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By Root 286 0

passenger got past the U.S. government medical inspectors at Ellis Island or crossed into the city on one of its many railroad tracks, waterways, roads, footpaths, or bridges. Most New Yorkers had undergone vaccination for smallpox at one time or another—on board a steamship crossing the Atlantic, in the public schools, in the workplaces, in the city jails and asylums, or, if they possessed the means, in their own homes under the steady hand of a trusted family physician. When an isolated case of smallpox triggered a broader outbreak, the health officials took it as an unmistakable sign that the population’s level of immunity had begun to taper off, as it did every five to ten years. The time had come to sound the call for a general vaccination. “We are not afraid of smallpox,” said Dr. F. H. Dillingham of the health department, when the news broke that smallpox had reappeared on Manhattan. “With the present facilities of this department we can stamp out any disease.”5

On Thanksgiving Day, as the Columbia University football team took the field against the Carlisle Indian School and three thousand homeless people lined up for a hot dinner at the Five Points House of Industry, a vaccination squad from the health department’s Bureau of Contagious Diseases moved into West Sixty-ninth Street. The four doctors began a quiet canvass of All Nations Block, starting with the immediate neighbors of the infected children. Health department protocol called for a thorough investigation of each case, in order to trace its origin, followed by the immediate vaccination of all possible contacts. In a place as densely inhabited as All Nations Block, everyone would have to bare their arms for the vaccine.6

With a willing patient, the vaccination “operation,” as doctors called it, lasted just a minute or two. The doctor took hold of the patient’s arm, scoring the skin with a needle or lancet. He then dabbed on the vaccine, either by taking a few droplets of liquid “lymph” from a glass tube or using a small ivory “point” coated with dry vaccine. Either way, the vaccine contained live cowpox or vaccinia virus that not long before had oozed from a sore on the underside of an infected calf in a health department stable. In the coming days, the virus would produce a blisterlike vesicle at the vaccination site. In due course, the lesion would heal, leaving a permanent scar: the distinctive vaccination cicatrix. If all went well, the patient would then enjoy immunity from smallpox for five to seven years, sometimes longer. And, of course, as long as a person was immune, she could not pass along smallpox to others.7

The health department’s plan was to secure All Nations Block first and then follow the same procedure on the surrounding streets. In the coming days, health officers and police would maintain a quarantine on the block and enforce vaccination in the neighborhood schools. The health department would use all the available methods to fight the disease: total isolation of patients, quarantine of their living environment, vaccination of anyone exposed to the disease, disinfection of closed spaces and personal belongings, and close surveillance of the infected district and its residents.8

It was a sensible protocol, born of medical science and the city’s long experience with the deadliest contagious disease the world had ever known. Historically, smallpox killed 25 to 30 percent of all those whom it infected; most survivors were permanently disfigured with the dreaded pitted scars. Decades after the scientific revolution known as the germ theory of disease, biologists and doctors were still searching in their laboratories for the specific pathogen that caused smallpox. But they felt confident they had a strong understanding of the microbe’s behavior: its pathological course in the human body, its epidemiological effects in a population, and the immunological power of vaccination to prevent the virus from attacking an individual or proliferating across an entire community. According to the state-of-the-art scientific knowledge, the “infecting