Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [84]
The viability of the entire campaign depended on a few glass tubes of lymph imported from the United States. Army medical officers doubted that vaccine virus originating in a temperate climate could retain its “virility” in the moist heat of the tropics. Ames received his little supply, transported eighteen hundred miles by sea then hauled by pack animal up the dusty military road to the camp. An assistant inoculated forty cows with the lymph. The camp waited for the virus to incubate in the animals’ bodies. They waited the requisite six days, and then waited some more. Nothing. Ames would recall these hours as the “worst and most anxious” of his life. He and his assistants furiously searched the calves’ undersides for the telltale vesicles, the blister-like sores from which the vaccine lymph could be harvested. But there were none. It appeared that the entire shipment of American lymph was useless and that “the undertaking must be abandoned.” After twenty-four sleepless hours, Ames and an Army pathologist, Dr. Timothy Leary, took one last look. This time they discovered that many of the animals had scablike “crusts” and “cones.” Removing them, the physicians discovered bases flowing with lymph. The doctors realized their mistake. The animals at Coamo had not been confined in stables, as they would be on an American vaccine farm. The vaccine vesicles had been broken by the underbrush, grass, and the calves’ own rough tongues. From the ring-shaped bases on the calves flowed “the finest lymph.” The operation was soon producing sixteen thousand good-quality vaccine points a day.68
The Army’s next challenge was to get Major Ames’s vaccine to—and into—the people. For this, the Army relied on the Puerto Ricans. Native runners, on foot and pack animals, negotiated the narrow paths and mountain streams to deliver fresh vaccine to the villages and barrios. The Army vaccination directors determined that the population was so dispersed and difficult to reach that the common American method of house-to-house vaccination would be unfeasible. Instead, they would have to bring the people to the vaccinators. The directors set the schedule and secured the cooperation of the alcaldes, the local officials who served in the island’s seventy-one municipalities as “mayor, school commission, county commissioner, and sheriff, all in one.”69
The original plan envisioned using Army Hospital Corpsmen to vaccinate the people. But the medical officers decided to hire native physicians and their assistants, called practicantes, for the job, believing (no doubt correctly) that local vaccinators would be “more acceptable to the people.” Each director was allowed to hire ten vaccinators, who would be paid in gold. According to the Army’s instructions, the practicantes must conduct their business at specified hours, “wear white coats,” and “always be neat and clean.” The skin of the native physicians might be dark, but American medical authority would remain clothed in white. As the physicians and practicantes performed their vaccinations—scraping the arms of men, women, and children with the sharp edge of Dr. Ames’s points—native scribes recorded each person’s name, address, sex, age, and race. In this way, the vaccination teams produced for the U.S. military government its first record of the population. Major Groff found that a single vaccinator, “if hurried,” could vaccinate three hundred people in an eight-hour day. Some Army surgeons never overcame their low regard for the Puerto Ricans. S. H. Wadhams, a Yale Medical School graduate who served as an Army surgeon in Ponce, claimed American vaccinators could do “three to five times as much work as the natives.”70
The military government found it necessary to continually ratchet up the coercion in its vaccination campaign. No vaccination riots were reported, but physicians working for the military government had to take care. When one was asked why he had failed