Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [43]
THREE
WHEREVER WERTENBAKER WENT
Though he never went to war, C. P. Wertenbaker lived his entire life in uniform. As a boy, he donned the outsized epaulets and tasseled shako cap of the Warrenton Rifles, a company of the Virginia Volunteers that was legendary in Charlie Wertenbaker’s world for its stand at Fairfax Court House on June 1, 1861. (The Rifles’ commander, Captain John Q. Marr, lost his life that day, the first Confederate officer to fall in the Civil War.) While a medical student at the University of Virginia, and during his half-dozen years as a practicing physician, Wertenbaker turned out for militia duty in the resplendent garb and sergeant’s insignia of the Volunteers’ Third Infantry. At twenty-eight, he put on yet another uniform, the one he would wear with honor for the rest of his career. The simple navy-blue field suit of a commissioned officer in the U.S. Marine-Hospital Service, meant to suggest military-issue without quite being military-issue, consisted of dress pants and a fly-front coat, the only adornments a pair of gold Service insignia—a fouled anchor and caduceus—on the coat’s upright collar. For ceremonial occasions, he sported the Service’s full dress uniform, a double-breasted suit with two rows of big brass buttons, golden epaulets, white gloves, and, at his side, a sword etched with the Great Seal of the United States of America. It was this national uniform, rather than the state regalia of his younger self, in which Wertenbaker would one day choose to be buried.1
But the most memorable outfit Wertenbaker ever wore, and the one most truly his own, was the one he contrived for his southern “smallpox work” in the late 1890s. Before he stepped, uninvited and unannounced, across the threshold of a sharecropper’s cabin or a mill worker’s wood-framed house, he pulled on a pair of crisp, sterile overalls and a coat that reeked of formalin disinfectant. He wound cloth around the top of his head, looking like a soldier with a head wound. And over his mouth and nose he tied a respirator that he fashioned from a yard of cheesecloth and a piece of thick cotton. It was not until Wertenbaker completed his inspection—after he had posed his last question, examined the last squirming child, and scraped his lancet against the very last arm—that the subjects of his attentions finally got a good look at him. Their eyes followed the U.S. government man as he stepped outside, doffed his cap and respirator, and set them aflame.2
The road that carried C. P. Wertenbaker from his privileged childhood on Virginia’s upper Piedmont Plateau to the humblest homes of laborers in the Deep South ran through Richmond, New York, Norfolk, Galveston, Chicago, Washington, and a great many points in between. The Marine-Hospital Service surgeon had at least one thing in common with the railroad workers, rivermen, agricultural laborers, miners, drummers, minstrel performers, and machine tenders who ferried smallpox across the South in their bodies and on their clothes: he never stayed put for long. For many laborers in the end-of-the-century South, the ability to pick up and go was the only form of mobility their lives offered. To aging former slaves and their children, freedom of movement was a cherished right, one exercised, sometimes, for the sake of exercising it, to demonstrate to an exploitative boss or landlord that their bodies and labor could not, in fact, be owned. For the Service surgeon, member of an elite cadre of some two hundred mobile federal medical men, transience was part of the job description.3
And, as Wertenbaker would learn, it was more than that. The surgeons’ readiness to move, the very portability of their federal medical expertise, made them a force for the integration and bureaucratic standardization of public health in the United States. Wertenbaker and his colleagues were the vanguard of