Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [167]
Charles E. Cate, a South End laborer, refused vaccination even as his wife lay sick in the Southampton Street pesthouse; he served fifteen days in Charlestown Jail rather than pay his $5 fine. As a force of 125 city-employed physicians moved from house to house in East Boston, vaccinating five thousand residents in a single day, a Canadian-born grocer named John H. Mugford refused to allow Dr. John Ames to vaccinate him or his daughter, Eva. Dr. Ames assured Mugford that the vaccine points he carried, on small quills, were perfectly safe. But Mugford did not relent. “I told him I studied the question too long to allow any poison to be put into my system,” the grocer testified at his trial. The court found Mugford guilty on both charges of refusing vaccination. He appealed his case to the Supreme Judicial Court.12
Even when Spencer’s Cambridge board finally took steps to enforce vaccination, it moved with an exceptional degree of caution. The board ordered vaccination on February 27, 1902. Spencer waited two more weeks before dividing the city into districts and sending seventeen physicians from house to house to vaccinate “all the inhabitants they could find.” Thousands were vaccinated in this way, while better-heeled citizens paid their family doctors to perform the procedure. For the city vaccinators, finding the inhabitants was not always easy. Some bolted. Others shooed the doctors from their doorsteps. The board compiled a catalogue, containing a card for every house in a large swath of the city. Each card listed the names of the inhabitants and the date each had last been vaccinated. Vaccine refusers were noted. Among them were Albert M. Pear, a prominent city official, and Pastor Henning Jacobson, whom Spencer visited himself. The board prosecuted no one.13
For a time, it seemed that compulsion in name only was all Cambridge would require. By the time some local residents got around to forming an antivaccination society in April, the epidemic seemed to have subsided. Vaccination slowed to a halt. With the arrival of spring, normalcy returned to Cambridge. It did not last.14
At midnight on June 5, the phone rang at Spencer’s home. The caller reported a dead body at 77 Norfolk Street. When Spencer arrived at the tenement, he was shocked at the appearance of the body—“one of the worst cases of smallpox I had ever seen.” The deceased, an African American boarder, had suffered for weeks with no medical care. Spencer examined the family that lived in the house. Three of the children had smallpox. Spencer had to assume that many in the densely populated neighborhood had been exposed. He called the undertaker, who buried the body that same night.15
Waiting out the incubation period of smallpox could be an unnerving experience. For a week, the board of health heard of no new cases. Then came the deluge: a full-blown outbreak on the blocks around 77 Norfolk Street, a section of Cambridgeport that lay just north of Massachusetts Avenue, the main road running from Central Square into Boston. Between June 14 and 28, ambulances carted nearly fifty infected adults and children to the New Street hospital. Seven from the neighborhood died. The board disinfected homes; closed schools and churches; and renewed its call for universal vaccination. In a single week, 4,000 people flocked to the free station in Central Square, just a few blocks from the infected district. Vaccinators canvassed the neighborhood, one of them vaccinating 260 people in just two days. But conflict impeded the corps’ progress. “Many refuse to be vaccinated,” the Chronicle reported, “while others evade the doctors when they call at the house.”16
The board issued another vote: all vaccine refusers would now be prosecuted. Now accompanied by police, city vaccinators were under strict