UNTIL AUGUST 1900, the plague had claimed only Chinese victims. A rough-hewn teamster named William Murphy would change all that.
By day Murphy drove a horse carriage, making deliveries in Chinatown. At night he put down his reins and picked up an opium pipe, escaping from his daily rut of mud and manure into a vaporous dreamscape.
One day, he felt a rush of fever. His head pounded and his body hurt as though he’d been beaten in a bar brawl. He sweated and shivered convulsively, his thirty-four-year-old drayman’s frame now weak as a babe’s.
Light-headed and woozy, he dragged himself from his Dupont Street apartment to the City and County Hospital at 26th and Potrero Streets. The doctors made puzzled stabs at a diagnosis. On August 11, William Murphy died. An autopsy revealed him to be the city’s first white victim of bubonic plague.1
Joseph Kinyoun studied the specimens with a grim vindication. “It is the most beautiful case of plague infection (if such things can be called beautiful) that I have encountered in this epidemic,” he said.2 Murphy’s death expanded the outbreak beyond people of Asian blood, but it was Anne Roede’s that transcended the boundaries of Chinatown.
Anne Roede, a white nurse, was called to Pacific Avenue to tend a teenage boy suffering from stomach pains and respiratory distress. It was a presumed case of diphtheria. As Nurse Roede bent over his bedside, the boy was seized with nausea. Too quick for her to dodge, he heaved and spattered the nurse’s face. She cleaned her patient, then composed herself as best she could.
Forty-eight hours later, Nurse Roede felt her own face grow flushed, her throat thick and raw. Her strength swooned, and her breath became labored. Doctors admitted her to the contagious disease ward of Children’s Hospital on California Street, another suspected case of diphtheria. Her fever soared. After hovering three days on the fringes of consciousness, the twenty-eight-year-old nurse suffocated.
The doctors moved her body to the Children’s Hospital morgue for autopsy and began their postmortem. Only when they looked into her lungs did they realize that Nurse Roede had died of pneumonic plague.
Panic-stricken hospital administrators decided that their morgue was contaminated and that it must be burned. As the fire engines pulled up and prepared to torch the room, someone called for coal oil to drench the floor. The oil was stored in the next room, amid a huge powder keg of flammable fuels—enough to engulf the whole hospital and all of California Street in flames. At the last moment, the fire was canceled. “If it had been started after that manner,” Kinyoun reflected, “all the fire engines in San Francisco would not have saved the Children’s Hospital.”3
Nurse Roede’s teenage patient died and was buried without an autopsy. Kinyoun was convinced that his killer was pneumonic plague and that he had infected Nurse Roede. He was even more convinced that a chain of such misdiagnoses was concealing the true size of the outbreak. “There have been more cases of bubonic plague… in San Francisco than have seen the light,” he wrote. “Either deliberately or unintentionally cases of bubonic plague have been returned to the Health Office under another name.”4
But plague was only part of his job. Quarantine duties had kept him very busy. In just over a year as San Francisco’s quarantine officer, Kinyoun had overseen the inspection of more than one thousand ships, during which more than fourteen thousand passengers had been disinfected.5 Clad in oilskins, the quarantine officers were required to board ships in the bay until nine or ten o’clock at night, breasting the whitecaps, hauling fumigation equipment aboard, smoking and spraying the fetid compartments. They checked passengers and crew, taking temperatures, peering into throats, and palpating glands in the neck to search for any signs of illness aboard ship. Passengers were always restive in quarantine, bridling at the health and baggage checks. It was a wet, grueling, thankless job.
But no ship made waves like the Occidental and Oriental Steam Ship Co. vessel the Coptic. She regularly plied the sea lanes from San Francisco through Honolulu and Kobe, Japan, to China, returning with her hold full of China tea, Hawaiian sugarcane, crates of Asian-Pacific delicacies—water chestnuts, yams, green ginger, taro root, lily bulbs, dried fish, and oysters—and a menagerie of dogs, cats, and monkeys.
After leaving San Francisco on June 26, 1900, to return to Asia, the ship’s surgeon, James Moloney, documented one of the most contentious cases of an already contentious year. In his ship’s logs, the surgeon said the Coptic picked up passengers in Honolulu, then headed for Japan. When the ship reached the port of Kobe, a steerage passenger was found mortally ill with fever.6
Ah Sow, a twenty-seven-year-old rice farmer from a plantation outside Honolulu, had a temperature of 105 degrees and an egg-size lump erupting from his thigh. Carried ashore in the wee hours, the man died as “the first case of plague occurring in the history of the Pacific Ocean on an outward bound ship,” Moloney said.7
On the steerage deck near the dead man’s berth, inspectors found three dead rats in the scuppers. A frenzy of finger-pointing ensued. The ship’s surgeon blamed the passenger Ah Sow for bringing plague aboard the Coptic from Hawaii.8 Honolulu health officers insisted that plague rats already on the ship from San Francisco had infected Ah Sow.
