of the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, that he started to make his name.
A ship landed in New York Harbor with passengers racked by cramps and relentless diarrhea. Local clinicians feared the worst—cholera—but nobody knew for sure. The symptoms were variable and vague; they could mimick those of other diseases. It was Kinyoun’s job to confirm it or rule it out. From the ailing passengers, he obtained samples and prepared slides. Squinting through the microscope lens, he saw a swarm of short, rod-shaped bacteria with hairy little fringes called flagellae, swimming around on the glass slide. It was
This was the first bacteriologic diagnosis of cholera in the United States, or anywhere in the western hemisphere.5 At age twenty-seven, Joe Kinyoun was a force to reckon with.
In 1891, Kinyoun moved his one-room operation to Washington, D.C., to what came to be called the National Hygienic Laboratory, where he gained broad powers to pursue bacteriologic diagnoses of other epidemic diseases. Out of his slides and test tubes emerged the embryo of a vast biomedical research empire that decades later would become known as the National Institutes of Health.
But back in 1899, Kinyoun was simply helping America catch up with Europe, where the original microbe hunters, like Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany, had begun the revolution in infectious disease study. Kinyoun now made a pilgrimage to the mecca of microbiology, studying at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and at Koch’s laboratory in Berlin. From Koch he learned the classic protocol, essentially a recipe for how to prove a germ caused a disease: 1) isolate the germ from a patient; 2) grow the germ in pure culture; 3) inoculate the germ into a lab animal and reproduce the disease; and 4) isolate the identical germ from the test animal. A century later, this circle of proof would continue to govern the diagnosis of infectious diseases. He also learned how to make an antitoxin against diphtheria by harvesting disease-fighting antibodies from the blood of horses exposed to the germ.
When he returned to the National Hygienic Laboratory in the United States, Kinyoun brought with him the European techniques that helped to transform the practice of medical diagnosis, from the ancient bedside art of observing symptoms to a lab science using microscopes, cultures, stains, and slides. Symptoms like fever and pain could be vague and misleading. Bacteriology offered a way to test a diagnostic hypothesis. Its truths were verifiable; it had the beauty of certainty. Or so he thought.
Just after Kinyoun’s National Hygienic Laboratory marked its first decade, his boss cut short his tenure and gave him a job far away. The supervising surgeon general of the Marine Hospital Service was Walter Wyman, a great gruff walrus of a man. A brusque bachelor, Wyman regarded the men of the corps as his family, and he was famed for abrupt transfers. He also regarded his primary mission as the imposition of the police powers of quarantine.6 Now, quarantine duty was calling from the Pacific Coast, and he had Kinyoun in mind for the job.
With bubonic plague now ravaging China, Wyman rightly knew that the Pacific portal of the United States was vulnerable, so he enlisted Joseph Kinyoun to combat it. He told Kinyoun to pack up his family—which now included three children and a pregnant Lizzie—and go west.
Kinyoun was shocked by this abrupt transfer. After running the National Hygienic Laboratory, being sent back to police a port city against disease must have been a humiliating demotion. But Wyman had homed in on Kinyoun’s replacement at the Hygienic Lab, so Kinyoun was California bound. Although Kinyoun was a brilliant bacteriologist, he was decidedly the wrong man for the job of quarantine officer on the Golden Gate. The port, a melting pot simmering with racial tensions, needed a doctor with a diplomat’s touch. Instead, the city got an intellectually acute but autocratic scientist with a bruised ego who expected a level of deference the city wasn’t prepared to give.
On the eve of Kinyoun’s reluctant departure from Washington, D.C., his fellow physicians feted him with a farewell banquet at Rauscher’s Restaurant. Their toasts were printed up in a cream-colored program bound with blue silk cord. Rumpled and stained from the night’s festivities, a copy would rest with his papers until he died.
