Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [138]
Roseto (as the place was actually called) was a close-knit settlement of fifteen hundred people at the edge of slate quarries in eastern Pennsylvania. The place had recently been named after the hill town in southern Italy from which most of its residents had come. The incident, reported without comment in a leading American medical journal, shows the determination of one immigrant community not to let even the deadly serious matter of smallpox interfere with a proper Catholic burial for one of its members. The people of Roseto rioted. They seized the body from the police. They bore it to a sacred space, their sanctuary. They drove the police from their church and stood guard so that the proper religious rites could be performed. In doing so, they unknowingly contributed a few sentences to a swelling archive of popular opposition to public health authority at the turn of the century—an archive most officials would have agreed showed the ignorance and superstition that hindered their efforts to stamp out smallpox.70
The power to remove and isolate an infected body—whether dead or alive—was fundamental to public health. “The power of removal,” said Leroy Parker and Robert Worthington in their treatise on American public health law, “is unconditional and unqualified.” But as the tenement mothers of Italian Harlem showed Blauvelt’s vaccination corps, the power was not uncontested. The most common form of resistance was concealment, hiding sick people, sometimes entire families, from public view. When health officials and police went looking for hidden cases of smallpox—sometimes acting on a tip from suspicious neighbors, school officials, or employers—they often walked into a fight. Experienced health officers expected trouble when they came for children. Fathers and mothers responded with tears, fists, and shotguns.71
Charles Chapin of Providence, one of the more self-reflective public health officials of his era, reckoned that people had good reasons for dreading the pesthouse. For their comfort and survival, smallpox patients desperately needed attentive personal nursing in a healthy environment. A few U.S. cities—including Cleveland, Milwaukee, and the District of Columbia—built permanent smallpox isolation hospitals, modern facilities involving large public investments. Chicago spent the unheard-of sum of $83,000 on its isolation hospital, an elaborate campus of buildings on Lawndale Avenue, complete with electricity and ten acres of well-appointed grounds. But the typical American pesthouse was a crude wooden shed, built in haste and on the cheap. Most lacked plumbing, plaster, or decent furniture. They were located far from their patients’ friends and families, a hard journey over bad roads or, as in the case of Boston and New York, across water to an island.72
American newspapers were filled with pesthouse scandals. A former patient of the New Orleans pesthouse decried the “horrors” of his confinement in a shanty built upon a swamp. Salt Lake City’s pesthouse was a public “menace.” One survivor of the New York City pesthouse on North Brother Island objected to “the uncleanliness and unsanitary way in which the patients are treated,” calling the “mockery for a hospital” a poor example for its inmates. In 1901, James Kerr willingly surrendered his young smallpox-afflicted daughter to city health officials only to have her die—of tuberculosis—on North Brother Island. Adding insult to grief, the city returned to Kerr the wrong body. As Chapin recognized, the scandalous conditions of many American pesthouses lay behind much of the resistance to removal of “patients.” “It is not to be wondered at that patients and their friends resort to every deception