Pox (59 page)

1
U.S. Census Bureau,
Twelfth Census of the United States
(1900), Schedule 1—Population, Manhattan, New York, New York, District 461. Note: all enumeration district-level census data cited in the notes to follow was retrieved using the U.S. Federal Census Collection in the online database Ancestry Library Edition,
ancestry.com
(Provo, UT). “Smallpox on West Side,”
NYT
, Nov. 30, 1900, 2. Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds.,
The Tenement House Problem: Including the Report of the New York State Tenement House Commission of 1900
(New York: MacMillan, 1903), 53.

2
“Jumped Through a Window,”
NYT
, Nov. 29, 1900, 4. “West Side Robberies,”
NYT
, Nov. 29, 1900, 5. “Chinaman Whips a Gang,”
NYT
, Dec. 6, 1900, 2.

3
“Smallpox in Manhattan,”
NYT
, Nov. 28, 1900, 3. “Chemists Report on Water,”
NYT
, Nov. 29, 1900, 5. For a concise contemporary description of the pathology of smallpox, see U.S. Treasury Department, Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service,
Handbook for the Ship's Medicine Chest
, by George W. Stoner, M.D., 2d ed. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 21–24.

4
“Smallpox in Manhattan.”

5
Ibid. On the New York City Health Department, see John Duffy,
A History of Public Health in New York City, 1866–1966
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1974); Evelynn Maxine Hammonds
, Childhood's Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880–1930
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

6
“Smallpox on West Side.” “Columbia Beat Indians,”
NYT
, Nov. 30, 1900, 8. “Thanksgiving Day Cheer,”
NYT
, Nov. 30, 1900, 3.

7
D. H. Bergey,
The Principles of Hygiene: A Practical Manual for Students, Physicians, and Health-Officers
(Philadelphia: W. B Saunders, 1904), 374. George Henry Fox,
A Practical Treatise on Smallpox
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1902), 26–31. Dr. Fox was the consulting dermatologist to the New York City Health Department.

8
“Smallpox on West Side.” “Fighting the Smallpox,”
NYT
, Dec. 1, 1900, 16.

9
William Welch and Jay F. Schamberg,
Acute Contagious Diseases
(Philadelphia: Lea Brothers & Co., 1905), 160. For the state-of-the-art scientific knowledge about smallpox, as it existed in the United States circa 1900, see Surgeon General Walter Wyman's “Précis Upon the Diagnosis and Treatment of Smallpox,”
PHR
, 14 (Jan. 6, 1899), 37–49. The authoritative modern treatise on the subject is F. Fenner et al.,
Smallpox and Its Eradication
(Geneva: World Health Organization, 1988). See also Ian Glynn and Jenifer Glynn,
The Life and Death of Smallpox
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); D. A. Henderson,
Smallpox: The Death of a Disease
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), esp. 34.

10
“Fighting the Smallpox.”

11
On the germ theory and its reception in the United States, see Nancy Tomes,
The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

12
“The Spread of Small-pox by Tramps,”
Lancet
, Feb. 13, 1904, 446–47. See also “Smallpox and Tramps,”
JAMA
, 22 (1894): 635.

13
“Smallpox on West Side.” “Fighting the Smallpox.” “Smallpox up the State,”
NYT
, Jan. 4, 1901, 3. “New York,”
PHR
, 16 (Feb. 8, 1901): 238–39. See W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Cayton,
An American Health Dilemma: A Medical History of African Americans and the Problem of Race
, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2000, 2002).

14
“Fighting the Smallpox.” “Race Riot on West Side,”
NYT
, Aug. 16, 1900, 1.

15
“Forty Smallpox Cases,”
NYT
, Dec. 5, 1900, 5; “Smallpox Case in Hoboken,”
NYT
, Dec. 3, 1900, 5. “The Smallpox Epidemic,”
NYT
, Dec. 4, 1900, 8.

16
“Fighting the Smallpox.” “Two New Smallpox Cases,”
NYT
, Dec. 7, 1900, 2. “Smallpox Still Spreading,”
NYT
, Dec. 15, 1900, 6.

17
“Smallpox Epidemic.”

18
“Smallpox Epidemic.” “Topics of the Times,”
NYT
, Dec. 12, 1900, 8. See Michael Willrich,
City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

19
NOBOH 1900–01
, 23.
PBOH 1902
, 38. Michael R. Albert et al., “The Last Smallpox Epidemic in Boston and the Vaccination Controversy, 1901–1903,”
NEJM
, 344 (1901), 375.
NYCBOH 1901
, 7–9, 56.
NYCBOH 1902
, 8–9.
NYCBOH 1903
, 8, 238. See James Nevins Hyde, “The Late Epidemic of Smallpox in the United States,”
PSM,
59 (Oct. 1901): 557–67; and Charles Fletcher Scott, “The Fight Against Smallpox,”
Ainslee's Magazine,
July 1902, 540–45.

