• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 413 0

funds from a parsimonious and skeptical county government. To get anything done, health officers needed the support of their local government institutions: vaccination orders (where state law did not give that authority to health boards), money for vaccine and vaccinators’ fees, cash to pay the pesthouse guards, and so on. In the larger towns, health officials had to win over the city council. In small towns and rural areas, health officials had to make their cases to county governments—boards of supervisors or, in some states (including Georgia and Kentucky), judicial bodies such as county courts and grand juries. The interests and medical understandings of those government bodies often clashed with those of health officers. For the lay officials, who, as Wertenbaker pointedly observed, were typically merchants, farmers, and other men “unfamiliar with matters pertaining to general sanitation and public health,” the smallpox question came down to taxpayer dollars and common sense. Unlike appointed health officials, most aldermen, county supervisors, and judges had to answer to the electorate. If they strayed too far from the common sense of the community, they risked losing their jobs.69

Some of the most dramatic clashes between health authorities and lay officials took place in crowded courtrooms, the center stage of local political life at the turn of the century. When the modern expertise of medical science collided with the old-fashioned legal authority of judges and juries, the law won. Having given up on persuading local physicians that the “ketching disease” troubling Jackson County was really smallpox, Inspector Smock made his case to the county court. The state health official delivered a two-hour speech. As a reporter from Louisville described the scene, things seemed to be going well for Smock until a preacher stood up and addressed the assembly. “The Lord has sent this affliction upon us, and the Lord will take it away in His own good time,” he said. At that point the county attorney, an elected official in a room full of voters, declared that there was no proof that smallpox existed in the community and he was opposed to any measure that would cost the taxpayers their hard-earned dollars. In a remarkable gesture to rural democracy, the judge decided to take a vote of all those present, asking the courtroom crowd to decide whether the disease was smallpox. “[T]o a man they voted that small-pox did not exist,” the journalist reported, “notwithstanding the fact that two men with distinct pustules on their faces were in the crowd.”70

Like Inspector Smock, C. P. Wertenbaker learned that to fight smallpox in a southern community he had to make his case in the court of public opinion. The politics of smallpox control was a politics of knowledge, as well as interests. Local government officials had many motives for requesting the aid of a Service surgeon. As in Middlesboro, some hoped to persuade “Uncle Sam” to pick up the tab for an epidemic they had allowed to spin out of control. After that debacle, though, Surgeon General Wyman had made clear that the Service would be supplying only expertise, not largesse. More opinions would seem the last thing needed in these local communities, where health officers had run into so much trouble trying to arouse public concern.

But to his surprise, Wertenbaker often found that by the time he arrived in a place, the people were ready to listen to a surgeon from the U.S. Marine-Hospital Service. Evidently, southern suspicion of federal authority had its limits. For Wertenbaker found that the quarreling parties in a community—the “kicking doctors,” the health officers, the county officials, and the public—seemed prepared to consider the diagnosis and recommendations of an agent of the U.S. government. Perhaps the Service’s years of yellow fever work had left a legacy of trust in the region. Maybe the Service’s reputation for medical expertise preceded it. Though local relationships generally mattered a great deal in these communities, it worked to Wertenbaker’s benefit that