Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [99]
The state board advised physicians to exercise care when performing the procedure. “The operation of vaccination should be conducted with aseptic precautions,” the board instructed, “and none but glycerinized lymph from a trustworthy producer should be employed.” The board was referring to liquid vaccine that had been treated with glycerin, which acted as a preservative and killed bacteria in the product. Glycerinized vaccine was the state of the art. Whether from a sense of political propriety or fair play to the Philadelphia area’s many vaccine companies—including H. M. Alexander’s Vaccine Farm, H. K. Mulford Company, and John Wyeth & Brother—the board refrained from endorsing any make of vaccine and offered no advice as to how anyone might distinguish the “trustworthy” from the more dubious products on the market. Trust was a commercial transaction, not a public dispensation.16
In early November, word spread in Camden that a sixteen-year-old boy named William Brower had come down with tetanus. Few of life’s hazards caused parents more worry than the infectious disease most folks called lockjaw. The New York writer W. J. Lampton called it “one of the strangest and most horrible maladies known to man.” In 1900, more than 2,200 Americans died from it. The tetanus bacillus was discovered in 1884 in a Göttingen laboratory. Since then, scientists had found germs in hay dust, crumbling masonry, garden soil, and, especially, horse manure. Turn-of-the-century America—from the farms to the cities—crawled with the stuff. Even so, as Army Surgeon General Sternberg noted in his treatise, Infection and Immunity , simply ingesting bacilli-rich filth would not cause infection. Nor was tetanus contagious. The bacilli did not grow in the presence of oxygen. It usually took a traumatic event—a wound of some kind, the narrower and deeper the better—to introduce bacilli into a human body in a way that could cause infection. The classic culprit was a rusty nail—not because of the chemical composition of the rust itself, but because it made the surface of the nail rough enough to hold an abundance of bacilli which the sharp, skinny nail could drive home without much bleeding. Every Fourth of July, hundreds of American boys caught tetanus after cutting their hands with toy pistols.17
The symptoms of lockjaw were terrible. William Brower suffered them all. The son of a plumber, the boy had seemed in fine health until he fell suddenly ill around November 1. He suffered a high fever. He felt the telltale stiffness in his face. His jaws tightened like a vise. Excruciating contractions spread from the jaw and neck to all the muscles of the body. His spine arched, as convulsions racked his body. The doctors administered the tetanus antitoxin, a relatively new product with a low rate of success. No one expected the boy to survive. According to the Philadelphia North American, William’s mother Sarah said, in her grief, “Never, never again shall I have one of my children vaccinated.” William had been vaccinated nineteen days earlier. To his parents there seemed no better explanation for his misery. The trusted family physician who had vaccinated William, Dr. William H. Kensinger, disagreed. “Vaccination doesn’t produce tetanus; that I know,” he said.18
Then came the news that sixteen-year-old Lillian Carty was critically ill with tetanus. The daughter of a railroad clerk, Lillian had been vaccinated twenty-one days earlier by Dr. S. G. Bushey, the city coroner and a prominent member of the Camden Board of Health. Lillian’s parents posted a sign at their front door, asking passersby to keep quiet, because the slightest noise agitated her and sent her into convulsions. Antitoxin was administered. No one expected her to survive.19
Neither Brower nor Carty was the first child to die. On November 11, Thomas B. Hazelton, age eleven, the son of a shipping clerk, was in the street playing when he started to feel ill, with a pronounced