Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [98]
A South Jersey industrial city of 76,000 people, Camden lay just across the sewage-choked Delaware River from Philadelphia. Times were good. Camden’s population had grown by 30 percent during the 1890s. Decent jobs could be had at the Pennsylvania Railroad and in the city’s ironworks, chemical plants, shoe factories, cigar companies, lumber mills, oil cloth factories, and woolen mills. Though the presence of immigrants and other newcomers was more keenly felt than in the past, Camden people remained overwhelmingly white and American-born, a generation or more removed from Europe. Crowded tenements of the sort found in New York and Chicago were scarce. Wage earners lived in low-slung neighborhoods of single-family homes. Like most communities, the people of Camden invested their pride and dreams in the rising generation. In September 1901, eight thousand children took their seats in the city’s thirty-two public schools. By mid-November, half of those desks would be empty.12
The trouble started on October 7. Eight-year-old Pearl Ludwick took ill with smallpox, followed, in quick succession, by her father, an oil cloth printer, and all seven of her brothers and sisters. Only Pearl’s mother was spared the pox; those days must have been among the most trying of her life. Then Pearl’s father and eldest brother rose from bed one night and, both delirious with the fever, bumped a table, which knocked over a lamp. The ensuing blaze burned the Ludwick house to the ground—but not before the Ludwicks got out and hundreds of neighbors rushed to the scene. All, of course, were exposed to smallpox. With this improbable chain of events commenced the Camden smallpox epidemic of 1901–2.13
New Jersey had seen little smallpox during the past sixteen years, and vaccination had fallen out of practice. But in 1901 smallpox seemed to be causing trouble everywhere in the United States, including Philadelphia. That summer, anticipating an epidemic year, the New Jersey Board of Health issued a public warning. “An extensive outbreak of small-pox can be prevented with absolute certainty if vaccination of all susceptible persons is secured,” the board declared. “[T]he question now arises, Shall general vaccination be done before a great calamity compels resort to this preventive measure, or must there first be startling losses of life to arouse parents, guardians, school boards, the public, and in too many instances the health authorities also, to a realizing sense of their duty to institute precautions against the spread of this pestilential disease?” No matter how you parsed that question, the message was dead serious. But it took the Ludwick family fire to bring its meaning home to Camden.14
Camden authorities ordered a municipal pesthouse built, and physicians worked long hours to meet the “rush to get vaccinated.” For those families who still needed convincing, the Camden Board of Education announced that it would enforce an 1887 state law that authorized local boards to exclude unvaccinated children. The Camden Board of Health president, Dr. Henry H. Davis, who happened also to be the medical director of the school board, dispatched vaccinators to the city schools. The Camden Medical Society opened a free vaccine station on Federal Street, in the heart of the city. And many residents were vaccinated by private physicians or, on the cheap, by the neighborhood druggist. Within a month, an estimated 27,000 people—more than one third of the city’s residents—had undergone vaccination, including five thousand public schoolchildren.