![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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