Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [44]
C. P. Wertenbaker as a young surgeon with the U.S. Marine-Hospital Service in 1888. COURTESY OF THE ALBERT AND SHIRLEY SMALL SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
A half century before the establishment of the federal Communicable Disease Center (now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in Atlanta in 1946, public health was still an explicitly coercive form of social regulation, or “police power.” As one early twentieth-century authority observed, “The famous Roosevelt doctrine to ‘speak softly, but carry a big stick’ is particularly applicable to public health work.” For the most part, local and state governments still wielded that authority, or neglected to, with little interference from Washington. But the mobility of the Service surgeons—premised upon the fact that smallpox and other infectious diseases did not respect borders—enabled the U.S. government to deploy scientific expertise and project an extraordinary measure of national authority across a vast region, a far-flung nation, and into new colonial possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific. For a growing number of people across America and many other parts of the world, a medical man in a navy suit was the first representative of the U.S. government they ever encountered. In 1891, Congress had assigned the Service a new role as sentinels at the nation’s borders and overseas ports, to ensure that immigrants did not carry foreign diseases onto American soil. Though virtually forgotten today, the intervention of Service officers like Wertenbaker at the scenes of local outbreaks—often deep in the American interior—may have been just as important as border control to the long process by which the U.S. government learned to govern its territory and people like a modern nation-state.4
The smallpox years of 1898 to 1900 were the busiest in the history of the Marine-Hospital Service to date, and those years were also the most mobile of Wertenbaker’s career. The surgeon’s sorties to smallpox-stricken locales across the American South afforded him an exceptionally broad regional perspective on the tangle of factors—the institutional constraints and conflicts, the clash of interests and beliefs, and the unpredictable behavior of a once-familiar disease and the individuals affected by it—that made small-pox control such an intractable political problem in southern communities. Middlesboro, Wertenbaker learned, had been just the beginning, an extreme example of the social dissension and political failure he would find everywhere. His experiences in the field would turn him into something of an extreme case himself, a strong advocate for greater national control in this traditionally local realm of law and governance, public health.5
Like most Americans born before the Civil War, Charles Poindexter Wertenbaker’s first loyalties were to family, community, state, and God. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, on April 1, 1860, Wertenbaker descended from a long line of soldiers, scholars, and scribes, whose generations of service to the Old Dominion he traced back to a distant ancestor, a colonel who sat on the Bacon’s Rebellion court-martial in 1676. A great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side had received one hundred acres of Virginia soil for his service in the Revolutionary War, a fact Wertenbaker used to establish his right to membership in the Sons of the American Revolution. His grandfather, William Wertenbaker, fought while still in his teens in the War of 1812 and was appointed by Thomas Jefferson in 1825 to be the first librarian of the University of Virginia, a position he held for more than half a century. In his application to the Sons of the American Revolution, C. P. Wertenbaker failed to mention that his father, a cigar manufacturer named C. C. (Charles Christian) Wertenbaker, had spent his prime in a very different war. He fought with General Robert E. Lee’s Army