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This was really good. It was kind of slow at the start, and it doesn't help at all that Kinyoun was kind of an asshole (however right he was about needing to contain the spread of plague). Once Blue was called in and some things started being done competently, it became pretty riveting. It's a bit sad that Blue became bitter toward the end of his career -- but he had, in the end, a career to be very proud of, and his work in SF was exemplary.

I'm developing myself a new public health hero in the form of Rupert Blue! I love the fact that he may not have been the most academically able person, but he was able to succeed where others failed because he made connections, listened to people's needs, and looked at the evidence beyond his own prejudices.

Thanks to whichever Litten I follow read this lately -- I'm really in the mood for non-fiction right now, and of course I'm always interested in all things to do with infectious diseases. Not sure how much the science part will be in the foreground here, but honestly sometimes that's the most interesting -- where biology meets how people live.

In 1900, bubonic plague popped up in San Francisco, initially in an ethnically Chinese man. What followed won‘t surprise any of us in light of our pandemic experience—racism, denial, political wrangling, and more abhorrent behavior, working against genuine attempts to stop the disease. Completely fascinating.

When I read this back in the summer and discovered Dr. Blue was laid to rest in SC, I knew I had to go and pay respects. So we made a little road trip today. Thank you, Dr. Blue for the work that you did. We might not be here, if you hadn‘t.
More on Dr. Blue: https://www.historynet.com/americas-heroic-microbe-hunter.htm

I never knew how narrowly the US escaped the bubonic plague. Little do most peoplx know that it happened right in the early 1900s, in San Francisco! This book tells you all about it. Politics played a big part in downplaying the danger, just as it continues to do so today with Covid 19; racism played a role as well, as it still does today. You‘ll never think of the Golden Gate the same way again.

This guy basically stopped bubonic plague in San Francisco in the early 1900s. I‘d say that‘s a major life accomplishment! He discovered the connection between rats and fleas, and fought back hard. When Influenza hit in 1918, he once again made a big difference. He was Surgeon General from 1918-1920. His headstone reads only: “His work for humanity took him to many lands but he came home to sleep his long last sleep.”

In the Mission District, two young boys playing in an unused cellar discovered the corpse of a rat. Emulating their father, who was an undertaker, they performed a mock funeral service before picking up the animal and putting it into a shoebox as a casket. They dug a hole with their hands and buried the it, completing the ritual. They then ran back to their house at 2888 Mission Street, unaware that their clothes were crawling with infected fleas.

What I see makes me tremble with fear. I see the buildings toppling over, big pieces of masonry falling, and from the street below I hear the cries and screams of men and women and children. I remain speechless, thinking that I am in some dreadful nightmare, and for something like 40 seconds I stand while the buildings fall…and during those 40 seconds I think of 40,000 different things. All that I have ever done in my life passes before me.

On some days health officials would stop in amazement, wondering how it was possible for there to be this many rats not only in San Francisco but in the entire world. To protect themselves from the bite of an infected flea, the men took frequent doses of anti-plague serum, which, when combined with the rank smell of blood and dizzying amounts of formaldehyde, often left them barely able to stand.

Inspectors noted the number of rats taken from each location, gender, date and whether the house had been visited before. Every afternoon, teams arrived back with their hauls. Rats found alive were tossed into vats of boiling water, a tactic meant to quickly kill fleas clinging to their bodies. Each carcass was nailed to a wooden shingle and given a number along with a short description of where it had been caught.

⬆️Contact tracing!

Under guidance from Governor Gage, state health inspectors began refusing invitations to attend the autopsies of suspected plague victims and would then claim that federal doctors were conducting them in secret and lying about the results. All attempts to force state health officials to acknowledge the reality of the plague were blocked, ignored or disregarded.

Look! It‘s the 2020 Covid 19 response!

He kept coming back to an idea that could explain how the disease was spreading, though Wyman had dismissed it before plague ever appeared in San Francisco. Yet Blue could not help but notice the possibility. The woman‘s home, he wrote in a letter to the Surgeon General, was only a few blocks away from Chinatown. That distance, he noted, was “a distance easily covered by rats in their migration”.

Henry Gage (CA Gov) 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.

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, William Cutter declared on the senate floor that Kinyoun deserved to be hanged for his attempt to ban any travel from CA.

DAMN. 2020 is 1900!!!

J.C. Campbell said of Dr. Joseph J. Kinyoun: a real doctor was someone who practiced with patients, not microscopes. Bacteriology was nothing but a sham, and the bacteriologists who practiced it were emasculated men, who could do no better than stay alone in a room with test tubes all day.

⬆️So we‘ve got a Steve Bannon and a Dr. Fauci in 1900. What is it with people not believing science?

Modern scientists now understand that Yersinia pestis seems designed to kill. The bacterium has the ability to detect temperature around it, and once it is in an environment around the human body‘s resting state of 98.6°F it begins to modify the structure of a molecule in its outer membrane in an effort to mask itself from the immune system.

