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Bacteriology as conspiracy

Posted on March 27, 2019

A few months after bubonic plague
had allegedly arrived in San
Francisco and thus finally reached the Americas for the very first time, the popular
local newspaper San Francisco Call
arrived at its own diagnosis. What had plagued the city, the bay area and the
minds of the people therein was not plague, but a disease called “Kinyounism" it
announced on June 22, 1900. The affliction was characterized by an autocratic
federal power-ridden quarantine officer, who based his drastic and tremendously
damaging quarantine measures against a suspected threat of bubonic plague
solely on the strange and sometimes ridiculous procedures of a young, often
mysterious and suspect science: bacteriology.

Fig 1 – The San Francisco Call, 10 March 1990. Fair use.For the Call, the Governor of California and a good number of local
clinicians, plague had never arrived, but a ‘plague craze’ was made up by the
federal quarantine officer J. J. Kinyoun.(Fig1) He was accused of conspiring
against the State of California, the City of San Francisco, its people and
their health. The person who had claimed to have found, isolated and proven
plague in San Francisco and furthermore was responsible for safeguarding the
city against infectious diseases had been ridiculed, dragged to court and was
about to face threats to his life in the months that followed. The
bacteriologist himself had become a disease, his scientific practice a threatening
foreign regime.

History, of course, has turned
the tables: Kinyoun did probably diagnose plague, and the conspirators were identified
within the group of plague deniers, amplified by three powerful newspapers, the
merchant’s associations of San Francisco, the Governor of the Californian State
and some of the noble doctors from the San Francisco Clinical Association. For
them, Kinyounism symbolized a regime
of public health that compromised local political, economic and social
interest; they preferred traditional methods of hygiene and cleanliness to
quarantine. Politically, they rejected federal interference in state business,
undermining the federal responsibility to protect the United States against
epidemic diseases. Medically, they questioned the means of diagnosing plague
bacteriologically, merging doubts about the emerging discipline with the
uncertainty of what actually characterizes an outbreak of bubonic plague in the
twentieth century.

The
outbreak began with a suspicious case in San Francisco’s Chinatown. On March 7 in
1900, Kinyoun left a detailed note in the Angel Island quarantine station’s
registry book:

“This morning the press announces that a
suspicious case, probably bubonic plague had been observed in Chinatown, San
Francisco, and that the whole of Chinatown had been quarantined by the Board of
Health. In the afternoon I telephoned to Dr. Kellogg, the bacteriologist for
the City Board of Health, who informed me that he had made an examination of
specimens of gland tissue from a Chinese, which showed some very suspicious
forms. He asked if he could come over to the station with some of the tissue
and make an examination here.  On his
arrival, new preparations were made, which when examined showed a number of
very suspicious forms, which suggested plague. I then suggested that animal
inoculations be made with a small portion of the gland tissue. This was done, a
rat, a guinea pig and a small monkey were inoculated.”

Two
days later – due to the absence of new cases the quarantine was lifted – on
March 9, the San Francisco Call
dedicated a large caricature to the bacteriological procedures, mocking
both the city authorities and the scientific measures carried out along the
lines of Koch’s postulates to prove the bacteria to be a causative agent in the
disease in question. The caricature displays the before mentioned rat, Guinea
pig and monkey as being happily fed and ‘livin’ easy.’ (Fig. 2) Instead of having
died to prove the presence of plague, they had remained alive, arguably happy
and well fed. The quarantine had to be lifted, damage was done, associations
and representatives were angry, but the annoying ‘plague farce’ seemed to be
over. 

Fig 2 – The San Francisco Call 19 June 1900. Fair use.As
Philip.A. Kalisch was to put it, “The journalists spoke too soon”. In a second
note in Angel Island’s registry on March 12, Kinyoun wrote: “The Guinea pig
died sometime during the night of the 11th, the rat at 11 am, Mar
12, & the monkey was quite sick.” The monkey died a few days later. For
Kinyoun, after inspecting the corpses, sufficient proof was given to accept the
existence of plague in the city. In his own words in a letter to his aunt and uncle:
“It therefore became my duty, under the law, to report these facts immediately
to Washington, together with any others which bear upon the subject.”

