Francisco back to Ann Arbor to grow cultures for vaccine production. He assigned star medical student Charles B. Hare to help with bacterial cultures. Having a reputation for careful technique, Hare was the only student allowed to handle bubonic plague. Hare denied having any lab accident. But somehow—perhaps because he was a smoker who rolled his own cigarettes—a droplet of the germ culture contaminated the medical student.
On the night of April 3, Hare’s back began to ache and an odd sensation of numbness crept over him. Overnight, his temperature shot up to 103. Toward morning, he was convulsed by nausea. Later, he began to cough up flecks of mucus streaked with blood. Novy tested it: It was pneumonic plague.
Hare was taken to the pesthouse in a horse-drawn ambulance. His room was sealed and doused with formaldehyde. Novy wired the surgeon general for an emergency shipment of fifty bottles of Yersin’s antiserum. Pneumonic plague, he knew, was the quickest killer and the toughest to treat. After injecting Hare with copious amounts of antiserum, Novy could only wait and hope.14
Hare’s fever hit 105.5, and he sank into delirium. His roommate was isolated with him but against all odds remained well. Then, as Yersin’s antiserum took effect, Hare’s temperature started to subside one degree at a time. Convalescence was slow, but after a month of isolation, Hare was discharged on a stretcher. He finished medical school and went on to practice medicine in California until his death at fifty. But for the remainder of his life, he required twelve hours of bed rest a day; his heart was permanently damaged by the toxin of the plague bacteria.15
Plague may not have jeopardized the medical career of C. B. Hare, but it mortally wounded the career of Joseph Kinyoun. Amid strident demands for his firing, Kinyoun wired the surgeon general, asking for a couple of weeks’ leave to restore his health and visit his family.
Instead of a vacation, Kinyoun received a blow. “You are hereby directed to transfer the public property under your charge to Assistant surgeon L. L. Lumsden, who has been directed to relieve you…. You will proceed to Detroit, Michigan, and assume charge of the Service at that station….”16
He was given three weeks to pack up his family and get to Detroit. No thanks, no acknowledgment of service under difficult conditions—nothing was offered to soften the blow. It was just the blunt, militarystyle transfer favored by Dr. Wyman and the U.S. Marine Hospital Service.
Kinyoun reeled. “The orders were simply without… any explanation,” he wrote to his relatives in the East. “I have been made the scapegoat.”17
Wyman wanted the quarantine officer to make a quick and quiet departure, but retreat was not in Kinyoun’s repertoire. Against Wyman’s wishes, Kinyoun went on the offensive, making speeches at state and county medical societies about plague. He took the advantage on such occasions to take some parting shots at his enemies.
Aiming at the San Francisco doctors who wrote false death certificates, Kinyoun mocked their misdiagnosis of plague as chicken cholera. He joked that they’d actually discovered a new disease, which Kinyoun called “cholera du Chink.” From his once high-minded defense of bacteriology, he had sunk to low puns and crude racial slurs.18
San Francisco bade a bizarre farewell to Kinyoun. On the eve of his departure from San Francisco, police came to Angel Island to arrest him for attempted murder. The charge dated from an incident five months earlier in the cold waters off Angel Island. Back in November 1900, a deaf-mute fisherman was mistaken for an escapee from military detention and fired upon by soldiers. Kinyoun claimed he had rowed out to save the man, not to assault him. But now he was accused of pulling the trigger.
“I did not fire the shots,” he protested. “It is an outrage to arrest me.” Since he was a federal employee, Kinyoun refused to be taken into custody by anyone but a U.S. marshal. Eventually the court dropped the charges.19
As he packed up his family for Detroit, Kinyoun suffered recurrent bouts of paralyzing stomach pain. Gut roiling, he asked for emergency sick leave to treat his “appendicitis.” Once the pain subsided, he planned a research trip to Asia to study plague, unable to let go of his obsession with the disease that had been his downfall.
But Kinyoun’s tenure as a federal public health officer was running out. He was exhausted. He couldn’t help but feel that Wyman, by failing to defend his diagnosis, had devalued his contributions to bacteriology. After his research trip to Asia, he would serve out a brief time in the Marine Hospital Service. But in his heart, he had already resigned.
Bitter in professional exile, Kinyoun wrote long, rambling letters blaming the press, the politicians, and the surgeon general, who—beginning with Kinyoun’s transfer to San Francisco—sought “to simply relegate [him] to oblivion.”20
When a friend suggested that he write his life story, Kinyoun ruefully proposed a title—
New Blood
FOUR MONTHS IN SAN FRANCISCO were enough to break the spirit. Hamstrung by his government’s gag order, Joseph White felt helpless to cure the plague in Chinatown. The place seemed an impenetrable puzzle, hiding the quick and the dead. “You cannot imagine the conditions. I cannot write them,” he wrote the surgeon general. “It would take Charles Dickens to do it.” White pleaded for reinforcements.
“The difficulties here are so great that never before in our history has there been a greater need for tactful and forceful officers,” he wrote, “and mediocrity is I think clean out of place.”
White proposed a candidate for the job, but Surgeon General Wyman had another man in mind: thirty-three- year-old Rupert Blue, who was at that moment stationed in Milwaukee, caring for sick boatmen on Lake Michigan. White had never met Blue, but he’d heard through the service grapevine that Blue was lazy and lacked the subtlety to negotiate with the Chinese.
This job takes tact, White continued. “I learn that Blue has none and is inert beside[s],” he added. “I don’t know Blue and have not a reason under Heaven to dislike him, so there is nothing personal in this matter at all, but I am fully persuaded that he cannot take the lead in this matter now or in the future.”1
Ignoring White’s doubts about his candidate, Wyman shipped Blue his orders to leave the Milwaukee station and proceed at once to San Francisco.
While Blue was en route, pressure was building from outside the state for action. Texas health chief W. F. Blunt demanded a copy of the plague commission’s report. Colorado health chief G. E. Tyler declared, “Concealment of contagious diseases is an unpardonable sin in public health work.”2 Newspapers in New York City and Washington State were beginning to sound alarms about California’s cover-up.
Suddenly the gag order was violated. The
Joe White, relieved to be rid of secrecy, denied he was the source of the leak and added that he didn’t think Kinyoun was, either. Few but the experts on the panel and the surgeon general were privy to the report. The source of the leak was never identified.
Rupert Blue arrived in San Francisco for duty just as the city launched a frenzied beautification project in anticipation of the visit of President William McKinley. On an embankment in front of the Victorian flower conservatory in Golden Gate Park, gardeners planted a tapestry of poppies and pansies spelling out “California’s Welcome to Our President,” flanked by an American eagle and a California grizzly bear. Miles of bunting and millions of red-white-and-blue flags decked the parade route. Market Street was strung with electric bulbs and Chinese lanterns that shed a patriotic radiance, Asian-Pacific style.
The moment he got off the train, Blue inhaled the brine-scented fog, with undercurrents of beer and sewage he remembered from his first visit as a young assistant surgeon on quarantine duty in 1895. The city now had a few more electric lights and motorcars, but its raffish spirit was intact.
Indeed, San Franciscans were intoxicated with speed in the new century. The traditional Sunday carriage caravans through Golden Gate Park were now joined by two dozen rattletrap horseless carriages, tearing through
