Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [46]
The scale and scope of the Service’s activities continued to grow after Wertenbaker joined it, and not only in the South. In 1890, Congress gave the bureau permanent authority to administer interstate quarantine regulations. The following year Congress put the Service in charge of medical inspection of immigrants at the nation’s major border crossings and ports, including Ellis Island. Among the many things the U.S. medical men demanded of arriving immigrants was proof of a recent successful vaccination against smallpox—preferably in the form of a fresh vaccination wound on the upper arm. After war broke out with Spain in 1898, the Service followed the flag, administering quarantine at the coastal ports of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. By the time Congress renamed the institution in 1902, calling it the U.S. Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service, the bureau had already achieved that position in fact, with its hospitals, stations, state-of-the-art National Hygienic Laboratory, and traveling surgeons. In the eyes of Surgeon General Walter Wyman, who presided over this institutional growth, the United States finally had “a sanitary structure worthy of this nation.”12
The manly martial and scientific culture of the Service offered Wertenbaker a way of living in the world that he must have found both familiar and exotic. Wyman, a St. Louis native who bore a passing resemblance to Theodore Roosevelt, recognized that enforcing maritime quarantines and traveling to epidemic zones was lonely and dangerous work. And though the surgeon general could be an overzealous enforcer of bureaucratic edicts, he cultivated camaraderie in the ranks. This esprit de corps rested upon a soldierly discipline and the faith that, as one officer put it, “scientific investigation at the bench and in the field would yield eventually the knowledge to deal with the diseases of man.”13
Wertenbaker’s Service career, from 1888 to 1916, coincided with the meteoric rise of scientific medicine. Professionals in medicine, the biological sciences, and public health were dramatically reducing Americans’ rates of mortality and morbidity from infectious diseases. Wyman encouraged his surgeons to think of themselves as men of science working at the front lines of this historic campaign. He dispatched them to medical conferences. He published their field reports in the Service’s journal. And when his surgeons fell in the line of duty, he honored them in words redolent of the values of the institution they had served. Yellow fever killed Assistant Surgeon John William Branham, a young husband and father, in Brunswick, Georgia, in 1893. The surgeon general praised him for his “education and medical attainments, . . . manliness of deportment and gentlemanly bearing.”14
As Wertenbaker rose in the Service and built a small family of his own, he kept that eulogy in his personal files, not far from his two life insurance policies. He must have wondered if he, too, would one day be remembered as an honored citizen-soldier in Walter Wyman’s war against disease.15
C.P. Wertenbaker could not have foreseen that he would spend several years of his life fighting smallpox. Until 1898, the Service’s work consisted chiefly of running its 22 hospitals and 107 relief stations for American seamen on the coasts and interior ports, manning immigrant inspection stations, and administering maritime quarantines when yellow fever threatened. Suppressing a smallpox epidemic was a different proposition from inspecting vessels and passengers at port. Fighting smallpox involved close control of entire local