Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [48]
As a white southern Democrat himself, Wertenbaker must have had an opinion about these developments, but he did not express it in writing. The Virginian took Jim Crow for granted. He chose to continue the station’s practice of maintaining separate “white” and “colored” hospital wards. Apart from a white steward, the entire staff was black. Wertenbaker introduced a new level of discipline at the station, including weekly inspections, for which the surgeon turned out in his full dress uniform, sword and all. Wertenbaker moved into the station officer’s residence, on the first floor of the two-story main hospital building, with his wife, Alice Girardeau Wertenbaker, who descended from a prominent South Carolina family, and their infant daughter, Alicia. Alice would make a respectable household for the young family, and she and little Alicia toured the coastal area in the Service’s “station wagon,” a horse-drawn affair operated by a black driver in livery. Charles Wertenbaker himself never had a chance to settle in.20
During Wertenbaker’s two and a half years at Wilmington, his telegraphic orders from Surgeon General Wyman sent him, over rail lines and dirt roads, to disease-stricken locales in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Wertenbaker called this phase of his long career in the Service “my smallpox work.” And if, at times, that work seemed as cursed as smallpox itself, he could take some satisfaction in the fact that no one did it better.
He established himself as the Service’s foremost smallpox expert in the field, known to governors, mayors, and state and local health officials as a master diagnostician of the new “mild type” of smallpox, and a man with a proven strategy for stamping out the disease. Such was Wertenbaker’s stature in the field that he received temporary appointments to the staffs of the governors of Virginia, Georgia, and Nebraska. In 1899, Wertenbaker sent Wyman a long memo entitled “Plan of Organization for the Suppression of Smallpox.” The surgeon general published it as a supplement to the Service’s “Précis upon the Diagnosis and Treatment of Smallpox.” If the “Précis” presented the latest scientific knowledge of the disease, the “Plan” offered a comprehensive strategy—part medical intervention, part military operation—for suppressing local outbreaks. The highest demand for both pamphlets came from the southern states, and though the tactics Wertenbaker outlined should have worked just as well anywhere, they were distinctly the product of his own experience fighting smallpox in southern cities, towns, plantations, and work camps.21
Wertenbaker had been on the job at Wilmington for only a few days when North Carolina’s first reported case of mild type smallpox arrived in the city. On January 12, 1898, a local physician informed Mayor S. P. Wright that Stephen Johnson, an African American brakeman who worked the Atlantic Coast Line between Wilmington and Florence, South Carolina, had contracted smallpox. City health officials hung a yellow quarantine placard outside the Johnson home on Hanover Street and quarantined three neighboring houses, vaccinating all the residents. Mayor Wright posted two policemen on the block to prevent residents from leaving. Wertenbaker had no jurisdiction in the matter. But he offered his assistance to the local government, ordered a hundred points of vaccine, and told Wyman he would vaccinate “all persons applying.” During the next three weeks, Wertenbaker watched Wilmington turn into a battleground over public health.22
On the first day of the outbreak, Wertenbaker accompanied Dr. William D. McMillan, the city superintendent of