Fighting Prejudice and the Death Rate in Charleston
But what is the guardian to do when the guarded refuse to bear their share of the burden; refuse, indeed, to manifest any calculable interest, except in the way of occasional opposition? Such is the case in Charleston, South Carolina, where every man aspires to do just as his remotest recognizable ancestor did, and the best citizens would all live in trees and eat nuts if they were fully convinced of the truth of the Darwinian theory. Charleston, lovely, romantic, peaceful Charleston, swept by ocean breezes and the highest death rate of any considerable American city; breathing serenely the perfume of its flowers and the bacilli of its in-bred tuberculosis; Charleston, so delightful to the eye, so surprising to the nose!
By accident Charleston got an efficient health officer not long ago. A deserved epidemic of smallpox had descended upon the unvaccinated negroes and scared the tranquil city. Dr. J. Mercier Green was called from private practice to tackle the situation. For weeks he waded in the gore of lacerated arms, and his path through darkest Charleston could be followed by rising and falling waves of Afro-American ululations; but he checked the epidemic, and when three months later the city physician died, he got the place. Now, had Dr. Green been wise in his generation, he would have been content to keep his municipal patient reasonably free from smallpox and live a quiet life. But he straightway manifested an exasperating interest in other ailments. He stirred up the matter of the water supply, regardless of the fact that all Charleston's great-great-grandfather had drunk water from polluted cisterns and died of typhoid as a gentleman should. He pitched into doctors nearly old enough to be his own great-great-grandfather because they failed to report diseases properly. He answered back, in the public prints, the unanswerable Good-Old-Way argument. He opined, quite openly, that there was too much tuberculosis, too high an infant mortality, too prevalent a habit of contagious disease, and he more than hinted that the city itself was at fault.
In the matter of the cisterns, for instance. Charleston now has a good city water supply, fairly free from contamination where it starts, and safely filtered before it reaches the city. But a great many of "our best citizens" prefer their own cisterns, on the grandfather principle. These are underground, for the most part, and are regularly supplied from the roof-drainage. Also, they are intermittently supplied by leakage from adjacent privy-vaults, Charleston having a very rudimentary and fractional sewerage-system. Therefore typhoid is not only logical but inevitable. I have no such revolutionary contempt for private rights as to deny the privilege of any gentleman to drink such form of sewage as best pleases him; but when it comes to supplying the public schools with this poison, the affair is somewhat different. Yet, as far as the Charleston Board of School Commissioners has felt constrained to go, up to date, is this: they have written to the City Physician asking that "occasional inspection" of the cisterns be made, and decorating their absurd request with ornamental platitudes.
With sewage it is the same situation. There is, indeed, a primitive sewer system in part of the city. But any attempt to extend it meets with a determined and time-rooted opposition. The Charlestonians are afraid of sewer-gas, but apparently have no fear of the filth which generates sewer-gas; said filth accumulating in Charleston's streets, subject only to the attention of the dissipated-looking buzzards, which are one of the conservative and local features of the place. I have seen these winged scavengers at work. It is not an appetizing sight. But with one exception they afford the only example of unofficial effort toward the betterment of sanitary conditions, that I witnessed in Charleston. The other came from a policeman, patiently poking with his club at the vent of one of the antediluvian sewers, which had—as usual—become blocked. Yet, despite public indifference and opposition, Dr. Green, without any special training or brilliant ability as a sanitarian, is, by dogged, fighting persistency lowering the death-rate of his city.
There is also a non-medical legislator to whom Charleston owes a debt of unacknowledged gratitude. Mr. James Cosgrove succeeded in getting the Charleston Neck marshes, wherein breeds the malaria-mosquito, drained. Since then the death rate from malaria, which was nothing less than scandalous, has dwindled to proportions that are almost respectable—if, indeed, it were respectable to permit any deaths from an easily destructible nuisance like the mosquito. Nearly all our cities, by the way, are curiously indifferent to the depredations of this man-eater. Suppose, for an example, that Trenton, New Jersey, were suddenly beset by a brood of copperhead snakes, which killed, let us say, two or three people a week and dangerously poisoned ten times that number. What an anti-snake campaign there would be in that aroused and terrified community! Well, that much more dangerous wild creature, the Anopheles mosquito, in a recent year slew more than 100 people in Savannah, Georgia, without arousing any public resentment. And Jacksonville's home brood in 1901 slaughtered 90 of its 30,000 citizens and dangerously poisoned probably 1000 more. New Orleans, by the way, having executed a triumphant massacre of the yellow fever mosquito (stegomyia) is now undertaking to rid itself of all the other varieties. And Baltimore's health bureau has succeeded in obtaining a grant of $10,000 for the purpose of demonstrating the feasibility of mosquito-extermination.