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The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco

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Plague is a fascinating subject because it is so utterly awful and so feared. Marilyn Chase's book not only explains this ancient (and current) disease, it is also a social history of San Francisco at the turn of the century. The disease first struck working-poor Chinese, and the rich white establishment wrongly figured they could stamp it out by being wretched to this minority population. When that didn't work, they denied that plague existed and impugned the public health doctor who kept insisting that it did.
Chase shows the official conspiracy--including the city's press--that not only kept information from the public but actively lied to San Franciscans. Ultimately, she shows that the battle to rid San Francisco of plague was won by persistence, diplomacy and sharing the nitty-gritty facts with the public.
Those who think the plague is a disease of the past, or at least of the Third World, might be interested to read the epilogue. It shows that plague is carried by rodents of the American West, and contains an account of a plague case in New Mexico in 2000.

If you know anything about medieval history, you know about the Black Death, the mysterious plague that killed off a third of the population of Europe. It may be surprising to learn that bubonic plague has made its mark on modern America. In 1900 in San Francisco's Chinatown, Wong Chut King died of a precipitous and horrifying illness, starting with a rush of fever and chills, continuing to agonizing back pains, painful lumps in the groin and armpits, bleeding, coma, and ending in death. It seemed to be the plague, and it seemed to city government the worst possible news, not because a resident of Chinatown had died, but because it meant bad economic prospects if the cause of death was found out. The amazing story of the arrival of bubonic plague in America and the difficulties involved in its eventual control is told in _The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco_ (Random House) by Marilyn Chase. It is a surprisingly exciting tale, with lessons for our own century.

The thousands of citizens of Chinatown were worried that discovery of the plague in their midst would only increase the considerable discrimination against them. They were right; the city quarantined Chinatown, eventually with barbed wire, arbitrarily zigzagged to exclude white stores and churches. Joseph Kinyoun, the federal medical officer for the city, tried to impose the quarantine and force vaccines, but Chinese community groups were able to have them struck down as racially discriminatory. Kinyoun was opposed by civic leaders fearing an economic impact if the plague became well known, and was eventually run out of town. His successor, Rupert Blue, had a little more effect, with some control of the plague before 1906, but then came the earthquake. It shook thousands of rats from their dens, rats which flourished in the broken sewer systems and the mounting garbage, and which successfully colonized the refugee camps. It was after the earthquake that Blue was at his most active, mercilessly driving his team of doctors, diggers and rat-catchers. He replaced wooden structures with concrete ones. He put a bounty on rats, ten cents apiece (afterwards twenty-five), and used tons of cheese every month in traps. He knew rats became disinterested in boring bait, so he included the cheese in Welsh rabbit lures, and gave them rye sandwiches with bacon. He enlisted women's organizations in lessons of housecleaning with city-cleaning in mind.

The author is a San Francisco science reporter for the _Wall Street Journal_, and knows the city's history and attitudes well. She has managed close-up views of Chinatown, the rats' importation by steamship from the infected port of Honolulu, and the rattery where rat autopsies and flea combings were done. There are lessons here for the next inevitable scourge. Racializing the disease and scapegoating its victims was a complete failure. The wide broadcast of scientific knowledge is our greatest epidemiological weapon. Unbiased reporting of facts without unnecessary terror but with necessary alarm enlists the aid of the public. It is probably not a coincidence that when hit with another plague almost a century later, when AIDS struck, San Francisco was, compared to the rest of the country, unafflicted with denial or discrimination, and gave swift and compassionate care.

This book is not only a fascinating look into the origins of the bubonic plauge in early San Francisco, tracing the disease's trek from China through Hong Kong to Chinatown in Honolulu and spreading itself in the western frontier of California; it is a view of how racism and politics affected interfered with solution. When plague first appeared in San Francisco, it struck the Chinatown area the hardest, inflaming tensions between the whites and the immigrants. When Dr. Joseph Kinyoun threatened quaratine of the entire area, the businessmen and politicians rose against him, putting the city' s profitability before the public's health. His replacement, Rupert Blue, managed the plague clean-up campaign with much diplomacy and brought about sweeping changes that not only curbed the rise of the plague, but also enhanced the city's image.

