Full episode transcript
BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh. As the Civil War ground to a halt, the journey for millions of former slaves was just beginning. A smallpox epidemic was ravishing their camps, a terrible scene made more terrible by the callous attitude of their white neighbors.
JIM DOWNS: Some people fall back on this popular fiction of the 19th century that black people would go extinct if freed.
BRIAN: 40 years later, people in the margins were again dying from smallpox, this time in New York. But the response was different. Doctors and police officers burst into immigrants’ homes to vaccinate them by force.
MICHAEL WILLRICH: With mothers trying to hide sick babies, with men actually brawling with health officials and police to prevent them from scraping their arms and running the vaccine into their arms.
BRIAN: Today on BackStory, a history of epidemics, what has the government done and not done to stop contagious disease?
PETER: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.
ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American History Guys.
BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh here with your co-pilot, Peter Onuf.
PETER: Hey, Brian.
BRIAN: The two of us are flying without our third co-host, Ed Ayers. He’s been down for the count with a nasty bug, and he’s not the only BackStory staffer sounding a little more frog-like this week. And as I look out from our studio, it seems to me that we’re at the peak of flu season. The reports have it that this year hasn’t been as bad as previous seasons.
In any case, we figured it would be a good time to dust off an old episode from our archives, in which we took on the history of contagious diseases. We were especially interested in the changing patterns of the government’s response to disease. And Peter Onuf here started us out with a story from the time when if I said germ theory, you’d probably think I was talking about a way to grow wheat. Here’s Peter.
PETER: It’s 1793, the dog days of summer, and we’re in Philadelphia. And I want you to get a picture of Philadelphia as a city, as 50,000 people, in those days the biggest city in the USA. And it’s the country’s capital, folks. It’s kind of smelly. It’s nasty, noisesome, unhealthy. And the people live so close together that when the disease comes, it comes on strong.
BRIAN: Yeah, what is the disease, Peter?
PETER: Well, people don’t know. I’m going to give you the description of poor Mrs. Parkinson, an Irish woman. She had severe head and back pains, great thirst, offensive stools, red spots on her face, blindness, sore throat, and hiccuping. And after all that, she died. But as she dies, she turns a particular hue of yellow.
BRIAN: Ooh.
PETER: Yellow fever, now you think, this is the nation’s capital. It’s where they got the best doctors, the most resources. They’re going to mobilize an effective response. But I got to tell you, 10% of the population– that would be 5,000 Philadelphians– die. And what does the government do? It leaves town.
ED: And if the people in the government had stayed, what could they have done?
PETER: Well, they would’ve died too. I think that’s the real problem here is that in early America, there is so much mystery about these epidemics. You don’t know where they come from. Many Americans would think it’s an act of God. It’s beyond our control. You’re being punished for something. It is a great mystery.
So how do you respond to an outbreak? We think now you’ve got to send in the National Guard, and you’ve got to get the government to do stuff. But in 1793, we just don’t have that kind of capacity. We barely had the capacity to make war on other nation-states and kill people. We certainly didn’t have the capacity to keep people alive.
BRIAN: Well, today on the show, we’re going to take a closer look at how government response to disease epidemics has evolved since 1793, when authorities essentially threw up their hands and ran. But before we launch into the history, let’s take a minute and check in with an expert on the science.
DR. ROBERT GAYNES: OK, my name is Dr. Robert Gaynes. I’m a physician.