Holy crap! This thing is smart!?

After penetrating the skin of a human, the bacterium would begin to rapidly multiply, doubling within the human body within two hours, then double again every two hours thereafter. White blood cells would be helpless as the bacteria developed antigens that allowed them to overrun the lymphatic system. Within a week, patients infected with the disease would develop a bubo laden with as much as 100 billion plague bacteria per gram of tissue. 🦠🤯

The city‘s newspapers immediately called the scare nothing but a ploy by the Board of Health to receive more funding. One warned that the quarantine could derail the city‘s economy and accused Mayor Phelan of conjuring up the disease as a feint to grab more power. “There is no bubonic plague in San Francisco. I would feel safe and saying that the fear would be foolish as this quarantine is now unnecessary.”

Sound familiar?! #covid192020

The Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882, prompted by fears among white Americans that an influx of Chinese laborers was pushing wages down. Ten years later, CA congressman Thomas Gaery introduced the Gaery Act, which when passed extended the Chinese Exclusion Act by ten years and required all Chinese residents to carry a certificate of residence at all times or face deportation or a year of hard labor.

Notice any similarities today?

In his influential work On the Unity of Mankind, German physician Johann Blumenbach Identified 5 major species of humanity, each possessing what he called unalterable physical and moral traits. Whites were the closest to God, with strong beautiful bodies, “not stained with pigment.” All Asians a lesser species he termed Mongolian, who were marked by small skulls—a sign of diminished intellect and depraved morals; yellow skin suggested laziness.

Racism and bigotry have been a part of California since the first Spanish encounters with natives in the 16th century; the rising influence of the new science of anthropology and the 1859 publication of Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species gave prejudice a scientific veneer and greater urgency. Taking their cue from Darwin‘s notion of the survival of the fittest, scientists began envisioning race as nothing less than a battle for the future.

If barroom room fights or bandits didn‘t kill newly arrived Argonauts, cholera could, with epidemics engulfing the city in 1850, 1852, and 1854 as waves of newly arrived gold diggers continued to dig water wells just one or two feet deep and without regard for the proximity of nearby latrines. All told, one in five gold seekers died within their first six months in San Francisco. 🚽💦🦠💩

Puzzled by the fact that few upper-class foreigners living in colonial compounds in Hong Kong and India caught the disease even as thousands around them succumbed, some public health officials drew the pseudoscientific conclusion that those with European ancestry had somehow developed immunity to plague and pointed to their survival as proof of racial superiority.

Think again dummies. Plague will take down any motherfucker, QUICK! 🙄🦠☠️

Its name alone was spoken with dread. Though a few living at the time had any first-hand experience with plague prior to its appearance, the trail of dead that it had once left in its wake made it seem like nothing short of divine wrath.

Bubonic plague appeared in a rural province of Yunnan in south central China in the late 1870s, where it festered for nearly two decades before making its way across the globe. By 1893 it had reached the city of Canton, where, in the words of one observer, it killed thousands of people “like plum blossoms in a late frost.”

⬆️That is a beautiful description of death.

The man‘s skin, which days before glimmered in the Hawaiian sun, was pocked with black spots and open red sores. The lymph nodes in his thigh were so swollen that it looked as if his leg had been pumped full of air and was at risk of floating away. A mixture of blood and foam began leaking out of his mouth, a sign of ruptured blood vessels, and he soon fell into a coma from which Dr. Li knew he would never recover.

⬆️That‘s a nice visual.

On the morning of December 8, 1899, Yuk Hoy, a forty-year old bookkeeper, awoke in his bed to the flash of a high fever and a mysterious swelling in his thigh. Woken by his wails, a man named Fong who lived on the same floor, stumbled in darkness to find him trembling in a litter of straw, his body quivering, as Fong would later describe it, “like the branches of a tree in thunder and lightning gone crazy.”

An interesting and infuriating look at how North America narrowly avoided a massive outbreak of plague, despite a healthy helping of idiocy and a huge embarrassing dose of racism. History!!

I had no idea there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in California in 1900. David K. Randall explores this terrifying and overlooked chapter of American history: how the plague threatened to overwhelm the rest of the country, how racism impacted the authority‘s reaction and how scientists ultimately managed to contain the disease. This book is brilliant and everyone should read it (maybe skip the lunch, though).

Loving this so far

Thank you to #NetGalley and to the publisher for an ARC of this book.

In the early 1900s, San Francisco faced a plague epidemic; yet, it‘s not in the history books. This is a tale of racism, political power/coverup, egos, and finally one man who eradicated the disease from the city. Randall‘s prose is spellbinding and brings to light this potential catastrophe. It‘s a quick, short read, but amazingly good. I learned so much; highly recommended.

Reading this fascinating book about the bubonic plague in the US at the turn of the 20th century, and of course accompanied by #SebastianKitty and #Zeke . #catsoflitsy