Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [53]
In carrying out a policy that frequently targeted blacks, officials did not hesitate to use physical force. The sort of actions that Wertenbaker had heard about in Middlesboro (where African Americans were handcuffed and vaccinated at gunpoint) were echoed in official actions elsewhere. The phrase “equal protection of the laws” had little meaning in southern public health. Authorities in smallpox-ridden Thomson, Georgia, made sure that “all the colored population that could be caught were vaccinated” before they pressed the issue with whites. When they met “bitter opposition on the part of the white element,” the authorities decided to ask for an “outside opinion” before “forcing the matter.” They appealed for the aid of a Service surgeon. Racist pride was probably enough to stop white Thomson officials from asking Uncle Sam to help them handle “their” colored people.38
Beleaguered southern health officials had a concise explanation for popular resistance to their authority: the people were “ignorant.” After the rebellious citizens of Laurel County, Kentucky, caused the local health board to withdraw its vaccination order, one officer sent a plea to Secretary J. N. McCormack: “you alone know how much unjust, unreasonable and criminal censure these ignorant people are heaping upon us.” Other health officials pointed out that the common people had no monopoly on ignorance. Physicians, judges, and county officials were clueless, too. When the opposition came from white farmers or mountain people, some officials inclined toward more charitable, if no less condescending, theories. “Our people are unaccustomed to the restraints and duties incident to the proper management of them according to the principles of modern hygiene,” Secretary Lewis of the North Carolina board gently explained. Meanwhile, African Americans who pushed back against white health authority were disparaged as not just “ignorant” but “criminally careless.”39
As the southern smallpox epidemic wore on, Wertenbaker and some of his state and local peers developed a set of deeper explanations for why both smallpox and popular antipathy to public health authority had gotten so out of hand. Knowledge remained the crucial piece in these explanatory schemes. But Wertenbaker and others realized that a community’s understanding of disease depended on something more personal than a public health circular or a family doctor’s advice. Medical beliefs rested upon shared experience and memory. On this score, smallpox posed a special problem.
Outside the urban centers and port cities such as Charleston and New Orleans, most communities had not seen smallpox in a generation. People old enough to remember the Civil War recalled the epidemics that had raged in both armies. C. C. Wertenbaker probably told his son about the pox that burned through the Army of Northern Virginia during the Maryland campaign. Union and Confederate soldiers wrote in their diaries and letters of the wonders and horrors of arm-to-arm vaccination: the common practice of inoculating men with pus taken from another soldier’s vaccination sore or, worse, from an actual smallpox lesion. Some troops expressed gratitude for the protection their vaccinations afforded, while many more recounted stories of terrible fevers, poisoned arms, amputations, and death. During the battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, five thousand Confederate soldiers were deemed unfit for duty after being vaccinated with material taken from the arm of a soldier who, as luck would have it, had syphilis.40
The civilian population did not have it much better. “Colonel” A. W. Shaffer of North Carolina recalled the desperate measures taken by local communities when vaccine ran out. “Everything having the semblance of a scab or pus passed for vaccine; anything with two hands and a blade or point, for a vaccinator; and every filthy sore at the point