American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [38]
By nightfall, Edson’s team had inspected residents at all eight tenements and diagnosed nearly seventy with typhus fever, including Fayer Mermer and two of her children. These men, women, and children were then escorted to the foot of East 16th Street at the East River where, in six separate trips, they were forcibly removed to the city’s quarantine hospital on North Brother Island, off the Bronx coast. Unwanted in Russia, Turkey, and France, these poor individuals were hastily and roughly herded into quarantine and must have wondered whether they were even welcome in America.
Within two days, every Russian Jewish immigrant in the city from the Massilia was located. While those with symptoms were sent to North Brother Island, Massilia passengers without symptoms, and anyone else who had lodged in the same tenements as those afflicted with the disease, were rounded up and placed in temporary quarantine at two boardinghouses at 5 Essex Street and 42 East 12th Street, with police stationed outside to prevent anyone from entering or leaving. Health officials fumigated the empty lodging houses by burning sulfur in iron receptacles suspended in water, with the steam aiding the distribution of the sulfur. The rooms were then aired out and scrubbed with a disinfectant of bichloride of mercury.
Meanwhile, the Massilia was at sea heading back to Marseilles. On the return trip, the ship’s fireman, baker, and several sailors came down with serious fevers and delirium, all symptoms of typhus. They survived the trip back to France, but it is unclear what happened to these crew members after they landed.
Edson’s next task was to track down the 457 Italians who had also entered the country on the Massilia. Unlike the Jewish immigrants, who nearly all stayed in Manhattan, as many as a hundred Italians were already scattered across the nation, some as far away as Chicago, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Bryan, Texas.
Health officials in Trenton, New Jersey, were able to track down two of the Massilia’s Italian passengers and bring them by cattle car to Edson’s office in New York for inspection. Edson was unhappy with the Jersey officials, although it is not clear whether he was more concerned about the forcible taking of the Italians or the fact that potential typhus carriers were brought into the city.
However, only three of the Massilia Italians were eventually found to have the disease. The Italians were lucky to have been almost entirely segregated from Jewish passengers throughout the entire twenty-threeday journey, mingling only when they were transferred by ferry to Ellis Island.
Edson and his staff, with the help of the United Hebrew Charities, had acted quickly and aggressively. “I do not believe there is the slightest danger of an epidemic. We have the situation entirely in our hands,” the young doctor predicted. In addition to the vigorous actions of Edson’s office, Dr. William Jenkins, the health officer of the Port of New York, ordered that all ships with Russian Jewish passengers be held in quarantine, despite the fact that the typhus among the Massilia passengers originated in Turkey, not Russia. Even so, seven cases of typhus would be detected among incoming immigrants at quarantine in the coming months.
Despite his actions, Edson could not completely prevent the spread of disease to other city residents. Less than three weeks after the arrival of the Massilia, a carpenter named Max Busch took sick at his Bowery lodging house. He was diagnosed with typhus and taken to North Brother Island. Each day seemed to bring more stories about more typhus cases, with victims being discovered as far away as Providence, Rhode Island; Newburgh, New York; Baltimore, Maryland; and even St. Louis.
Meanwhile still more cases of typhus fever were being discovered