When plague invaded

The Barbary Plague

The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco

Marilyn Chase

Random House: 304 pp., $25.95

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It, too, came out of China. It, too, was met at first by official denials that it even existed. But, like the current Chinese officials who had to acknowledge the existence of their dreaded disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, San Francisco officials in 1900 were forced to recognize the presence of theirs, the bubonic plague, as Marilyn Chase recounts in “The Barbary Plague.”

It was brought from plague-wracked China to Honolulu, and from there to San Francisco, probably by the four-masted steamship Australia, which docked at San Francisco on Jan. 2, 1900. Among its disembarking passengers were rats, and on the rats were fleas infected with the plague.

By the time the epidemic -- for it was officially that -- was ended in 1908, San Francisco had 280 cases of plague and 172 deaths. But the end of the epidemic did not mean the end of its presence in the United States. The disease moved from San Francisco rats to ground squirrels and other wild rodents and spread into the Sierra Nevada, Rocky Mountains and Southwest. To this day, people who live in the high deserts and mountains must take care to stay apart from rodents and their fleas. (Just this winter, for instance, a couple who live in a semirural development southeast of Santa Fe, N.M., contracted the plague. Both lived, but the husband lost his feet and lower legs to its complications.)

Chase, a Wall Street Journal reporter, presents the San Francisco plague and its consequences with a good sense of storytelling, though some of her efforts to impart verbal drama are maladroit. It does nothing for her narrative to say of federal quarantine officer Joseph J. Kinyoun that he was a “disease warrior” for whom Angel Island was “his fortress” and San Francisco Bay “his moat.”

Kinyoun was in fact one of the two most important figures in Chase’s story. Trained at the Pasteur Institut in Paris and the laboratory of Robert Koch in Berlin, Kinyoun helped bring the new science of bacteriology to the United States. He was sent by the U.S. Marine Hospital Service, the federal agency created to guard American ports against entering diseases, to San Francisco, one of the most important entry points. Kinyoun had the scientific skills for the job but not the political ones. He was imperious and stiff-necked.

So when he looked through his microscope in 1900 and saw the plague bacillus that killed a Chinese man in Chinatown, he thought his words of warning alone would be sufficient. They weren’t. The authorities in San Francisco wanted to hear nothing of the plague. A short quarantine of Chinatown was ridiculed. A conspiracy of the politicians, the San Francisco press and the head of the Marine Hospital Service to keep the story quiet so business wouldn’t be hurt was finally uncovered and revealed by the Sacramento Bee. For his troubles Kinyoun was banished to Detroit.

The other principal character in Chase’s book, Rupert Lee Blue, fared better. He was both scientist and diplomat and, when he succeeded to Kinyoun’s post in 1903, he was able to lead a cleanup of the city that had been forced to recognize what it flinched from, that the plague was somehow associated with sewage and filth. Chinatown, the epicenter of the outbreak, was scrubbed, the streets and alleys of its 12 square blocks cemented. By 1905 the outbreak seemed over. Blue left.

Then on April 18, 1906, came the great earthquake and fire, and by the next year the plague was back, this time not confined to Chinatown but erupting in small bursts throughout the area. Blue returned, this time focusing, correctly as it was turning out, on the fact the fleas on rodents carried the disease. He led the medical-sanitation struggle that finally rid San Francisco of its pest. Blue rose to the post of U.S. surgeon general and held the job from 1912 to 1920, overseeing the country’s response to the venereal disease outbreak that accompanied the mobilization of World War I and the terrible worldwide influenza epidemic at its end in 1918.

The plague outbreak and its impact is a big story to tell and, except for some overwriting, Chase tells it with thoroughness and clarity in “The Barbary Plague.”