From
here on, the city became the scenery for a dramatic battle between those
agreeing on Kinyoun’s diagnosis and those questioning and denying persistently
the presence of bubonic plague in San Francisco. On the side of the federal
bacteriologist, we find the city’s Major Phelan, the city’s Board of Health led
by Dr. Williamson and a number of respectable doctors from the San Francisco Medical Society, publicly
backed by just one newspaper , the San
Francisco Examiner
. The other side would constitute itself through the
support of the Californian Governor William T. Gage, the Californian Board of
Health, amplified through the strong voice of three large daily newspapers and
equally supported by a number of respectable doctors from the San Francisco Clinical Society.

The
story of this defining conflict of the US public health system has been told
many times. It is usually presented as a classic case of political and economic
interests trumping scientific rigour in order to prevent a drastic short-term
damage to commerce and image while risking the long term effects of a dangerous
epidemic. Governor Gage is often depicted as a leading figure in this
conspiracy against science and health. Eager to protect the sanitary image of
California from national and international isolation, he tried to influence
doctors, politicians and political institutions to follow his direction. 

Most of
the newspapers of San Francisco acted accordingly to the enormous commercial
interests of their owners, well connected to the merchant and commerce
associations, while the collaborating doctors are often portrayed as compliant
experts, compromising their medical and scientific values to consolidate the
conspiracy of plague, orchestrated and plotted by the federal bacteriologist J.
J. Kinyoun.

The
sanitary officer would become a public target first in caricatures and public shaming,
later on through a bounty on his head, needing a personal life guard throughout
conducting his investigations throughout the bay area, before the director of
the Marine Hospital Service, General Wyman gave in to political pressure and decided
to deploy him elsewhere.

Kinyoun
became a tragic hero in this historical drama of American public health. He himself
titled the events enfolding in the aftermath of his plague diagnosis “Le
miserable en Quarantaine”. Before he was brought down by the powerful
opposition he had to face in San Francisco, the ‘forgotten
indispensible’ man had a stunning career.

After
finishing his studies in medicine, he began practicing medicine in 1882 in New
York City and developed early on an outstanding interest in the emerging field
of bacteriology. He entered the Marine Hospital Service and quickly associated
himself with the Hygienic Laboratory, the first reference laboratory of the US.
His exemplary 16 year career in the MHS corresponded with the rise and
exponential growth of American microbiology. Highlights from his time as a
director of the Hygienic Laboratory have been the first isolation of the
cholera bacillus on American soil, his research visits in Berlin with Robert Koch,
in Paris with Emile Roux and in Japan with Kitasato Shobasuburo.

This decorated career of a “real
pasteurian” came to an abrupt end when in 1899 Kinyoun was suddenly sent to
Angel Island in San Francisco to oversee a vigilant quarantine system to
protect the United States against plague. Kinyoun dreaded his factual demotion,
the “sickening weather” of the Bay Area and complained to his friend: “I have
not been well since I came to San Francisco. I had four break-downs in the last
year”. He had also received his “first baptism of newspaper fire.”

And
indeed, the newspapers, mostly the Call,
fired a broadside: After a series of accusations against the major, the city
Board of Health and their officials, the focus narrowed down on Kinyoun. In the
meantime, a few more cases had appeared, and Kinyoun had established a travel
ban on Chinatown, which was lifted by the Court in June 1900. To prevent a
spread of plague to the rest of the US, Kinyoun informed other state boards and
quarantine stations of the immediate threat and was ordered by General Wyman to
consequently widen the travel ban for everyone suspicious of having been infected.
This gave Kinyoun even more power:  “just
as I choose, so that I could deny the right of any one whom I knew or felt has
been exposed to the infection of plague.” The Call reacted furiously:

“Dr. J.J. Kinyoun. Federal quarantine
officer at this port, has struck a serious blow at the property of California.
Abusing the autocratic powers of his position and without a care for the consequences
of his extravagant action, he has placed the State under quarantine. He has
paralyzed traffic, made the State an object of fear to the Union, jeopardizing
every financial and industrial interest in California, and proclaimed to the
world the dangerous falsehood that the most drastic measures are necessary to
prevent the spread of the bubonic plague in this State. As far as any
investigation can prove this action of Dr. Kinyoun is utterly without warrant.
Every responsible investigator declares that if the bubonic plague ever was in
San Francisco it is not here now.” (Call, 17/06/1900)

In the
following weeks, the tone got rough. From insinuating that Kinyoun had in fact
a “buboe on his brain”, to celebrating Kinyoun’s second failure in court when
the travel ban was lifted ( see Fig 2), and asking to “Oust the bubonic board”
– to finally arriving at the diagnosis of “Kinyounism”.

