Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [85]
Through the island vaccination campaign, Americans were indeed learning the art of colonial statecraft. Ames’s provision pulled a largely illiterate, rural population into a documented relationship with the U.S. military government. It also imposed a new discipline on local institutions, by holding public and private authorities—schoolteachers, managers, and employers—legally liable for enforcing the measure. The strategy worked. “From hills and valleys, hamlets and municipalities, young and old flocked to the vaccinators,” Ames recalled, “like John Chinn’s Wuddahs, in Kipling’s story of the vaccination of the Satpura Bhils. Often two or three hundred, old and young, would be still waiting, unvaccinated, when darkness closed the day’s work. . . . Sometimes the vaccination was continued by lamplight to relieve the pressure.” The metaphor of police power could no longer contain such ambitions. Like the Kipling character to whom he now compared himself, Major Ames saw himself as the vanguard of a civilizing mission, carrying into those overgrown hills and valleys the vaccine of a paternal American nation.72
Even then, some Puerto Ricans refused to cooperate. In June, the new governor general, George Davis, imposed new penalties for people who refused to be vaccinated: a $10 fine, plus $5 for each subsequent day in violation. Anyone who failed to pay the fine would “suffer ten days’ imprisonment and thereafter five days for each additional offense.” This penalty was harsh even by the toughest standards of vaccination measures in the United States.73
On June 25, 1899, Chief Surgeon Hoff received a telegram from Coamo Springs announcing that the vaccine farm had produced its one-millionth point. A week later he brought the campaign to a halt. The Medical Department’s vaccination program had carried vaccination to the people on an unprecedented scale. According to Hoff, the vaccinators had performed nearly 860,000 operations (742,062 vaccinations and 116,955 revaccinations) in a period of five months. And the vaccine produced at Coamo Springs was, by contemporary standards, good, with a reported success rate of 87.5 percent. Colonial administrators always kept the bottom line in view. Hoff noted with satisfaction that the entire vaccination campaign had cost only $43,000.74
By the end of June, the “head-fire of vaccination” had stopped variola in its tracks. In the decade before the arrival of the U.S. Army, the annual death rate from the disease had averaged 620 people. From January 1 to April 30, 1900, not a single death from smallpox was reported. And during the two years after completion of the eradication campaign, the annual death rate dropped to just two. Under the new superior board of health established under Colonel Hoff’s leadership in June 1899, the vaccination of infants continued. U.S. health officials continued to seek out the elusive people Hoff described as the “‘submerged’ 200,000 who escaped in the grand attack” of 1899.75
The new colonial civil administration installed by the Americans on May 1, 1900, would learn soon enough that the vaccination campaign had not permanently eradicated smallpox. The flow of people and goods from the mainland brought variola minor to the island. Still, American officials and journalists followed Ames’s lead in touting the Puerto Rican campaign as a “lesson to the world.” Ames hoped it would overthrow the “present belligerent skepticism” toward