The city, despite its poverty, managed a gallant gesture. To make it easier for Blue to navigate the fractured streets of the city on his daily rounds, the city offered him a motorcar for his official use. So he now had access to those places the streetcars couldn’t go.
The old City and County Hospital was condemned. The isolation ward for plague patients was being moved from the original site to a new rat-proof compound ringed by eight feet of galvanized steel at Army and De Haro Streets. The exodus of other patients had already taken them to far-flung sites around town: the Presidio Hospital, the almshouse, private hospitals. Even the horse stalls at Ingleside Racetrack—abandoned as too drafty for Thoroughbreds—sheltered the sick and aged.14
Conditions citywide were ideal for an explosion of plague. The lone bright spot, Blue boasted, was Chinatown, where plague was almost nonexistent. He attributed this to his campaign back in 1903 and 1904 to build out the plague with cement basements in the district.
For some reason, Chinatown’s mistrust now began to soften. Unlike the “wolf doctor,” Joseph Kinyoun, the soft-spoken Blue won over the community by degrees. The
Dr. Blue, who was sent by Washington to investigate the plague, said it is not serious. People should not be frightened, he said. They will not overdo the quarantining of the houses, or harass the residents. Their main emphasis is to go after the rats. These physicians are very kind and gentle. They told our reporter to comfort the people.15
The Rattery
BLUE HAD NO ILLUSIONS. “The campaign is likely to be a long one,” he warned a colleague in Washington, “and the infestation will be fifty times more difficult of eradication than before. The foci are to be found all over the city, the greater number existing in the burned district where, on account of the protection afforded by the ruins, the rats multiply in countless numbers…. The people are very much alarmed [and] fear a quarantine….”1
At 401 Fillmore Street, Blue organized his command center and the federal laboratory. Tucked into a nondescript annex behind the Victorian headquarters stood the heart of the operation—“the rattery.” The rattery held narrow lead-topped dissection tables, covered in rodent carcasses that were split tip to tail for postmortem analysis. Tacked on the walls of the rattery were sticky rectangles of flypaper to trap any insects that might alight on a rat and then buzz away to spread the germs. It was like a coroner’s office for rats.
Aproned men in shirtsleeves—sometimes gloved—skinned and dipped each carcass in disinfectant. Each rat was numbered, nailed on a shingle, and labeled with the date and address of its capture. With quick, light blade strokes, the men made a long vertical incision, gently, to avoid damaging internal organs. Peering into the split thorax and abdomen, they searched for signs that mirrored human plague symptoms: swollen glands about the throat, enlarged hearts, livers, or spleens. Any sign of infection triggered a further round of tests.
The men summoned Stansfield when they found signs of plague. He then snipped minuscule tissue samples of glands, spleen, or liver. From these, he prepared glass slides for the microscope. He also dotted samples onto culture plates containing a nutrient broth resembling an overripe dish of jellied consomme. Then he watched the culture dish to see if the samples would sprout germ colonies with a ground-glass texture, spreading and thickening into plaques with a pattern that resembled beaten copper—the look of plague bacteria colonies. He injected the germs into guinea pigs and waited to see if the animals lived or died. On such tests, the city’s future health depended.
It was a bloody, reeking business. The rat crews were skinning, splitting, and examining rats as fast as they could. As their speed and efficiency grew, the crews dissected hundreds of rats a day. Each day they filled eight to ten steel garbage cans with split carcasses, which were carted off to be burned in the incinerator. The rank and musky scent clung to their clothes and nostrils. It took bars of strong soap, dousings with eau de cologne, and snifters of brandy to rid themselves of the reek of it at day’s end.
It was always a dangerous operation. Although any rats caught live could be plunged into boiling water, drowned in kerosene, or gassed with formaldehyde, there was always a chance that some stray flea might leap off its doomed host in time to bite the unwary inspector. And for this reason, the men took injections of vaccine or antiserum.
With the growing harvest, Blue’s men acquired an intimate knowledge of the domestic life of
We have found in our work that a rat-run usually branches like a Y. At one extremity of the fork is a little store-house in which may be found corn, wheat, pieces of bread and apple cores. At the other end is the nest made of rags and feathers laid on straw or hay and offering an ideal breeding place for fleas. This display of ingenuity and foresight gives us a clew [
Every day, the laborers hit the streets, searching houses, placing poisons, closing rat holes, and burning garbage. Medical inspectors made rounds to inspect the sick and the dead. Most plague patients were taken to the county’s plague camp—a few blocks from the old condemned hospital—or to its morgue.
The link between rats, people, and plague now captured more of Rupert Blue’s attention. Even during the first outbreak, he’d operated on the assumption that controlling vermin was a key to controlling plague. Only now did the precise role of fleas start to emerge from the shadows.
Blue wrote Washington asking them to send him literature on the spread of plague in India and China. In 1906 the doctors of the plague commission in India and others had just begun to publish their confirmations of what French researcher Paul-Louis Simond had discovered a decade earlier—that a flea bite could spread plague germs. Surgeon General Wyman, recognizing this as a landmark observation, had begun circulating the reports to his men up and down the West Coast in early 1907.
Poring over those reports, Blue began to refine his attack. Rats were the agents of epidemic, dealing death by means of the insects that hid in their pelts. Now Blue began to push his men to autopsy more and more rats every day, as many as the rattery could handle. He began to understand and anticipate the alternating seasons of rat plague and human plague, mediated by a tiny go-between: a glossy brown bloodsucker no bigger than a sesame seed.
The peak season for human plague ran from April to September, Blue observed, coinciding with the balmy months when fleas flourished, bred, and fed avidly. Then from October to March, cold would descend, and the fleas would hibernate. But these winter doldrums were deceiving, for it was high season for rat plague. Wet weather makes them loath to leave their burrows for food, and they turn to cannibalism. Sick members of the colony are defenseless against their predatory kin. As they feed on one another, the infection spreads. In spring, warmth lures the rats into the open just when flea eggs hatch. The cycle begins anew and lasts through the warmth of a San Francisco autumn, until the chilly bands of rain sweep in off the Pacific, driving vermin underground.
After less than a month on site, Blue’s October 3 tally of human plague showed fifty-one positive cases, forty-four suspicious cases, and thirty deaths. With the rats flourishing and the sickness increasing, Blue needed to enlist the city in his campaign. He drafted a circular to be delivered to every home, business, warehouse, factory, bakery, restaurant, and hotel in town. Set out traps and poison, he urged. Plug up rat holes. Seal garbage in metal cans. Make every building rat-proof. He avoided the word
