March 6 is the anniversary of two events that look like an evil irony against the backdrop of the coronavirus outbreak. Exactly 210 years ago, in 1810, Illinois became the first American state to introduce mandatory vaccinations. And 120 years ago, in 1900, the first American epidemic of bubonic plague began in San Francisco. With the first event, everything is already clear: for two centuries the obscurantists have not got used to vaccinations, but the second is worth telling separately. The story there resembles a thriller and almost ended in disaster.
Chinatown. 1900s.
There have been 3 pandemics of the bubonic plague in human history
The first happened in the V-VIII centuries - the so-called "Justinian's plague", which halved the population of Byzantium. The second is the same "Black Death" that devastated medieval Europe. The third global epidemic began relatively recently, around 1885, in the Chinese province of Yunnan. Globalization, ships and migrations then allowed the plague to spread to all inhabited continents in a matter of years. Just a few years after the outbreak in China, it was already raging in India and Hawaii (then they were not yet in the US). And in 1900 she reached America.
The first people infected with the plague reached the states 9 months before the outbreak. These were two Japanese who, like hares, made their way onto the Nippon Harry steamer from Hong Kong and jumped overboard, hoping to reach the shore. A few days later, their bodies with traces of the disease were fished out near Angel Island, in the San Francisco Bay. However, these two did not cause the epidemic. American doctors knew what was happening in China and kept everyone who sailed from Asia in strict quarantine. What they didn’t know yet was that the plague was spreading by fleas and rats that come on the steamers.
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March 6, 1900, in the Year of the Rat, the first plague was found in San Francisco itself
It turned out to be a 41-year-old owner of a woodworking workshop named Vinh Chu Kinh, a native of China, who at that time had lived in San Francisco for 16 years. He was a bachelor and lived in a basement room near the Red Light District. So, all the time, while he was suffering from the plague, local doctors, who decided that he just had gonorrhea, treated him, to put it mildly, incorrectly. The suspicious corpse delivered to the police station caught the eye of a government surgeon, and he performed an autopsy, which finally convinced him that he was a victim of the plague.
City doctors sounded the alarm. Responsible for the health of the people of San Francisco, Dr. Joseph Quignon has done a great job of isolating foci of infection. He convinced city officials to quarantine Chinatown and even begged them to spend part of the budget on advanced plague vaccines invented by Russian doctor Voldemar Khavkin. Vaccines already in 1897 existed in the form of a prototype and managed to save Bombay from disaster. But the San Francisco authorities considered them an untested tool and a waste of money.
Joseph Quignon.
And soon in the newspapers and in medical circles, they began to persecute Quignon himself. The fact is that in 1900, 16% of the city's total population and 90% of the workforce that built the Transcontinental Railroad were Chinese. The Chinatown quarantine, in which 250 thousand people lived at the time, would have resulted in enormous losses for industrialists and business tycoons.
An anti-plague campaign was organized, and Joseph Quignon was accused of spreading false rumors for personal gain. The Governor of California, Henry Gage, personally made a statement that there never was and never will be a plague in his state. Anti-plague bravado reached the point that San Francisco actually dispersed the medical staff - allegedly budget money is wasted on these alarmists.
It all sounds crazy, but at that time there was an absurd racist stereotype, according to which whites, as stronger and more spiritually developed people, do not suffer from the shameful sores of Asians - like the plague. As you can see, the "spiritually developed people" did not burden themselves with the memory of the "Black Death", which carried away 25 million people in the Middle Ages.
A year later, about a hundred people have died from the bubonic plague in Chinatown
Practically no measures were taken on this matter - after all, the governor issued a decree according to which there is no plague in California. Fortunately, the San Francisco doctors did not sit idle and tried to reach the highest authorities. As a result, they reached President McKinley himself, and only with his filing began to apply measures to combat the epidemic. The vigorous military doctor Rupert Blue was sent to San Francisco to replace the slandered and almost driven to suicide Joseph Quignon, whose forces managed to overcome the plague.
Rupert Blue.
Blue got down to business with the army fuse. Chinatown has been quarantined again. Suspicious shops, taverns, brothels and other suspicious crowded places, where there could be rats, were closed. The earthen floors of buildings were poured with concrete, and concrete and stone floors were treated with lye. A rat hunt has begun in the area. The rodents were investigated by tracking the spread of the plague across areas. The blocks occupied by plague rats were additionally cordoned off, creating a kind of quarantine in quarantine.
Thanks to all these measures, the outbreak of bubonic plague was localized, and soon it completely disappeared. However, the city was declared free from disease only in 1908. However, cases of infection are still noted in the United States - rats that sailed on steamers from China infected autochthonous gophers. Even in 2016 and 2017, there were cases of infection in New Mexico: several people were infected, one of them even died. So the plague that began with Vinh Chu Kin was never defeated.
Vivisectors from San Francisco are studying rats for contamination. 1900s.
v The history of the epidemic in San Francisco is a perfect example of how the greed of corrupt officials, incompetent politicians, corrupt media and domestic racism can contribute to a pandemic. And unfortunately, nothing has changed in 120 years.
Author: Vladimir Brovin