To
protect the city from Kinyounism in the future the Call asked the City ”to get rid of the  indisputable foulness of Chinatown,” which
gave Kinyoun and the Board “ a shadow of an excuse” to suspect plague where –
as the Call repeated tirelessly – there
never has been any trace of the dreaded epidemic. The seemingly obvious
problems of hygiene, the necessity of cleaning what is perceived as ‘foulness’,
resembles the racist
stereotypes directed at the Chinese populations and their segregated
quarters, which were usually perceived as dangerous, conspicuous and obfuscated
spaces.

Kinyoun,
on the other hand, was ready to inscribe himself into history. In his letter to
his friend, he responded to the allegations of the Call with his own interpretation of the disease he has become: 

“Kinyounism is meant to be that a man will carry
out his orders irrespective of the wish of the local people; that he will tell
the truth whether it is politics or not; that he cannot be bribed, coerced or
jollied onto supressing the truth, particularly to his superiors.”(Letter to
Bailhache, 49)

Given
the statement of the Call, the reaction
of Kinyoun and the historical interpretation of who conspired against what, the
story of commercial interest on one end and scientific rigour at the other
prevails. But, as it remains to be shown, one should be careful in accepting
this narrative all too easily. What Erwin Ackerknecht has argued for the anti-contagionist
throughout the nineteenth century applies here as well: 

“Still, to call the anticontagionists simply
‘‘mouthpieces of commercial interest’’ would be a regrettable
oversimplification of the situation. To many of them, both slogans: freedom of
commerce (no quarantines), and freedom of science (anticontagionism) were,
together with others, like freedom of the individual (against any bureaucracy),
the natural expression of the same fundamental attitude and social position.” (Ackerknecht 1948)

Because
behind the dramatic scenes of political conspiracy and suspect science, one can
indeed find a complex and often subtle medical debate, whose authors shared the
same fundamental attitude, about how to arrive at a satisfying way to diagnose and define
the nature of plague. Bacteriology was still a science in the making and its
findings needed to be related to clinical histories, epidemiological patterns
and pathological analysis. This was precisely the weak spot of bubonic plague
at the time. The bacteria was defined and mostly agreed upon, but its
vector and means of distribution, its ecology and epidemiology was not.

‘Kinyounism’
might be sorted out as just a polemical way of blaming the bacteriologist for
his diagnosis. But historically, ‘Kinyounism’ could as well be understood as a
symptom of failing to justify a particular public health regime based on
quarantine, the laboratory and the microscope.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework programme (FP7/2007-2013) /ERC grant agreement no 336564

 

Bibliography:

Letter
to Bailhache and Letter to Aunt and Uncle from the National Library of
Medicine, Kinyoun Papers.

Ackerknecht,
Erwin H. 1948. “Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867.” Bulletin of the
History of Medicine
22: 562–93.

Chase,
Marilyn. 2004. The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San
Francisco
. Random House Publishing Group.

Craddock,
Susan. 2000. City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San
Francisco
. Minneapolis ; London: University of Minnesota Press.

Feldinger,
Frank. 2008. A Slight Epidemic. Silver Lake Publishing.

Kalisch,
Philip A. 1972. “The Black Death in Chinatown: Plague and Politics in San
Francisco 1900-1904.” Arizona and the West 14 (2): 113–36.

Morens,
David M, and National Library of Medicine (U.S.). 2011. The Forgotten
Indispensible Man Joe Kinyoun & the Birth of NIH
. [Bethesda, Md.]:
National Library of Medicine.

Risse,
Guenter B. 2012. Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
JHU Press.

Shah,
Nayan. 2001. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s
Chinatown
. University of California Press.

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