“Ah, happy, proud America! Thrice happy to possess men of Kinyoun’s stamp, with all their faculties calmly and resolutely bent upon the fulfillment of a noble duty to mankind,” intoned the toastmaster that night. “I wish you God-speed in your journey across the continent to the Golden Gate of the Pacific Ocean, where new fields of activity and new friends await you….”7
After a week on the train with a pregnant wife and three small children, Kinyoun reached his foggy exile. Temporarily ensconced in the plush and gilt Palace Hotel, with its liveried doormen, he found rates that no health officer could afford. It was “the spider’s trap for the eastern fly, and everyone pays tribute to these money sharks, on setting foot in San Francisco,” he wrote to relatives and colleagues back East.8
He checked out. Kinyoun bundled his family into a carriage that clopped down Market Street to the Ferry Building, where they boarded the steamer
Facing north, away from San Francisco toward the tiny Marin County hamlet of Tiburon, his new headquarters was an eyesore in paradise. The biggest island in the bay, Angel Island was an ancient Miwok Indian camp, now occupied by U.S. quarantine and military officers. Its 740 acres were canopied with oak, madrone, bay laurel, and eucalyptus. Washed by the blue-green waters of Raccoon Strait, Hospital Cove might have made a beautiful spot for a resort hotel, Kinyoun mused. Then he beheld the primitive quarantine station and sparsely furnished cottage. His wife, Lizzie, was appalled. Kinyoun’s heart sank.
The ramshackle wharf and quarantine station’s dirt roads melted into mud rivulets in the rainy season. And if the quarantine officer’s quarters were primitive, facilities for immigrants were even worse. There was no shed to shelter immigrants after their disinfecting bath. So the new arrivals had to stand, soaked and shivering, in the bay wind. It was a cold hygienic threshold to what would become in later years the Ellis Island of the Pacific Coast.
His new island home had few neighbors, no school, and little amusement for the children: Mary Alice, Conrad, Perry, and their new redheaded baby, John Nathan. There was a pier for fishing, but Kinyoun found Pacific fish to be insipid fare. Lizzie had a bad foot that kept her housebound. Too frail for more than one evening out in fourteen months, she was often in a raw temper.9 They were isolated and made few friends. At night, it seemed that they were the ones in quarantine, bound by the sigh of the waves, the tolling of fog bells, and the pulse of the lighthouse.
The bright spot in their island exile was photography: Lizzie spent evenings in her darkroom, conjuring blurry portraits of her children out of the vinegary chemical bath. This hobby kept a kind of peace; Joseph had his lab, and Lizzie had hers.
Kinyoun chafed in the epaulets of his federal public health officer’s uniform, which made him look ridiculous, he said, like a “major-domo” or a “government mule.”10 He’d been a young star in the Marine Hospital Service, nailing the cholera diagnosis while still in his twenties. Why had Dr. Wyman rewarded him with a transfer to this rude place, remote from the nerve center of public health? Kinyoun bitterly joked that Dr. Wyman had sent him out West to bury him. Writing to one of his mentors, Kinyoun swore that if that were the case, he would prove to be “a rather lively corpse.”11
For certain, his scientific pedigree wasn’t worth a wooden nickel in this rowdy town, where bankers, bosses, and broadsheets ruled. Kinyoun resented the grip of merchants on the life of the city and its public health. “You know,” he wrote the folks back East, “San Francisco is frequently called ‘Jew Town.’ Well named.”12 He imagined that the city’s Jewish businessmen were trying to get rid of him. About that, Kinyoun was wrong;
“I fortunately for one time in my life assumed the role of Dav[ey] Crockett… knowing that I was right,” he confided to a friend.13 Guarding the nation’s health, he felt that he was under siege, much like his coonskin-capped hero in the Alamo.
One night, his wife, Lizzie, dreamed that the surgeon general came unannounced to Angel Island and requested a candle from her so he could inspect the quarantine station in the dark. Wait for my husband, she protested. What does it mean, Joe? she asked Kinyoun later. The surgeon general was in the dark, and he needed Kinyoun to light his way—it seemed clear enough. Kinyoun longed to be like his namesake, the biblical Joseph, honored by Pharaoh for his interpretation of the nightmare about to unfold on this alien coast.14
THE SPECTER OF PLAGUE had risen up before here. In June 1899, the Japanese steamship
