Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [35]
In his crisp blue uniform, Charles Poindexter Wertenbaker was the very model of a Marine-Hospital Service physician during Walter Wyman’s long tenure as surgeon general (1891–1911). A university-trained medical man with the discipline of a soldier and the bearing of an officer, Wertenbaker knew how to handle a microscope, a pen, and a gun. Wertenbaker was thirty-seven years old. An inch or two shy of tall, he had fair skin, light eyes, and a thick mustache that in his younger days he had waxed into a fashionable pair of handlebars. He had spent ten years in the Service, working the federal outposts in a succession of American ports: Norfolk, Galveston, Chicago, and Lewes, Delaware. He took over at Wilmington just days before the smallpox arrived there, reportedly in the body of an African American railroad hand. Now, three months later, he was still figuring out the politics of smallpox control. For him, Middlesboro would be an object lesson.47
When daylight broke on March 14, Wertenbaker toured Middlesboro on foot with A. T. McCormack. As they walked, Wertenbaker noted the Old World character and surprising sturdiness of the Appalachian boomtown: the broad streets with their English names, the imposing bank buildings and substantial storefronts of the business district, the Victorian mansions of the finer neighborhoods. Even the wood-framed houses constructed for the workers looked built to last. On many of those houses hung the telltale placards or yellow flags. McCormack told him that four hundred residents, roughly one ninth of the population, were now under domestic quarantine—prisoners in their own homes. Another seventy-two people were in the pesthouse. So far, McCormack told Wertenbaker, his men had vaccinated nearly two thousand people. At this point, anyone who had not been vaccinated probably aimed to keep it that way. In any event, as Wertenbaker reported to Wyman later that day, “forcible vaccination is still progressing.”48
McCormack did not hide his resentment at Wertenbaker’s presence in Middlesboro. McCormack was a young man, but he was no country doctor. He had a medical degree from Columbia University. The Kentucky Board of Health was, in a sense, the McCormack family business. He was his father’s most trusted man in the field. He did not intend to let the Middlesboro debacle tarnish the board’s honor and reputation. The physician assured Wertenbaker that he had wasted his time in coming all the way to Middlesboro. The state had everything “under control.”49
Next the men arrived at the pesthouse. The crowded structures, located in a thickly settled part of the city, housed seventy-two men, women, and children. As he moved through rooms thick with the sickening sweet smell of smallpox, Wertenbaker kept a running tally. Forty-nine of the inmates had already broken out with clear cases. The rest showed some early symptoms or were being detained as “suspects.” According to the standard Service practice, the suspects should have been kept apart from the patients, to avoid unnecessarily spreading the disease. Most of the inmates were African American; seeing Middlesboro from the perspective of smallpox, Wertenbaker mistakenly concluded that half of the city population was black. From his experience in North Carolina during the past few months, Wertenbaker couldn’t have been surprised that smallpox and Jim Crow had conspired in Middlesboro, too. But something else did surprise him. The inmates were not just sick, or in imminent danger of becoming so. As he wired Wyman later that day, “the patients are without food.”50
Months of haggling between city and county authorities had come to this. Without the backing of the Bell County Fiscal Court, the city scrip was worthless. A few days earlier, the grocer who had already