20
USSGPHMHS 1898
, 598
. USSGPHMHS 1901
, 15.
USSGPHMHS 1903, 72
.
USSGPHMHS 1904
, 19. The Service fiscal year ran from July 1 to June 30. On underreporting, see
USSGPHMHS 1899
, 755–56
; USSGPHMHS 1910
, 189. “Echoes and News,”
MN
, Sept. 21, 1901, 470. “The number of cases notified each year represents at most 20% of those that actually occurred; many patients did not see a physician and many others who did were not reported as having smallpox.” Fenner et al.,
Smallpox and Its Eradication
, 329. From my own research, I judge Fenner's 20 percent figure to be very conservative.

21
USSGPHMHS 1903,
72.
USCB 1900
, Vol. 4—
Vital Statistics Part II, Statistics of Death
, 228.

22
Welch and Schamberg,
Acute Contagious Diseases
, 207–8. Charles V. Chapin, “Variation in Type of Infectious Disease as Shown by the History of Smallpox in the United States, 1895–1912
,” Journal of Infectious Diseases
, 13 (1913), 194.

23
Pamela Sankar et al., “Public Mistrust: The Unrecognized Risk of the CDC Smallpox Vaccination Program,”
American Journal of Bioethics
, 3 (2003), esp. W22. Edward A. Belongia and Allison Naleway, “Smallpox Vaccine: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,”
Clinical Medicine and Research
, 1 (2003): 87–92. Vincent A. Fulginiti et al., “Smallpox Vaccination: A Review, Part II. Adverse Effects,”
Clinical Infectious Diseases
, 37 (2003): 251–71. Welch and Schamberg,
Acute Contagious Diseases
, 58–83.

24
The literature on American antivaccinationism is growing, and it is no longer easy to dismiss the movement, as John Duffy once did, as “filled with cranks, extremists, and charlatans.”
History of Public Health in New York City,
152
.
See, esp., James Colgrove, “‘Science in a Democracy': The Contested Status of Vaccination in the Progressive Era and the 1920s,”
Isis
, 96 (2005): 167–91; idem,
State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Nadav Davidovitch, “Negotiating Dissent: Homeopathy and Antivaccinationism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in
The Politics of Healing: Histories of Alternative Medicine in Twentieth-Century North America
, ed. Robert D. Johnston (New York: Routledge, 2004), 11–28; Robert D. Johnston,
The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 177–220; idem, “Contemporary Anti-Vaccination Movements in Historical Perspective,” in Johnston, ed.,
Politics of Healing
, 259–86. Martin Kaufman, “The American AntiVaccinationists and Their Arguments,”
BHM
, 50 (1976): 553–68; Judith Walzer Leavitt,
The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 76–121. On England, see Nadja Durbach,
Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907
(Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2005). For an overview, see Arthur Allen,
Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

25
Chapin, “Variation in Type,” 194.

26
“The Vaccination Question and the Purity of Vaccine,”
Therapeutic Gazette
, 26 (1902): 98–99.

27
For an excellent revision of the conventional periodization of free speech, see David M. Rabban,
Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Holmes to Hand, June 24, 1918, in Gerald Gunther, “Learned Hand and the Origins of Modern First Amendment Doctrine: Some Fragments of History,”
Stanford Law Review
, 27 (1975), Appendix, 757.

28
Michael Willrich, “‘The Least Vaccinated of Any Civilized Country': Personal Liberty and Public Health in the Progressive Era,”
Journal of Policy History
, 20 (2008): 76–93.

1
Henry F. Long, “Smallpox in Iredell County,”
NCBOH 1897–98
, 208.

2
U.S. Census Bureau,
Twelfth Census of the United States
(1900): Schedule No. 1—Population, Iredell County, North Carolina. “Dr. John F. Long Dead,”
CO
, Apr. 29, 1899, 4. Federal Writers' Project,
North Carolina: A Guide to the Old North State
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), 71–78, 401–7. Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome,
North Carolina: The History of a Southern State
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 481–83.

3
Long, “Smallpox in Iredell County,” 214. My account of Harvey Perkins's case also draws upon “From Bulletin, February 1898,” in
NCBOH 1897–98
, 82–85; C. P. Wertenbaker, “Smallpox at Statesville, N.C.,”
PHR
, 13 (Jun. 24, 1898), 634–35; and “Harvey Perkins Dead,”
CO
, Feb. 22, 1898, 6.

4
Long, “Smallpox in Iredell County,” 208.

5
USSGPHMHS 1898,
627, 598–99. “Warning Against Smallpox,” Mar. 25, 1898, in
KBOH 1898–99,
23. C.P. Wertenbaker, “Investigation of Smallpox at Columbia and Sumter, S.C.,”
PHR,
13 (May 13, 1898), 470. See “From Bulletin, February 1898,” in
NCBOH 1897–98
, 82; “Smallpox in the United States as Reported to the Supervising Surgeon-General United States Marine-Hospital Service, December 29, 1896, to December 31, 1897,”
PHR
, 12 (Dec. 31, 1897), 1421–22; C.P. Wertenbaker, “Smallpox at Middleborough, Ky.,”
PHR
, 13 (Mar. 25, 1898), 273–74. See also W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton,
An American Health Dilemma
,
Vol. 1: A Medical History of African Americans and the Problem of Race: Beginnings to 1900
(New York: Routledge, 2000), 322–414.