The Barbary Plague

Upon His Work Has Been Based the Fake Plague Panic in San Francisco…. Proofs of so-called plague in San Francisco rest entirely upon the bacteriological findings of the late Dr. Halstead A. Stansfield, who committed suicide on Monday April [13th], in the Sutro Forest…. The evidence was indisputable that Dr. Stansfield had been erratic for a long time and his melancholia [was] intensified by intemperance. Yet it is upon the scientific findings of this mentally unhinged specialist that Dr. Blue and his associate plague experts pronounced San Francisco as suffering from an epidemic.¹¹

Blue had seen trouble coming. He had always worried that if Stansfield ended up in the drunk tank, he would bring scandal and discredit to the public health service. But this was worse than he’d feared. Stansfield was in the morgue. His tragedy, splashed across the press, now cast doubt upon the plague diagnosis. Blue gave laconic interviews, outlining the facts for the newspapers. If he felt guilt over his officer’s death, he kept his own counsel.

Colby Rucker had seen Stansfield’s sprees as the prelude to disintegration. Without blaming Blue directly, he privately deplored the public health service’s failure to diagnose mental illness and offer help to its men. Elsewhere, an unstable officer was discovered playing Peeping Tom by beachside bathhouses. Later, he died in an insane asylum. Another officer lost his mind, after struggling to mesh three clashing sets of data. He wrote a confession and killed himself. Rucker faulted the service for failing to recognize when its own doctors were in distress.¹²

Despite the shock of Stansfield’s death and the gleeful press frenzy, Blue had to marvel at how steadily his team carried on. They worked long hours. They created fresh strategies against the predatory rats. Their novel solutions saved lives.

Officer Richard Creel ran Plague District One, which encompassed Chinatown, from a small frame cottage in Portsmouth Square. One day he discovered rats scuttling beneath the plank floors. Creel thought back to his Missouri boyhood. He recalled his parents’ tales of how local farmers had saved the harvest from rats by raising the corn bins onto stilts. Dr. Creel propped up his own office on stilts and evicted the vermin.

One night shortly afterward, Creel met Blue and another officer, Charles Vogel, for dinner at the Little St. Francis, where all three lived. Vogel was despairing over the persistent plague deaths in the Lobos Square refugee camp. The camp’s 750 Red Cross cottages had been soaked with carbolic acid. But even after disinfection, the pestilent rats returned. Then Creel spoke up. He told his story of the corn farmers and his own success in outsmarting the predatory rats. Convinced, Blue ordered the cubelike cottages of Lobos Square to be mounted on stilts eighteen inches off the ground.¹³

After eighteen plague cases in Lobos Square, the disease simply ceased. Raising the frail shacks on poles placed them too high for rats to climb in and created a crawl space for cats and dogs to chase them out from under the cottage floors. “Rat-proofing by elevation,” a country cure that saved the corn, now became an urban success story that saved lives.

As the inspectors soldiered on, condemning slovenly houses and sordid cafes, they risked the wrath of property owners. The owner of a greasy spoon cursed and swung a claret bottle at inspectors, while a gun-toting housewife railed at the “grafters.”¹⁴

Entering suspected plague houses was also fraught with risk of disease. Before crossing the threshold, the inspectors unleashed guinea pigs, letting them run through the building as furry flea magnets. This technique—along with doses of antiserum—limited the risk of lethal bites.¹⁵

The Chronicle and the Wasp continued to print acid attacks on the plague campaign. Chronicle publisher Michael de Young changed the tenor of his campaign in the Chronicle. Now, instead of flatly branding the plague a fake, he refined his editorials, affecting a new tone of scientific skepticism about the link between plague and rat fleas. He ran guest columns by contrarian physicians who lent an air of authority to de Young’s plague denial. Blue warned Washington that de Young’s pseudoscientific articles threatened to erode support of the public and of City Hall at a critical moment.¹⁶

This time, however, the state and county medical societies leapt to Blue’s defense. Without naming names, they blasted certain newspapers as “a disgrace to reputable Journalism, a menace to Public Health and safety and an outrage upon the cities of their publication.”¹⁷

The Chronicle backed off, and City Hall stood firm.

