Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [109]
The American newspapers followed the Camden vaccine investigation like a criminal trial. The story certainly had the elements of a good police procedural: dead schoolchildren, intimations of a corporate cover-up, and men in laboratory coats keeping a sober vigil over culture dishes and white rats.
To lead its investigation, the Camden Board of Health secured the services of a young Philadelphia physician named Albert C. Barnes. A brilliant and eccentric man who never shrank from a fight, Barnes grew up in the hardscrabble section of South Philadelphia known as “The Neck.” Educated at Philadelphia’s renowned Central High, he paid his way through the University of Pennsylvania Medical School by boxing and playing semiprofessional baseball. An M.D. at twenty, he studied chemistry at the University of Berlin (and later at Heidelberg). Returning to Philadelphia in 1896, Barnes began working as a consulting chemist for Mulford Company and quickly rose to a full-time position as advertising and sales manager. Placing a Mulford man in charge of an investigation of Mulford products may seem scandalous today. But the move raised few eyebrows at a time when business, medicine, and public health authority often moved in unison. (Not long after the Camden episode, Barnes began amassing his own pharmaceutical fortune by inventing, with a German colleague, the antiseptic Argyrol; he spent that fortune building one of the great private collections of modern French art, the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania.)56
Barnes’s unique combination of talents made him an able defender of the Camden Board of Health and Mulford. The doctor traveled to New York to keep the city’s leading papers and their wire services apprised of the ongoing investigation. Barnes pressed the point that the same virus had been used on a million people living within thirty miles of Philadelphia, “and few, if any, fatal results were reported.” The Tribune praised the board’s man: “Dr. Barnes, the expert employed by the authorities of Camden to look into this trouble, throws a flood of light on its origin.” Papers that a few days earlier had impugned Mulford vaccine now lingered over local factors: Camden’s dry weather, dusty streets, filthy children, and negligent parents. As Barnes told his audience, the fatal cases had occurred “among the lower class of people, who by their own carelessness poisoned the wounds with tetanus, or lockjaw, bacteria.” The vaccine and the physicians who used it were “perfectly blameless.” The Sun, one of the first newspapers to implicate Mulford, now told its readers that tetanus was simply “in the air,” just waiting for “any cut or scratch . . . to give it a lodging place.” It was “highly unfortunate,” the paper added, “that a period of prevalence of tetanus germs should have coincided with a period of vaccination.” The chemist cum adman had sold the press the oldest story in the annals of public health: the poor begot filth, and filth begot disease.57
The Camden Board of Health finally released its full report, on November 29, 1901. By then all of the major findings had already been delivered by Barnes to the New York papers. The terse report combined bacteriology and epidemiology with an older emphasis on atmospheric and environmental factors. The board had tracked down samples of the various makes of vaccine used in the city and sent them to the New Jersey state bacteriologist. Laboratory tests failed to detect tetanus in the samples. Meanwhile, physicians at Camden’s Cooper Hospital had used vaccine purchased from fifteen separate Camden pharmacies to inoculate white rats, known to be highly susceptible to tetanus. Not one developed the disease. Epidemiological evidence supported the laboratory data. According to standard medical treatises, acute tetanus occurred within five to nine days after the introduction of bacilli in the body. But the Camden children had not fallen ill for about three