Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [139]
Improvements to the typical pesthouse came only on those rare occasions when a well-to-do smallpox patient was confined in one. The American pesthouse was, without apologies, a class institution—the medical equivalent of steerage. Pesthouses were designed for the isolation and treatment of smallpox patients who lived in tenements and other dwellings too crowded to allow for their isolation at home. By long practice, affluent members of the community who lived in spacious quarters, at some remove from other dwellings, were entitled to convalesce at home. Health officials who failed to heed this commonly recognized American practice risked litigation and political censure. When Mary Kirk of Aiken, South Carolina, returned from missionary work in Brazil with a case of leprosy, the board of health ordered her removed from her house in the heart of the city to the four-room pesthouse by the city dump. Kirk sued. A “woman of culture and refinement” had no business in the pesthouse, a place “coarse and comfortless, used only for the purpose of incarcerating negroes having smallpox and other dangerous and infectious diseases.” Awakened to Kirk’s plight, the city council promised to build her a “comfortable cottage” on the outskirts of town, “supplied with all modern conveniences.” Meanwhile, a circuit judge issued an order, forbidding the board from removing Kirk to the pesthouse. Calling this “an exceptional case,” the state supreme court affirmed that action.74
The poorest members of an American community were not only the ones most likely to be sent to the pesthouse; they were also the people most likely to have one opened up in their neighborhood. Best public health practices called for locating a pesthouse at a safe remove from the local population. Usually, pesthouses were located on the outskirts of town. In some places, state law forbade public health boards to erect pesthouses too close to other dwellings. There seemed to be sound science behind such rules. While most public health officials believed smallpox contagion could not be carried through the air more than two hundred feet without being destroyed by oxidation or dilution, the Journal of the American Medical Association conceded, “This belief is purely empiric; there are no scientific data for its foundation.” In one 1903 study, an English health officer suggested that one “smallpox ship,” a floating pesthouse moored on the Thames, had caused an epidemic in a village half a mile away. As the London Times said, “smallpox hospitals may become sources of serious danger to the unprotected populations in their vicinity.”75
That sense of danger made a pesthouse, in one medical writer’s estimation, “the most unpopular neighbor that a man could have.” Health officers seeking sites for a new pesthouse were turned back by shotgun-wielding farmers in Durham, North Carolina; writ-bearing “taxpayers” in Omaha, Nebraska; petition-signing citizens in Houston; and blaze-setting residents in Union County, Kentucky. In Bradford, Pennsylvania, three hundred men and women burned down a vacant schoolhouse that local officials had turned into a pesthouse. In Turtle Creek, eight miles outside of Pittsburgh, a “Quaker mob,” two thousand in number, rioted to prevent the board of health from trying the same thing. Firemen turned their hoses on the unruly Friends.76
Whether the agitators were immigrant laborers or white “taxpayers,” whether they favored the axe or the writ, collective action to keep out the kept-outs had an inherently conservative aspect. These turf defenders did not necessarily object to the pesthouse as a political response to contagious disease. In most cases, their quarrel would evaporate if the government chose another site—somebody else’s backyard. Grievances and interests varied. Property owners feared that a pesthouse in the neighborhood would diminish real estate values. Poor residents protested the endangerment to their health as well as the constant reminder that they