The Barbary Plague

While urging the mass vaccination—“Haffkinization”—of Chinatown, the surgeon general downplayed the dangers of the situation. He portrayed the measures as necessary simply to keep plague from establishing a base in the city and causing repeated outbreaks throughout the year.¹⁰

The Examiner, the newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst, broke ranks with the other San Francisco papers, which ridiculed or denied plague outright. The Examiner saw the plague as a news opportunity. Enterprising reporter J. A. Boyle rolled up his sleeves and filed a first-person account of what it felt like to be injected with the Haffkine vaccination.

“The inoculation itself is entirely painless…. Within two hours, however, the serum had spread through my system and its effects began to be felt,” wrote the journalistic guinea pig. “Shooting pains, slight at first, began near the point of injection and extended across the chest, down the arm and even up into my neck and head. My left arm felt numb and I moved it with difficulty. The muscles covering my shoulder blade felt as if they were being drawn together as by a rubber band,” he added. “I was slightly dizzy, there was a ringing in my ears and I felt I was drifting into a stupor from which I did not particularly care to rouse myself. All this time, the pain in my shoulder, chest, neck and arm had been increasing until it was quite severe. I was unable to concentrate my mind and felt flushed and feverish.”¹¹ Eight hours later, Boyle’s pain eased, his head cleared, and his fever dropped. His ordeal was over, his story a success. But the stunt did nothing to convince those in Chinatown to roll up their sleeves.

By now, the mere sight of white health officers with their needles was enough to prompt a panic. Some whites who worked in Chinatown, like Donaldina Cameron, director of the Presbyterian Mission Home in Chinatown, attributed fear of the plague vaccine to superstition. She tried to encourage immunization, but the Chinese knew the Haffkine vaccine could sicken or even kill. A few mission girls lined up. One girl broke from the line, dashed to a second-story window, and jumped. Onlookers saw a flash of jacket and a wisp of black hair, and she disappeared. A thud sounded from below, where the girl was alive but in agony, crumpled on the sidewalk with smashed ankle- bones.¹²

A Presbyterian missionary of Scottish descent, Miss Cameron had one passionate calling: to rescue slave girls and prostitutes from servitude in Chinatown and convert them to Christianity. Sallying forth in her shirtwaists with leg-of-mutton sleeves, her auburn pompadour anchored by prim veiled hats, she raided vice cribs like Carry Nation with a Scots burr. The Chinese, skeptical of her meddling, called her Fan Quai, “White Devil.” To her wards she was Lo Mo, or “Old Mother.”¹³

One day while the quarantine was in effect, a nine-year-old girl named Ah Ching had come seeking help at the mission for her sister, who was dying of plague. Cameron shed her Victorian gown for Chinese pants, hid her russet head under an umbrella, and slipped past the quarantine lines.

After ascending through a skylight, she hopped roof to roof and found Ah Ching’s boardinghouse. The girl was abandoned and slumped on a wooden chair out on the sidewalk. Miss Cameron carried her to the mission and summoned a doctor. In a surprising turn of events, the physician diagnosed not plague, but appendicitis. She died three hours later, victim of a burst appendix and of neglect spawned by plague phobia.¹⁴

Over Chinatown, columns of smoke rose from the bonfires of refuse that burned on Pacific Street. Plumbing was flushed with chemicals, masking the scent of cookery and crowded humanity with stinging clouds of disinfectant vapors. Mounds of white lime powder were scattered in chalky drifts against the balconied apartments, storefronts, and courtyards, so that the district looked like a Sierra village after a snowstorm. An oppressive stench hung over the district.

Downtown, the board of health met with the Chinese consul and the Chinese Six Companies, wrangling over details of the Chinatown cleanup of plague. All they could agree on was the need to clear out basements and dispose of garbage. On that, no one could disagree. The consul issued a statement urging people to clean up their homes and businesses. But autopsies and diagnoses were different.

City and federal doctors ordered that any Chinese person who died unattended by a physician, or whose medical history was unknown, be autopsied in order to ascertain the cause of death. But autopsies outraged the sensibilities of grieving families and friends. To placate authorities, Ho Yow advised his constituents that, when sick, they should send for a “white physician.” If they were too poor to pay, a doctor would be furnished free from the new Oriental Dispensary.

