Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [112]
At the Marine-Hospital Service’s Hygienic Laboratory in Washington, Milton Joseph Rosenau was wondering the same thing. In the winter of 1901–2, he determined to find out, secretly buying up samples from eight different vaccine makers on the open market and taking them back to his laboratory. The thirty-three-year-old scientist knew Philadelphia and its environs well: a native of the city, like Albert Barnes and Joseph McFarland, he had received his education in its public schools and at the University of Pennsylvania. After completing his medical training in 1889, Rosenau joined the Marine-Hospital Service, serving as a quarantine officer in San Francisco and, at the close of the Spanish-American War, in Santiago. After a decade in the field, he took over the Hygienic Laboratory, which he transformed from a one-man outfit into a leading government scientific institution. A brilliant scientist with the heart of a reformer, Rosenau’s scientific interests ranged across bacteriology, chemistry, and pharmacology. As early as April 1900, Wertenbaker had focused Rosenau’s attention on the problem of vaccine purity by sending him some points and lymph for testing. A few teeming cultures and one dead mouse later, Rosenau confirmed Wertenbaker’s suspicion that the dry points on sale in the South crawled with pathogens. In a private letter, Surgeon General Wyman had cautioned Wertenbaker against reading too much into Rosenau’s report. “The work confirms the well known fact that glycerinized lymph is superior to dry points and no other conclusion should be drawn from the report,” Wyman advised.66
A broader conclusion was inescapable after Rosenau tested the vaccine samples he collected on the open market, at the height of the national vaccine crisis, in the winter of 1901–2. The federal scientist presented his preliminary findings to the New York Academy of Medicine in February 1902. Like Walter Reed before him, Rosenau found a great unevenness in the quality of vaccine on the market. On average, each nonglycerinated dry point Rosenau examined had 4,809 bacterial colonies, while the glycerinated lymph averaged 2,865 colonies per sample. (The journal Pediatrics recoiled at this “ridiculous amount of impurity.”) The contaminants included staphylococci, pus cocci, and an assortment of molds common to the hay and dust of the stable. What made Rosenau’s report news was his argument that vaccine makers placed too much confidence in the germicidal powers of glycerin. The makers had “become careless of contamination, trusting to the glycerin to purify their product.” And in their haste to meet the high demand for vaccine during the national wave of smallpox epidemics, makers had not given the glycerin sufficient time to work, flooding the market with “green” virus.67
Rosenau did not shy away from the political implications of his data. He told Wyman, “Our results so far have plainly indicated that the manufacture of vaccines is too important a subject to leave to commercial enterprise without restrictions.” Many in the medical profession agreed. As the Medical News observed, “The enforcement of government inspection with power to prevent the sale of improper material seems to be the desideratum.”68
Rosenau’s paper accomplished what only a federal report could do. Coming so fast on the heels of St. Louis and Camden, it persuaded American doctors and public health officials, working in local communities across the United States, that defective vaccine was a national problem that required a national solution. Many had seen the hideous effects of bad vaccine in their own patients, and their consciences troubled them. “The inoculation of such vaccine is followed by severe reaction, including fever, erysipelatous dermatitis, a deep, sloughing sore, and great swelling of the arm,” the Cleveland Journal of Medicine reported. And after all of that, some vaccine still produced “no immunity to subsequent smallpox.” The Sanitarian , a leading voice of the public health profession, lamented “the poisonous character of much of the vaccine