This book has it all -- poitical intrigue, racism, a disease out of control, heroes and villains. Sometimes non-fiction can be better than most novels, and in this case, it makes for a great book well worth reading.

I was raised in Contra Costa County to the east of San Francisco. And of course, we went through state history while in grade school. But not once were we told about the Plague, though we heard plenty about the earthquake and the San Andreas faultline. It came as a complete surprise to me that SF had experienced one more trauma during that decade from 1900-1910...they did not just experience the plague once, but rather a series of them. I guess with all the shipping that SF used to be known for, much of it coming from the Orient, it should not have been so unusual. Much of the area that this happened in has changed drastically over the years, including Chinatown, but I still remember going to Chinatown in the 1960s and seeing butcher shops with dead ducks hanging in the windows.

Most cities had problems with rats. If they thought SF was bad, I hate to think what Chicago was like with that city being the major one for slaughterhouses throughout the U.S., and of course, NY with all the shipping from around the world. What made SF unique is that it was relatively smaller to both NY and Chicago, and considered a clean city. I guess even after 60 years, the area was still embarrassed by their run-in with the plague and that's why we didn't get that information in school.

I love medical history, and we have several very good authors out there, with the late Roy Porter and Laurie Garret being a couple of favorites. Chase's book was alright, but did not have the writing ability of the above authors, and the book seemed dry, and very repititious at times. She obviously did her research, to the point of having the names of so many of the Chinese who died in the first wave of plague. The book just lack the feeling of urgency conveyed by other authors when dealing with epidemics.

It was a good enough book, and maybe as Chase writes more books, she'll learn to not to write as a reporter (which she is) and to develop the ability to make history of any kind exciting without having to 'make up' historical facts. Probably the best part of the book was the political and racial biases against the Chinese (again). I felt bad for their continued fight against prejudices, when they had done so much to build the West.

Karen Sadler.
Science Education,
University of Pittsburgh

If I thought too much about the language, I tended to think "who was this person's editor, and what were they drinking?" But despite the intermittent distraction, I found it fascinating. The author tells a real non-fiction story - and it measures up to a good fiction read. I'm from San Francisco, so I had an added interest in the location if not the topic, but, come on, who isn't fascinated by The Plague? The author jumped around in time in a way that had no rhyme or reason for me, but again, I wasn't more than temporarily distracted by this. Worth the time.

A thrilling drama rich with the textures and flavors of young San Francisco before, during and after the Great Quake and Fire of 1906. It is also a cautionary tale for this era of Aids, SARS, and threats of microbial warfare. Beautifully written, this is an intimate portrait of heroes and scoundrels, of those who doggedly battled against the plague and of those whose bigotry, political ambition and greed blocked the way. It is a thoroughly researched story of a very close call and a not-quite-complete victory over an enemy that still haunts us today. This book is hard to put down and its imagery lingers long after.

This new work, The Barbary Plague: The Black Death In Victorian San Francisco by Marilyn Chase will soon become the standard reference on this fascinating chapter in California history. It is the first book length study covering the two plague outbreaks which visited San Francisco between 1900 and 1909, and it stands alone in its ability to tell this story. Chases writing is wonderfully easy to read and breathes life into a history forgotten to all but a few medical historians. In addition to the excellent writing, Chases research into her subject is on par with the best academic standards. She not only has an experts grasp on the history but has brought the full force of her professional career as a science and medicine reporter with the Wall Street Journal to the telling of the tale.

In The Barbary Plague Chase is able to tell the story of the two plague outbreaks from the perspective of the two United States public health officers most intimately associated with the story, Joseph J. Kinyoun, founder of the NIH, and Rubert Blue, whos success in dealing with the 1907 plague outbreak in San Francisco lead to his elevation to the position of Surgeon General. Both men were sent by the federal government to San Francisco to fight the plague. Kinyouns career with the public health service was destroyed when his scientific professionalism clashed with the political machinery in California that was determined to bury the truth in 1900. Blues career, on the other hand, was lifted up to the heights by his ability to work the prevailing political winds of 1907 to his advantage.

