Plague in the lungs might be misdiagnosed as common pneumonia, fretted city physician A.P. Without an autopsy, cases of plague might be mistaken for something else.

To placate authorities, Ho Yow advised his constituents that, when sick, they should send for a “white physician.” If they were too poor to pay, a doctor would be furnished free from the new Oriental Dispensary. But autopsies outraged the sensibilities of grieving families and friends. But autopsies and diagnoses were different.Ĭity and federal doctors ordered that any Chinese person who died unattended by a physician, or whose medical history was unknown, be autopsied in order to ascertain the cause of death. The consul issued a statement urging people to clean up their homes and businesses. All they could agree on was the need to clear out basements and dispose of garbage. An oppressive stench hung over the district.ĭowntown, the board of health met with the Chinese consul and the Chinese Six Companies, wrangling over details of the Chinatown cleanup of plague. Mounds of white lime powder were stored in chalky drifts against the balconied apartments, storefronts and courtyards, so that the district looked like a Sierra village after a snowstorm. Plumbing was flushed with chemicals, masking the scent of cookery and crowded humanity with stinging clouds of disinfectant vapors. Over Chinatown, columns of smoke rose from the bonfires of refuse that burned on Pacific Street.

Most city newspapers respond with ridicule or a conspiracy of silence, as the corpses mount. But public health interventions-quarantine and fumigation-have so terrified the Chinese that some conceal their sick and dead. In this excerpt from The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco (Random House, 2003), federal quarantine officer Joseph Kinyoun struggles to impress San Franciscans with the threat posed by the infection that has invaded Chinatown. Violent chills, fever, excruciating headache and crippling body pain progressed to the eruption of large red swellings of the lymph glands, black bruises from hemorrhaging, and agitated delirium relieved only by coma, then death. Without antibiotics or an understanding of how the bacteria spread from rats to humans via fleas, victims suffered a hideous end.

As health officials brace for outbreaks of a mysterious new disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome, Marilyn Chase, ’71, recounts a mostly forgotten pestilence that gripped San Francisco 100 years ago: bubonic plague.

The Barbary Plague by Marilyn Chase