Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [67]
A Boston Globe reporter named J. N. Taylor had traveled with the Twenty-sixth all the way from Massachusetts. “The city was very dirty—oozy with it,” he recalled. Of pressing concern to the U.S. command, small-pox raged in the city, killing more residents every day. Prior to the arrival of the Twenty-sixth, smallpox, known by its local name, buti, seemed to be accepted as a fact of life. Few of the inhabitants had ever been vaccinated, and they made no effort to isolate the sick.3
On the advice of the U.S. health officer on the scene, the soldiers set about enforcing a “progressive policy” of sanitation, “giving Iloilo a bath and a scrubbing.” They set up a smallpox hospital outside the city and removed the sick from their families. Soldiers inspected homes, cleaned out decrepit privy vaults, and introduced a new system of dry earth closets. The troops moved with particular force upon an expanse of shacks that stretched a quarter mile from the old Spanish palace to the Jaro bridge. The district housed one thousand of Iloilo’s poorest residents, among whom, Taylor noted, “fully 700 were pock-marked.” The soldiers leveled the district.4
Risking fines or imprisonment, many Ilonggos resisted the American sanitary campaign, which, as Taylor had to admit, did require “a radical change in the sanitary conduct of their homes.” The Army’s effort to enforce vaccination proved so unpopular that the soldiers found it “necessary to round up the inhabitants with guns to inoculate them.”5
Within three months of the Twenty-sixth Regiment’s arrival, Iloilo seemed to Taylor a city transformed. The offensive odors had abated. Small-pox was disappearing. Even the attitude of the Ilonggos appeared to be softening. Many now called upon the health inspector’s office, children in hand, and asked to be vaccinated. Taylor could imagine a time when, with a little more sanitary work (draining the city’s swamps was the obvious next project), Iloilo might make a perfectly salubrious home for white men.
“There seems to be no good reason why Iloilo should not be as healthy as Boston,” he said.6
Where soldiers go, plagues follow. Since the age of Alexander, the annals of war had known no truer axiom. Mobilizing armies uprooted young men from great cities and remote villages, previously distinct epidemiological environments, and threw them together in crowded camps where the air reeked of waste and the water teemed with the unseen agents of cholera and typhoid. Across the millennia, seasoned generals had fairly expected diseases to take more lives than spears, swords, or guns. Rarely did those expectations go unmet. Beneath the staggering death toll of the American Civil War, in which some 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers perished, lay the familiar but little understood handiwork of microbial pathogens: nearly twice as many soldiers had died from disease as from combat.7
When army camps grew up near centers of population, microbes circulated indiscriminately between soldiers and civilians. Soldiers on the march carried smallpox across continents, as the Spanish conquistadores had done in the Americas. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 unleashed a European pandemic of pox that killed more than 500,000 people. Wars disrupted entire societies, causing famine and poverty, displacing populations, and destroying fragile systems of sanitation—all of which increased people’s vulnerability to disease. As catastrophic events, wars and the epidemics they made sometimes became indistinguishable from