Without an autopsy, however, cases of plague might be mistaken for something else. Plague in the lungs might be misdiagnosed as common pneumonia, fretted city physician O’Brien, who attended to Wong Chut King. The victim suffocates so quickly that the telltale buboes don’t have time to erupt, he said. So the city board of health passed a motion ordering that any Chinese dying of apparent pneumonia, swollen glands, fever, or other symptoms of possible plague be subject to autopsy—“the same as whites.”¹⁵

Days after the order was issued, monthly death reports in Chinatown began to subside. The mortality rate was half of normal.

Cases of sickness were being concealed, and deaths as well, the health board concluded. One patient who lived across from the Chinese consulate vanished before inspectors arrived. In another case, a man said to have died the day before was as ripe as a week-old corpse. Whether the corpse was in a state of rapid decomposition due to plague or had simply been abandoned for several days was hard to know. The elderly doctor in charge, who worked behind a pharmacy on Kearny Street, denied concealing plague deaths but admitted he was under pressure to dissemble.

Dr. Edward Seltzer recounted to the health board his hellish house call. He found the patient “unable to lie down, and unable to sit up, and was doubled over suffering terribly, spitting blood and suffocating…. Nothing I could do was of more than at most transient effect, and the man died in my presence…. I was a little undecided as to the cause of death, but gave it as lobar pneumonia because the Chinese have a horror of dissection and begged me to give as the cause of death something which could call for no dissection.”¹⁶

Bodies were whisked room to room, stashed in out-of-the-way cubbyholes, or carried over the rooftops—in a shell game to keep the sick and dying from the inspectors. In other cases, San Francisco Bay became a river Styx, with bodies stowed aboard tiny fishing boats, slipped across the water, and interred in an unknown spot. Hiding the dead was Chinatown’s defense against the intrusion of white doctors. How many bodies disappeared, no one knew.¹⁷

Some hid in plain sight. One ingenious ruse involved a game of dominoes. During an inspection on Waverly Place in Chinatown, one doctor found five men seated around a game table. The players froze as police officers stormed the apartment, upending the place but finding nothing. Two hours later, one of the players was found to be dead. During the inspection, his companions had propped him up at the game table, with his hand poised upon a domino in such a natural position that he escaped notice.

“Their tricks are manifold,” said the duped doctor, W. G. Hay of the University of California, in a speech to the California Academy of Medicine. Just how to outsmart the inspectors, he fumed, “[t]he wily heathen seemed to know by instinct.”¹⁸

Rants against the “heathen” Chinese made Consul Ho Yow heartsick. His ailing constituents were forced to flee for fear of the rough interventions of the white doctors, he said, but he denied that his people were actually hiding the dead.¹⁹

An exodus of Chinese began, driven by fears of quarantine, chemical bombardment, and needles. Some scattered to the gardens and factories of their friends in the suburbs. Others were quartered as cooks in private homes within the city. At the old Globe Hotel, the usual three hundred tenants had dwindled to a dozen, who stood with their bags packed, ready to leave if the cordons went up or the torch was threatened again.

On the waterfront, Dr. Kinyoun tried to assert his authority as quarantine officer. But his bluster failed to hold back a rising tide of derision. When a steamer called the Gaelic arrived from Asia with a sick Chinese man aboard, Kinyoun quarantined the vessel. Somehow, despite Kinyoun’s ban on reporters in quarantine, one from the Examiner managed to sneak aboard or to smuggle out stories of Kinyoun in action. The paper published an account of Kinyoun charging about the deck, barking orders, behaving as a bully, acting overbearing to the poor and obsequious to the rich.²⁰

The city board of health, meanwhile, had no cash to pay for the cleanup. The health board begged the board of supervisors for $7,500 to pay men to fork garbage into the incinerator, to sprinkle formaldehyde and shovel lime about Chinatown. The bid for funds inflamed suspicions that the plague was merely a pretext for padding the budget. Newspaper cartoons showed Kinyoun’s monkey, rat, and guinea pig as burglars robbing the city treasury. The Chung Sai Yat Po declared: “If the government didn’t have this $7,500 Buddha,