While health officers of California, Hawaii, and the shipping company wrangled, the Coptic, now scrubbed and fumigated, raced waves and weather to cross the Pacific again. When she next reached San Francisco Bay, Kinyoun was away, up north inspecting quarantine stations in Canada. He left the San Francisco station in the hands of an experienced officer, who scrutinized the Coptic’s freight and passengers to howls of protest over the delay.
Kinyoun returned to San Francisco from Canada to find himself blamed for the Coptic’s delayed docking and for alleged rough treatment of the passengers. He wrote to the surgeon general, saying that the unfounded charges were part of a plot to oust him. “I cannot be bribed, coerced or cajoled into a suppression [of the facts] regarding the plague.”9
By now, Kinyoun’s own health was compromised. “I have not been well since I came to San Francisco,” he acknowledged to his friends. “I had four break-downs in the last year.”10 His gut, always in turmoil, was seized with pains he ascribed to “chronic appendicitis.” Modern doctors might have labeled his malady as ulcers or spastic colon. By any name, there was little relief. In the days before acid blockers and antispasmodic drugs, the public relied on patent medicines laced with alcohol, coca, or morphine. Kinyoun simply suffered and blamed his agony on overwork and political pressure that the Coptic affair promised only to exacerbate.
When the Coptic next docked in San Francisco on December 14, once again loaded with exotic foodstuffs and live animals Kinyoun suspected were possible carriers of infection, he ordered extraordinary vigilance. He granted limited pratique, meaning only routine cargo could be unloaded, but seafood and produce needed special certificates. Dogs, cats, and monkeys required inspection.11
At the wharf, resentment flared as irate merchants sat idly awaiting their shipments. Around the customs house, it was whispered that California’s congressmen were lobbying for Kinyoun’s transfer “as far away from San Francisco as possible.”12
San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce president, Charles Nelson, called Kinyoun “a menace to our trade and commerce.”13 On December 21, the Chinese Six Companies sued for release of their goods, charging that Kinyoun had again overreached his authority as quarantine officer.14
Now, barely six months free of litigation, Kinyoun was under renewed legal fire. Christmas on Angel Island was somber. Kinyoun took solace in his children’s hopes for the holiday. Alice, a pianist, craved music. Perry was obsessed with hunting and fishing. Conrad tickled Kinyoun by having picked up his father’s taste for technology and requesting that almost all his presents be machines. “It was real amusing,” Kinyoun wrote his friends, “in looking over the list which he gave me for Santa Claus.” Otherwise, the holiday held little cheer.15
As 1900 drew to a close, the newspapers ran rosy prophecies for San Francisco, now ranked as the nation’s eighth largest city, with a population of 342,000. “In San Francisco, the century goes out brilliantly,” wrote the Call’s publisher, John D. Spreckels. “All kinds of trade report a good movement at profitable prices. The export trade of the port was never better… the Orient keeps the ships and the shippers busy… there is a general feeling of confidence in… 1901.”16
Kinyoun took a gloomier view. “It appears to me that commercial interests of San Francisco are more dear to the inhabitants than the preservation of human life,” he wrote. “No sentiment has been expressed against a possible danger arising to the people, to their wives and children. These people seem perfectly indifferent whether or not bubonic plague exists in San Francisco, so long as they can sell their products and make large percentages on their investments.”17
The San Francisco Chronicle, in its year-end editorial, demanded the quarantine officer’s expulsion. Headlined THE DOOM OF KINYOUN, the column declared: “Kinyoun is to go…. The official acts of Kinyoun have been outrageous, and have fully warranted the public indignation…. It is grossly improper for his Federal superiors to say that such a man must not be removed ‘under fire.’ ”18
Kinyoun wrote a friend, “I am at war with everybody out here.”19
In Sacramento, Governor Henry T. Gage escalated his attacks. In his year-end address—a rhetorical volcano that spouted twenty thousand words and covered fifty-four sheets of foolscap—he took his plague conspiracy theory to new and gothic heights. Now instead of just spilling the germs, he insinuated, Kinyoun spread them intentionally.
