thousands of Chinese flowed from the quarantined zone into greater San Francisco. Food deliveries recommenced. Men went back to work in hotels and kitchens all over town. Whites, too, cheered the end of their disrupted dinners. The Examiner published a celebratory verse.
But the poems and jokes, the cheers and celebration, were premature.
Two days later, on March 12, the scuffling and scrabbling animals inside the cages of the Angel Island lab went silent. When Kinyoun looked in, he found the rat and the guinea pigs lying cold in their cages. The monkey grew listless, hung his head, and died the next day.