Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [63]
And to perform. There was a theatrical, even scripted, quality to Wertenbaker’s appearances in southern cities, county seats, and small towns. In an age of Chautauqua assemblies, traveling circus shows, and political debates in the open air, Wertenbaker’s impending arrival was heralded in advance in the local newspapers and by word of mouth. The public seemed hungry for information about smallpox and vaccination—or at least eager for a good show. The medical man gave it to them.72
The show began the moment he stepped off a train, packet, or wagon. Greeted by the local health officers and officials, he asked them to take him directly to see the smallpox suspects. Before making his inspection, he put on his smallpox outfit—the overalls, head wrap, and respirator. Typically, the men, women, and children he examined had already been diagnosed with chicken pox or “elephant itch” or something else. It rarely took Wertenbaker long to make his own diagnosis, and it was usually smallpox.73
Wertenbaker would then call a public meeting. At first he held his meetings in county courthouses, but the audiences soon grew too large and he moved with them into the public square or streets. The crowds sometimes numbered a thousand people or more. Entire communities turned out for the show: farmers and factory workers, businessmen and representatives of local women’s clubs, parents and schoolchildren, whites and blacks. Wertenbaker announced to the audience that smallpox existed in their midst and, be it ever so mild, it could kill. He instructed the people in the clinical features of smallpox, explaining how mild type smallpox differed from chicken pox, measles, and other common diseases.74
Next he would explain the importance of vaccination, and how it worked. And that’s when folks got edgy. Wertenbaker’s audiences always included many people who were strongly opposed to vaccination. It was during these moments, as he stood in his Service blues preaching the virtues of vaccination to workingmen in overalls and women in homemade dresses, that Wertenbaker would listen to their complaints and their fears. He came to appreciate the extent to which antivaccination sentiment grew from reasonable fears of the procedure. Whether he was speaking in Charlotte or Columbia, Danville or Lumpkin, the surgeon heard the same objection from mill workers, farmers, and other manual laborers: vaccination caused “sore arms,” and that interfered with business.75
This common fear of a vaccine-disabled arm was at least as old as the Civil War epidemics. “I have been in the habit of preaching vaccination for the last thirty or forty years,” one North Carolina physician said in 1898. “I never saw a fiddler vaccinated in my life.” The bad batches of “dry point” vaccine flooding the South in 1898 and 1899 turned a lot of people into fiddlers.76
Even under the safest conditions—an aseptic procedure, using vaccine free of harmful bacteria—smallpox vaccination typically caused some constitutional disturbance, a fever, and a painful inflammation at the site of the vaccination. That’s how a physician knew the vaccine had taken: it “set up a fire.” But mass vaccinations during epidemics rarely afforded the safest conditions, and the results of the dry points caused physicians and health officers to voice concern.77
In an era when almost everyone earned their living with their hands—farming the land, working wood, laying track, mining coal, tanning hides, rolling tobacco—the prospect of losing a few weeks’ wages to a “sore arm” brought on by tainted vaccine was reason enough to dodge the lancet. The belief that this new mild smallpox (if it actually was smallpox) was unlikely do serious harm only strengthened the perceived risk of vaccination. Secretary Lewis of the North Carolina Board of Health noted that