“Could it have been possible,” said Gage, “that some dead body of a Chinaman had innocently or otherwise received a post-mortem inoculation in a lymphatic region by some one possessing the imported plague bacilli, and that honest people were thereby deluded?”20
Before, Kinyoun was a bumbling sorcerer’s apprentice. Now, he was a mad scientist spiking corpses with bubonic germs.
To defend the state from such demonic experiments, Gage proposed making it a felony to import plague bacteria, to make slides or cultures from it, or to inoculate animals with it. He also proposed making it a felony for newspapers to publish “any false report on the presence of bubonic plague.”21
Rallying around the governor, the legislature passed a joint resolution on January 23 asking President McKinley to remove Kinyoun from West Coast duty. Fearing exile was too mild a punishment, the bill’s author added that Kinyoun should be hanged.22
“I did not know that a man occupying such a high position as the Governor of a State, could stoop so low as to lend himself to one of the lowest forms of persecution,” Kinyoun wrote to his aunt and uncle. “His statements were more in keeping with what is found in the yellow-backed dime novels, than what has really occurred….”23
After eighteen months of toil and family sacrifice on Angel Island, Kinyoun was denounced as a fraud. He wired the surgeon general, asking to be avenged for the slander.24
But Kinyoun got a vote of no confidence from his boss. With federal-state relations in San Francisco frayed past repair, Wyman sent in a new man to manage the crisis. Joseph H. White was a veteran who had fought cholera in Hamburg and leprosy in Hawaii. The day after New Year’s, White set down his suitcase at the Occidental Hotel on Sutter Street and set to work.
Newspapers promoted the theory that White had come to reverse Kinyoun’s diagnosis. But soon after his arrival, Chung Wey Lung, a sixty-year-old merchant, died in his basement store at 720 Jackson Street.
Kinyoun took Joe White to view the unfortunate man, whom he referred to as a “low, dirty Chinese.”25 Desperate for White to believe him, he saw the dead man not as a patient, but as proof of his hypothesis.
The slides and cultures confirmed that Chung was the city’s twenty-third plague victim in ten months. In marking the number 23 on the Chinatown map in pink ink—the color code for the year 1901—the public health officers saw that all but two of Chinatown’s dozen square blocks were now touched by the outbreak.
Chung’s case was quickly followed by more deaths, both Chinese and white. Furious at the governor’s intransigence, the city health board president, J. M. Williamson, took his case to the mayor. “The Board of Health during the whole of this bitter controversy has promulgated nothing but the exact facts,” he said. “A lie is a lie whether it [be] uttered by the lips of medical sycophants hovering around the gubernatorial coattails, or whether it be traced by the point of an executive pen.”26
Confronting a hopeless impasse, Joseph White took a decisive step. He asked Surgeon General Wyman to send a panel of independent experts to determine once and for all whether plague existed in San Francisco. Meanwhile, White kept a discreet distance from the embattled Kinyoun.
Wyman agreed, and chose his experts with care: From the University of Pennsylvania, he tapped Simon Flexner, a bespectacled thirty-seven-year-old medical educator who would later gain fame at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. From the University of Michigan, he chose Frederick Novy, thirty-six, a goateed professor of medicine. From the University of Chicago, he recruited Lewellys Barker, thirty-three, a lanky young anatomy professor who had been a protégé of the legendary William Osler at Johns Hopkins University. All three knew plague when they saw it. Novy had studied plague in Berlin. Flexner had researched it in the Philippines with Barker. Barker had then followed pestilence to Bombay, India, a city he found “preternaturally quiet and dismal” under the smoky pall of funeral pyres. There, he later wrote, he “realized what the horrors of the Black Death of Europe in earlier centuries must have been.”27
In late January 1901, the three plague experts left their laboratories and classrooms behind and boarded trains for the West Coast. They traveled fast and light, carrying no lab equipment with them, checked into the Occidental Hotel, and looked for a laboratory where they could work. It seemed simple enough, but nothing in San Francisco was simple.
Kinyoun’s laboratory on Angel Island was well equipped but tainted by controversy. A University of California scientist offered lab space but was forced to withdraw his offer for fear Governor Gage would cut his university’s funding.28
Finally, the city of San Francisco found makeshift lab space in room 161 of City Hall. Every day, the special commission made the rounds of Chinatown, visiting the sick and the dead. Accompanying them was Wong Chung, the secretary of the Chinese Six Companies, acting as their translator and guide.