Chase asserts that Blue had greater political skill than Kinyoun and that their different fates prove this out. To a certain extent I think this is true, but there were other factors at play. The political climate that the two men worked in was substantially different. Kinyoun faced a hostile political landscaped financed by a defensive business community, lead by the Southern Pacific Railroad, trying to protect its profits. To defend itself Californias business community decided to deny the existence of plague. By the time Blue faced the epidemic, the business community had come to the realization that they could not hide from the outbreak and needed to meet it head on. Where Kinyoun faced extreme hostility, Blue was, in the end, given complete cooperation. Chase describes this change in political climate, but she doesnt provide the reader with the full significance of its meaning to Kinyoun and Blue..

While this is an excellent book, it does have a few points where historians might quibble. For instance, Chase suggests that the plague was introduced to San Francisco via the rats abroad the ship Australia which arrived from Asia at the beginning of January 1900. The source for her proposition is a note in a letter written by Joseph Kinyoun to his uncle, Dr. Preston Bailhache, in August of 1900. In my own research on the topic, I had an "ahaa!" moment when I read Kinyouns suspicion about the Australia. The problem, from a historical or epidemiological perspective, is that there are so many other suspect rats from so many other ships arriving in San Francisco that it is impossible to prove.

The plague pandemic had been spreading out of China since 1894. The United States public health service, then known as the Marine Hospital Service, had taken over San Franciscos quarantine inspection in 1897 in anticipation of the plagues arrival and had been on the lookout for three years when the first case in the city was confirmed. Kinyoun certainly never officially claimed that the Australia was the source of San Franciscos plague. From an academic standpoint, other researchers who have read Kinyouns letter decided that his suspicion was unsubstantiated and would have to remain an interesting historical footnote. Chase and her publisher decided that it was tasty to be able to say that they had found that source of San Franciscos epidemic, and it makes good reading to be sure.

Quibbles aside, The Barbary Plague is peerless in its presentation of this amazing story. For history buffs and academics, Chases book sets the benchmark for telling the story of San Franciscos brush with the Black Death.

Ms. Chase has mixed a veritable cauldron of explosive subjects about which to write something fresh: politics and race in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, the just emerging discoveries about plague vectors, topped off with brand new research into the characters who stood at the center of an outbreak of plague in San Francisco's Chinatown. She recounts how the early cases were misdiagnosed or dismissed in order to prevent damage to the city's reputation, and while the descriptions of individual cases is by its nature repetitive, the story is made all the more powerful as the epidemic's toll mounts and, finally, subsides. Ms. Chase describes the anti-rat campaign and its role in beating the plague, and pinpoints the seemingly minor difference in flea types that saved us from a much worse outbreak. Ms. Chase scrupulously avoided the easy paths to sensationalism and chose to stick to the facts. For instance, she makes the point that it was evident that the number of plague victims was being undercounted due to sufferers (or bodies) being removed from the city, possibly in collusion with authorities, but steadfastly sticks only to the proven cases in proving the existence of an "epidemic". The epidemic may have been far worse than recorded. And coming just as we were avoiding travel to certain destinations because of SARS, her book is an outstanding reminder of the responsibility of public health authorities to place the public good above all else in matters of infectious disease. If you are interested in the early days of public health in the United States, or wish to draw lessons for the present, this book is a must read!

Based on the title I would not have picked this book, but it was chosen by my book club. What a pleasure to read. Well written and one of the best overviews of what San Francisco was like at the turn of the century including during the 1906 earthquake. All of the members of the book club enjoyed this book and many have recommended it to friends.

How many readers (let along how many residents of the Bay Area in California) know that The Black Death once reached epidemic proportions in San Francisco? I sure didn't.
Beginning in 1900, it erupted off and on for the next 5 yrs before public health officials finally brought it under control.
But in this very well-written and extremely well-researched 'docu-drama,' Marilyn Chase outlines how the politics of denial on many levels prevented the earlier curtailment of the outbreak. Chase, the author, puts a face on those who were involved in the cover-up, as well as those who bucked the anti-Chinese tide of the era and finally halted the spread of the disease.
The Barbary Plague launches epidemiology onto the best seller lists.