American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [37]
Considering the traumas of their nearly yearlong trek, it is no surprise that many of the Jewish migrants succumbed to illness. Twenty-three-year-old Julia Hoch, for example, suffered from uterine hemorrhaging on the trip, leading ship doctors to prescribe a treatment of “purgative clysters [enemas] two times a day for obstinate constipation, hot sedative vaginal injections. Internally, a solution of extract of ergot in cognac and peppermint water, strengthening nutrition.”
Despite the treatment, Hoch somehow managed to recover. Young Isaac Holinsky was not so lucky. Seven days out from Marseilles, the nine-year-old Russian boy became afflicted with chronic nephritis, a kidney condition. Doctors subjected him to “a milk diet, to constant applications for wet hot flaxseed poultices on the renal region and on the chest.” The treatment did not work, and four days later Isaac passed away, his body thrown overboard “with all due formality of a sea burial,” according to the ship’s log.
When the ship finally arrived in New York Harbor, Weber made sure that the sick immigrants were immediately taken to the Ellis Island hospital. Besides the sick passengers, officials put aside nearly seventy other Massilia immigrants for further inspection, fearing that their poverty would likely lead to their becoming public charges.
Despite these concerns, nearly all of the 270 Russian immigrants were eventually allowed to land, thanks to a sympathetic ruling by Colonel Weber and the intervention of another Jewish aid society. In the cases of those suspected of not meeting inspection standards, Weber accepted the posting of bonds by the United Hebrew Charities, which then placed the immigrants in boardinghouses on the Lower East Side. Although a few of Massilia’s Jewish passengers scattered across the country after leaving Ellis Island, most landed in this growing Jewish ghetto.
The story of the Massilia should have ended there. Colonel Weber’s charity would have gone unnoticed. The poor treatment of the sickly Jewish travelers by ship officials would have been largely ignored, except for a mild reprimand. On the following day, more ships would have entered New York Harbor, bringing with them more personal stories and more decisions for immigration officials. But the Massilia would not fade so quickly into the city’s past.
On the morning of February 11, 1892, Dr. Cyrus Edson, the chief sanitary inspector of the New York City Health Department, arrived at his office to find four postcards waiting for him. All four were sent by Dr. Leo Dann of the United Hebrew Charities, and dealt with four cases of typhus fever that Dann had discovered among Massilia passengers at a boardinghouse at 42 East 12th Street on the Lower East Side.
Often confused with typhoid fever, typhus had similar symptoms, including high fever, dizziness, muscle ache, nausea, and the outbreak of a reddish-purple rash. Typhus was a fast-spreading disease that had threatened the city in previous years. In 1851, almost a thousand New Yorkers had died from the disease, but since 1887, only five people had succumbed to typhus. City officials were anxious to prevent any new outbreak, so Edson and his staff made the trek that afternoon to the East 12th Street tenement where they found not four but fifteen cases of what Edson later called “that most dreaded of all contagious diseases.”
The thirty-five-year-old Edson, a direct descendant of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, was also the politically savvy son of a former New York City mayor with strong ties to Tammany Hall. Now Edson was in charge of a potential public health crisis, in a city and a nation already uneasy about immigration.
It quickly became apparent that the disease could be traced to the Massilia. Edson and his team of inspectors, with