Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
ONE - BEGINNINGS
TWO - THE MILD TYPE
THREE - WHEREVER WERTENBAKER WENT
FOUR - WAR IS HEALTH
FIVE - THE STABLE AND THE LABORATORY
SIX - THE POLITICS OF TIGHT SPACES
SEVEN - THE ANTIVACCINATIONISTS
EIGHT - SPEAKING LAW TO POWER
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
Also by Michael Willrich
City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago
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First published in 2011 by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Michael Willrich, 2011
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Willrich, Michael.
Pox : an American history / Michael Willrich.
p. ; cm.—(Penguin history of American life)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-47622-2
1. Smallpox—Epidemiology—United States. 2. Smallpox—History—United States. 3. Epidemics—United States—19th Century—History. 4. Epidemics—United States—20th Century—History. I. Title. II. Series: Penguin history of American life.
[DNLM: 1. Smallpox—epidemiology—United States. 2. Smallpox—history—United States. 3. Disease Outbreaks—United States. 4. History, 19th Century—United States. 5. History, 20th Century—United States. WC 590] RA644.S6W.5’210973—dc22 2010034544
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For Wendy
PROLOGUE
NEW YORK, 1900
Manhattan’s West Sixty-ninth Street no longer runs from West End Avenue to the old New York Central Railroad tracks at the Hudson River’s edge. In the space now occupied by aging high-rise condominium towers and their long shadows, there once stood a low-slung street of tenements and houses. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was said to be the most thickly populated block in the most thickly populated city in the United States of America. Someone called it “All Nations Block,” and, being a pretty fair description of the place, for a while the name stuck.
A brisk walk from the fashionable hotels of Central Park West, All Nations Block was a rough world of day laborers, bricklayers, blacksmiths, stonemasons, elevator runners, waiters, janitors, domestic servants, bootblacks, tailors, seamstresses, the odd barber or grocer, and, far outnumbering them all, children. Each morning, the children streamed east to Public School No. 94 at Amsterdam Avenue or to the crowded kindergarten run by the