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 protege 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

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