Wong Chung was a moon-faced gentleman who wore the traditional queue. A respected figure on the Chinatown commercial scene, Wong was also fluent in English, and could unlock his neighborhood’s secrets as only a native speaker of Chinese could. It is hard to know what persuaded him to help the visiting doctors. Perhaps the Chinese Six Companies wanted him to inform them of what the Caucasian physicians were up to. Perhaps Wong himself suspected that the plague scare might turn out to be real. Whatever the interior thoughts of this quiet man, his work assisting the two-week investigation set the stage for a relationship between Chinese and whites that would turn the tide of the epidemic.
Every day, they improvised autopsies in dimly lit apartments, surrounded by the grieving families and friends of the dead. Then they returned to room 161 of City Hall, armed with their autopsy samples. After placing the samples on glass slides and peering into the microscope, they wrote up each case for their report.
Plague or no plague, whatever the panel found was destined for a confidential report to the surgeon general in Washington, D.C. During two weeks in February 1901, they examined thirteen people dying of all causes.
“Of the thirteen deaths which came to our attention, occurring from Feb. 5 to Feb. 16th inclusive, six were undoubtedly due to infection with plague,” the panel concluded. “A seventh may have been a case of plague which went unrecognized.”29
Among them were two actors, a theater cook, and a cigar maker who tried to soothe his buboes with a plaster of salve and honey. There was a little girl initially misdiagnosed with typhoid, and a middle-aged laborer. All had succumbed under the eyes of the nation’s preeminent infectious disease specialists. Such was the power of plague and the powerlessness of doctors to stop it.
The mystery of the seventh case involved Chung Moon Woo Shee, a homemaker who died of a suspicious fever. But just as the trio of experts made the first incision in their autopsy, her watching family cried out inconsolably. Their wails of grief froze the doctors’ scalpel in their hands. Out of respect, they laid down their tools. There would be no autopsy that day. Her case remained unsolved.
Just as the commission wrapped up its report, the youngest commissioner, Lewellys Barker, developed a sudden fever. He was overtaken by aches, and odd lumps began to erupt. After two weeks in plague houses and makeshift morgues, it looked ominous. They’d all taken precautions, injecting themselves with liberal doses of Yersin’s plague antiserum, but it wasn’t perfect protection.
Even though Yersin’s antiserum was far safer than the Haffkine vaccine, it also could cause problems. The two products worked differently in the body. The preventive Haffkine vaccine, made from killed plague bacteria, was injected before exposure to immunize a person—that is, to spark the production of human antibodies that could fight off plague. The Yersin antiserum, on the other hand, was a solution of ready-made antibodies given to boost immunity even after a person was already exposed to plague. But since this antiserum was drawn from the blood of horses exposed to the plague, it contained proteins foreign to the human body. So some recipients of the antiserum mounted an intense immune reaction against these horse proteins. The reaction—fever, joint pain, and hives—was known as “serum sickness.”
Serum sickness could be very dangerous indeed, but it wasn’t plague. And to his colleagues’ intense relief, Barker’s illness turned out to be just that—a case of serum sickness mimicking early symptoms of plague. It was a false alarm, but a reminder that no one was immune.30
Their grim task completed, and their lips sealed about their findings, the expert panel trio prepared to leave for home. But a trickle of leaks about the plague report in the Sacramento Bee alerted Governor Gage to impending trouble. He demanded an audience at the Palace Hotel.
Billing his visit as a courtesy call, Gage brought a delegation and prepared to lobby the scientists to head off any threat to his state. The plague commissioners, in no mood to be bullied, gave it to him straight: The state had the plague, and they intended to report it to the surgeon general. The governor retreated to Sacramento to plot his next move.31
On February 28, he summoned newspaper and railroad executives. They chartered a special train to the capital and huddled with the governor until four A.M. Then, their plan of action decided, they went home to pack for Washington, D.C.32
Sidelined, Kinyoun watched helplessly. He tried to forewarn Surgeon General Wyman about the governor’s delegation and its rumored mission to suppress the panel’s findings.33 Now in charge, Joseph White dined with the mayor and medics to muster support for his plague-control operations. But privately, he despaired. “The people and the place here,” he wrote the surgeon general, “are a law unto themselves….”34
“The situation here is worse than you think,” he added. “I cannot foretell the outcome, but I fear disaster. A year ago it might have been checked but now I am extremely doubtful of any success…. I fear the service has met… a Waterloo.”35