Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [163]
But for America’s anti-antivaccinationists, no case of smallpox was sweeter than the one that nearly killed Immanuel Pfeiffer.
The manhunt lasted five days. Only later would the public learn the details of those tense hours. The interrogation of Pfeiffer’s clerk, who insisted the doctor was away in Philadelphia. The interview with the janitor of a Charlestown apartment house, who had seen the doctor, looking weak and accompanied by an unnamed woman, exit by the back door and enter a hack. The search for the hack and its driver, who had taken Pfeiffer and his “companion” (presumed, it appears from newspaper accounts, to be his mistress) to the offices of a certain Boston doctor. The doctor’s denial that he had seen Pfeiffer. The discovery that Pfeiffer and “the woman in question” had engaged another carriage bound for Bedford, the town twenty miles northwest of Boston where Pfeiffer’s wife, Olive, and their children lived on a dairy farm he rarely visited. The health officers’ race to Bedford. The rounding up of the local selectmen. The drive to the farmhouse, where a doctor examined Pfeiffer and declared him “in a very serious condition from a thoroughly developed case of smallpox.” The announcement, by the Boston Board of Health, that Dr. Pfeiffer “probably will not recover.”81
How many had been exposed to smallpox in the days between Pfeiffer’s disappearance and the arrival of the health officials at his Bedford bedside? No one knew. Bedford officials placed the Pfeiffer farm under quarantine, ordering all on the premises vaccinated. Learning that Pfeiffer’s two daughters had been to school since his arrival, officials ordered all the town’s pupils to get vaccinated or stay home. Boston authorities tracked down the two carriages in which Pfeiffer had traveled and disinfected them. All of the residents of the Charlestown apartment house were vaccinated.
To everyone’s surprise (except perhaps his own), Immanuel Pfeiffer’s famous constitution pulled him back from the brink of death, and he began his long recovery. The race for the moral high ground began even before his survival was assured. Durgin announced that several other physicians had visited Gallop’s Island that season, and, having previously been vaccinated, none had come down with smallpox. The Boston Globe dubbed Pfeiffer “a victim of his own zeal and bravado.” The Pfeiffers’ Bedford neighbors took no pity on the man one called an “old chump.” Medical authorities across the nation reminded their publics that the moment was larger than the man. They praised Durgin for his “wisdom and his scientific foresight” in orchestrating this “object lesson” for the American people. Meanwhile, the intended recipients of that lesson—the antivaccinationists—condemned Pfeiffer, too. Boston antivaccinationist B. F. Nichols could find no sympathy for any man “who recklessly exposed himself to contagion.”82
As the days passed, the realization dawned (at least to some observers) that Pfeiffer and Durgin were a dangerous match. The episode showed how far a committed antivaccinationist and an equally determined vaccination advocate would go to make a point. The citizens of Bedford, stuck with a bill of $1,000 for containing the resulting emergency,