Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [33]
McCormack put Dr. Bell in charge of the vaccination corps. The medical men entered the neighborhoods with health inspectors and police in tow. The men returned to the same homes later, to make sure the vaccine took. For some residents, the vaccine took too well. In February and March, the newspapers ran four stories about citizens who became sick or temporarily disabled following vaccination. The arm of one mail clerk, according to one newspaper report, “swelled to three times its normal size.”39
African Americans in the Over the Rhine district learned how a smallpox epidemic could transform years of official indifference and neglect into coercion and violence. Racial tensions had risen during the winter, as white officials and newspapers blamed black townsfolk for the events that brought shame on the community. The Weekly Record called for a public law, like the Louisiana separate coach law the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), to “keep the colored people in a separate section of the town. If it cannot be done by process of law, it can be accomplished by public sentiment.”40
The thin line between process of law and white public sentiment vanished when Dr. Bell’s vaccination corps moved back into the Over the Rhine section in early March. Entering crowded wooden houses and shanties, they confronted the consequences of black distrust of white health authority. The inspectors found twenty or more adults and children suffering from smallpox, who had hidden (or been concealed by their parents) from the authorities. As the inspectors removed the patients from their homes and hauled them to the pesthouse, the physicians examined the arms of the other residents, finding many that had never been touched by a vaccinator’s lancet. As they attempted to enforce the vaccination order, the physicians were met, according to the Weekly Record, with “the greatest opposition.” That was what the police were for. This time there would be no arrests or fines. All who resisted were handcuffed and vaccinated at gunpoint.41
McCormack and his men brought a new measure of expertise, discipline, and violence to Middlesboro. In the ten days after the state took control of the epidemic, the health authorities handled 169 cases of smallpox. Thirty-four of the patients were white, the rest black. The youngest was an infant just one day old when the eruption appeared simultaneously on mother and child. Miraculously, the baby survived. By March 10, many of the patients had recovered, and no further deaths had occurred. Dr. Bell’s vaccination corps had scraped the arms of 1,968 people—the exactness of the count offered as a testament to the state officers’ efficiency. Earlier reports had put the number vaccinated by the city officials somewhere around a thousand. And others had been vaccinated by their own physicians. But the epidemic was not over. There were still seventy people packed into the pesthouse on Brown’s Row. And they were running out of food.42
One thing McCormack and his deputies had not brought to Middlesboro was money. The state board didn’t have much in the first place; its annual appropriation was just $2,500, and half of that went to pay J. N. McCormack’s modest salary. The state was counting on city and county officials to pay for the guards and the pesthouse supplies. But squeezing money from the local governments proved even harder than getting people vaccinated. The Bell County Fiscal Court still refused to contribute a penny, and the scrip (called “warrants”) that the city had been using to cover expenses had become so devalued as to be all but worthless. As a consequence, the guards were virtually working without pay. When A. T. McCormack wired the news to his father, the secretary resorted to the