Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [166]
Working in a field dominated by allopathic physicians, Spencer never severed his ties to “irregular” medicine. A onetime president of the Massachusetts Eclectic Medical Society, he remained an officer of that organization until his death in 1903. Unlike many eclectics, Spencer believed in the theory of vaccination. But he showed a marked reluctance to impose the beliefs of the mainstream medical profession upon unwilling members of the public. It is hard to imagine Spencer relishing a public confrontation with Immanuel Pfeiffer. In his interactions with Jacobson, Spencer proceeded with caution and deliberation, as he had ever since smallpox first broke out in Cambridge several months earlier.
Smallpox had already been spreading for months in Boston and other cities of eastern Massachusetts by the time Cambridge reported its first case on October 25, 1901. The outbreak, in a tenement by the Charles River, still caught the city unprepared. Despite the entreaties of the board of health—a three-member board consisting of Dr. Spencer and two laymen, lawyer William Peabody and engineer Charles Harris—the city government had balked at spending taxpayer money on precautionary measures. Cambridge had no pesthouse, and in recent years vaccination had fallen off. Harvard required all of its students and employees, from the professors to the African American waiters at Memorial Hall, to get vaccinated; during the months to come the university reported not a single case of smallpox. But Harvard and the elite bastions of Brattle Street and Avon Hill stood as islands of privileged homogeneity in a diverse city of 95,000 people that teemed with brickworks, factories, and thickly settled neighborhoods. By the end of December, the city suffered fifteen smallpox cases, three of them fatal.8
Spencer’s response was decisive but temperate. The board established a pesthouse on New Street, near the Fresh Pond marshes, and opened public vaccination stations, where thousands of citizens lined up for free vaccine. The voluntary vaccination effort hit a setback on January 4, when the Cambridge Chronicle reported that Annie Caswell, just five years old, had “died of tetanus, or lockjaw, following vaccination.” The news came less than one month after the last Camden, New Jersey, child had died from postvaccination tetanus. According to the report, the doctors who had tried to save Annie believed “the vaccine used might have been impure or that some foreign substance may have gotten into the sore.” Dr. Edwin Farnham, the chief inspector for the Cambridge Board of Health, swiftly declared his belief that vaccination could not have caused Annie’s death. There would be no investigation.9
As the outbreak of smallpox continued, with twenty-six cases and three more deaths reported during January and February 1902, the board declined to use its full powers. Spencer publicly defended his cautious quarantine policy, saying the city had “no right” to placard the home of a resident merely because she may have been exposed to smallpox. The board must be “absolutely certain” the resident had been infected. And the board held on to compulsory vaccination as a last resort.10
Spencer seemed determined to avoid the sort of public standoffs with antivaccinationists that the more aggressive actions of Durgin’s Boston board had sparked in the streets, the