Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [66]
In 1907, Wertenbaker happily returned with his family to his native Virginia to run the Service station at Norfolk. In the final years of his career, he would become well known to African American educators, ministers, physicians, and nurses for his efforts to organize rural black farmers and church groups into state and local “anti-tuberculosis societies.” In classic Wertenbaker fashion, he wrote up a detailed “Plan of Organization” for creating these societies. But the essence of the plan was to mobilize African Americans at the grassroots to fight a deadly infectious disease. By the time of Wertenbaker’s death, of kidney disease, in 1916, southern blacks had founded five state leagues and numerous local societies.85
C. P. Wertenbaker’s grave lies in a well-shaded area of the University of Virginia cemetery, not far from the resting places of the eleven hundred Confederate soldiers buried there during the Civil War. The remains of C. C. Wertenbaker, who outlived Charlie by two years, lie nearby. The words on Charles Poindexter Wertenbaker’s tombstone remember a son of the Confederacy who, along with hundreds of other traveling medical men of the United States Marine-Hospital Service, carried the influence of the national government across the South. The inscription reads: “As Soldier, Doctor, and Officer for Twenty Eight Years of the National Health Service His Good Works are Imperishable.”86
In the years after Wertenbaker left Wilmington, he saw many of the reforms he had advocated come to pass. Local, state, and federal health authorities placed a greater reliance on public education in their work. A new federal system, established in 1902 and run by the U.S. Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service’s National Hygienic Laboratory, regulated the manufacture of smallpox vaccine and the proliferating array of new vaccines, sera, and antitoxins on the market. And Congress gave the Service greater authority to standardize and coordinate the control of infectious disease at the local and state levels. No revolution had taken place. But reform surely had come.
At the turn of the century, there existed as yet only a few areas of the American domain where the authority of the nation reigned supreme in the field of public health. Foremost among them were the new colonial possessions acquired by the United States in the Spanish-American War of 1898. In those distant spaces, medical officers of the United States Army exercised powers of a scale and scope that C. P. Wertenbaker could scarcely have imagined.
FOUR
WAR IS HEALTH
Windswept and weather-beaten, the city of Iloilo stood upon unpromising marshland near the southeastern tip of Panay, in the vast Pacific waterworld of the Philippine archipelago. The center of the islands’ sugar trade, for decades the old Spanish port had sent forth from its deep harbor steamships bearing that prized commodity, as well as hemp, sapanwood, coffee, mangoes, and mother of pearl. The people of Iloilo were known for their habit of resistance to outside authority, be it the Kingdom of Spain, the Catholic Church, or, now, the United States. In December 1898, Emilio Aguinaldo’s Filipino independence movement set up a military stronghold there. By October 1899, when the Twenty-sixth U.S. Volunteers stepped ashore, Aguinaldo’s insurrectos had already been driven out, but they remained entrenched not far from the city.1
The Twenty-sixth was a regiment of New England militiamen. They had recently undergone a crash course in the geography of American expansion. Their journey began two months earlier in Boston. They traveled by train across the continental United States to San Francisco. Encamped in the