Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [56]
Southern health officials admitted that a large percentage of smallpox cases went unreported in their states. How, then, could they speak with such certainty about the racial origins of these epidemics? Those in a position to produce official accounts of epidemics have often blamed their occurrence on subordinate social groups. But this is not to say that all such narratives are works of pure fiction. To dismiss the official accounts out of hand—or to read them only as elite ideology—is to forgo all hope of recovering the social experience of disease. The wonderfully idiosyncratic epistolary form that public health reports took in this era inspires at least some confidence in their contents. State reports consisted mainly of letters and telegrams, peppered with chatty detail, sent in by local health officers. Even assuming broad agreement regarding matters of race and class, it would have taken a racial conspiracy of an implausible scale to make all of these reports tell a common story of the epidemic’s prevalence among African Americans and poor whites, if there were not some basis for this in fact. With an infectious disease such as smallpox, which spread most easily among people without regular access to medical care and who lived in close proximity to one another, the poorest members of society were exceptionally vulnerable. Inadequate nutrition made poor people susceptible to all sorts of diseases. Public health officials made a revealing leap, however, when they concluded from such epidemiological facts that “irresponsible negroes” (or “ignorant” whites) were morally culpable for the spread of smallpox.50
Smallpox patient at the Tampa pesthouse, 1900. COURTESY OF THE STATE ARCHIVES OF FLORIDA
In his personal papers and public writings, C. P. Wertenbaker was serious, dispassionate, and reserved—a gentleman scholar of the Service stripe. In his field reports to Washington, he dutifully noted whites’ belief that they had a natural immunity to the disease they called “nigger itch,” but he considered this popular belief a sign of ignorance and a bane to scientific smallpox work. He did not normally indulge in expansive statements of racial ideology, “scientific” or otherwise. But in one letter, which he sent to a Mississippi health official in 1910, the federal surgeon revealed some of his assumptions about the state, and fate, of African American health. “There is no question in my mind,” Wertenbaker wrote, “but that the negro constituted the gravest menace to the country in which they lived, from a sanitary standpoint.” “The negro is like a child,” he continued, “incapable of carrying on any effectual sanitary work unless guided and directed by the white people.... Unless there is a marked change in sanitary conditions among the negroes, I believe that within the next 100 years the negro will be almost as scarce in this country as the Indian now is. I believe that the extinction of the race is imminent.”51
With those few lines Wertenbaker revealed a cast of mind entirely conventional among white medical authorities of his time and place. Such theories had a long lineage. In the antebellum period, southern medical writers had used just such claims to defend the institution of slavery. Observing that African American slaves were less prone than whites to contract malaria and yellow fever (because, we now know, of an inherited genetic resistance to the mosquito-borne viruses that caused those diseases), slaveholders lauded their chattels’ natural fitness for back-breaking labor in the coastal rice and cotton fields. Ideologues claimed the intelligence and moral dispositions