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stiffness in his jaw. Someone called for Dr. Bushey, who as the Hazeltons’ family physician had vaccinated the boy about three weeks earlier. Never had Bushey seen a patient suffer such “terrible agony.” Less than twenty hours after Thomas took to his bed, he was dead. According to the New York Tribune, now covering the Camden story, Bushey moved to set the record straight. “[T]he boy’s death was not the result of vaccination,” the coroner declared. But Thomas’s parents had doubts. Mr. Hazelton said he might seek legal advice. He wanted to know whether the vaccine used on his boy was pure and, if it was not, whether the manufacturer could be held responsible for his death.20

The next day, November 13, tetanus struck nine-year-old Anna Cochran, the daughter of a teamster. She had been vaccinated about three weeks earlier. The story of little Anna’s courage, as convulsions shook her small frame, was, as the New York Sun told it, “particularly sad.” Just before she died, on November 14, Anna “turned to her parents and whispered through her clenched teeth: ‘Don’t worry, papa and mamma, I’m going to get well.’”21

As parents’ initial suspicions swelled into a panic, Dr. Davis of the board of health made a statement to the press. Camden’s most prominent physician attributed the tetanus cases to a period of unusually dry and dusty weather. “I am satisfied that none of them have been caused by vaccination,” said Davis, “but by the tetanus germs in the air.” Local physicians formed a unified public front with Davis and the board, insisting that the vaccine they had used was safe. But a few expressed doubts. Dr. Dowling Benjamin, considered a local authority on tetanus, broke ranks. “This talk of germs being in the air is all absurd,” he said. “If that were so there would be more lockjaw than there now is. I think it is highly probable the tetanus germs were in the vaccine tubes before they were sealed.”22

Local newspapermen turned up three more dead children whose deaths by tetanus had previously gone unreported. Eleven-year-old Anna Warrington, the only child of an illiterate ship carpenter and his wife, had died on November 8, after suffering in “great agony.” Six-year-old Frank Cavallo, the child of Italian immigrants (his father was an illiterate rag dealer), had been vaccinated in Philadelphia during a visit to his grandmother; he died three weeks later, on November 9. The other new victim, unnamed, lay buried in the Evergreen Cemetery, believed to have died on November 5. A growing distrust of the authorities strengthened the public’s fears. Why hadn’t public health officials reported these cases earlier?23

On the night of November 15, Lillian Carty gave up her fight. The doctors had done all they could, the newspapers said, administering antitoxin and trying to ease her suffering as her muscles contracted. “Conscious through it all,” the New York Tribune reported, “she suffered frightfully for two days.” Her parents, exhausted from the long ordeal at her bedside, were prostrated in their grief. Remarkably, William Brower was still alive, but in critical condition. The bad news kept coming. The day Lillian died, another child had been diagnosed with tetanus following vaccination. Her name was Mamie Winters. She was eight years old.24

Camden was now in a full panic, and regional newspapers had taken notice. With the tetanus outbreak now weighing far more heavily on people’s minds than the continuing smallpox epidemic, city health officials and parents searched, in their own ways, for connections between the lockjaw cases. They found few. The children ranged in age from six to sixteen. No two of them lived in the same ward of the city. None had visited the free vaccination station, and no more than two had been vaccinated by the same physician. As the Camden Board of Health saw things, though, there were significant commonalities. Board representatives observed that most of the children were from “lower class” families (a dubious claim, as Hazelton’s father was a shipping clerk; Brower’s, a plumber; Carty’s, a railroad clerk);