The rat work ground on. For the week that ended May 4, Blue quickly scanned the figures: 20,907 houses inspected, 190,104 bits of poisoned bait placed, 4,063 rats trapped, 2,518 rats collected from bounty hunters, and 691 rats found dead. Of these, the men tested 2,952 rats for bubonic plague bacteria. Sixteen animals were infected. The prevalence of infection was subsiding—from the flashpoint of 2 percent, it was down to 1.2 percent— better, but not good enough.

San Francisco was visibly cleaner by May. The produce markets were pristine. Butchertown was rebuilding. Though some work remained, the trends were so favorable that Surgeon General Wyman called on President Theodore Roosevelt to deliver the good news for which the city had been waiting. It was safe for the Great White Fleet to land inside the Golden Gate.

Half a million people stood on the hills and headlands that May morning. Cannon concussions split the air and thudded in the chests of the onlookers as the flotilla of white-and-gold warships glided through the Golden Gate. From the ship decks, the men could hear the cheers and see the fluttering of thousands of tiny flags, antlike in their agitation, on the hillsides. The city was awash with joy. Businesses were ecstatic.

A bisque-complexioned Gibson girl in a pale gown adorns a commemorative poster. Poised gracefully on a giant bar of Pears’ soap, she is shown gazing out over the bay, waving her handkerchief at the fleet. The Great White Fleet and Pears’ soap, said the ad: “Two of the world’s most valued necessities to protect our women and keep them happy.”¹⁸

On the eve of his fortieth birthday, Blue seemed immune to the thrill. Perhaps seeing the city’s excitement over the navy aroused some buried boyhood rivalry with Victor. For certain the municipal holiday stole attention away from his duties at the lab. “Owing to the enthusiasm over the presence of the Fleet, things are very quiet at the present time,” he wrote Surgeon General Wyman. “As soon as this temporary excitement is over, I will resume the educational campaign.”¹⁹

Blue was itching to unveil a new “stereopticon” lecture series that had dazzled his audience at a recent state medical convention in San Diego. While he lectured, the device could display a picture of a warty-tailed Rattus norvegicus, then magically dissolve the image into a picture of a flea. He could make a slide of a patient with classic buboes dissolve into a microscopic mugshot of Bacillus pestis. He wanted Colby Rucker to take the stereopticon lecture on tour to the American Medical Association in Chicago.

It would take more than magic lantern slides to reclaim the public’s attention after the splash made by the Great White Fleet. Next to all that glamour, San Francisco’s zest for the plague campaign slumped, in a kind of morning-after languor. “The people, I fear, are lapsing into an apathetic state again,” Blue reported to the surgeon general. He added bitterly, “The occurrence of a case at this time would tone them up a bit.”²⁰

Of course, Blue wasn’t hoping for another human casualty. But the persistence of infected rats told him that pockets of plague still smoldered underground. Such a reservoir of germs could fuel outbreaks indefinitely. As long as danger persisted, his work wasn’t done. If he couldn’t keep the public engaged, he would fail. He’d been battling plague for eight years now. If San Francisco could stay the course for another eight months, he could finish the job and leave behind him a healthy city.

Blue realized by his birthday on May 30 that San Francisco hadn’t suffered a human plague case in months. This wasn’t a guarantee of anything, as recent reports from Sydney, Australia, had shown. There, plague came roaring back after a seven-month respite. Here, summer was approaching, high season for fleas, when plague cases peak. Blue wrote to Washington to head off the city’s efforts to win a premature clean bill of health for the city.

“I fear,” said Blue, “that August and September will see a recrudescence of the disease.”²¹ Recrudescence—the ugliest word in the public health lexicon—means an epidemic outbreak after a latent spell. Like a war that flares up after a seeming peace, it humbles the soldier who has underestimated the enemy.

Somebody was bound to jump the gun. On Sunday, June 14, 1908, it happened: The New York Times declared victory against plague in the city of San Francisco.