Given its fearsome association with the Black Death of late medieval Europe (more on this anon), news of its arrival in a given locality was of the gravest concern. In the early 1890s, the plague began spreading from a historic 'reservoir' in southwest China, first to cities along China's coast, then along maritime trade routes emanating from Hong Kong and Canton. Of course, such a decontextualized description of an international disease's spread fits any number of 'silent travelers' 3 (the reader is free to choose her favorite), but it certainly applies to the bubonic plague outbreaks in San Francisco a century ago.īubonic plague came late to the United States, the outbreaks in question being the very first. Public health measures and travel restrictions focus on Asians.

Political leaders in a major city object to travel advisories and quarantine as overreacting and bad for business. Immigrant communities are identified as the locus of infection. Health officials in North America see it coming but think they can prevent its taking hold here. ban on Asians isn't protection against the virus-it is simply discrimination under a different name.' 2 Ī bald recitation of the 1900 bubonic plague outbreak in San Francisco certainly has a contemporary ring: A communicable disease seems to originate in southern China, then crosses the Pacific to North America on the fastest transport of the day. 'Suspicion of Chinese-Americans has waxed and waned over the twentieth century, but it has never completely gone away. As the SARS epidemic was playing out in early 2003, Iris Chang, author of The Chinese in America: A Narrative History, 1 wrote of its explicit connection with 'the most severe example of medical panic transforming itself into racial prejudice'-the bubonic plague outbreaks in Honolulu in 1899 and in San Francisco the following year.

Some historians have been eager to apply presumed lessons from the past to the infectious outbreak du jour. Though an allegorical tale meant as political instruction, the novel conveys Rieux's sense of foreboding in a way that matters to medical history, too.

The barbary plague by marilyn chase