THE SCAVENGERS OF CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA
It is interesting to note, by the way, that this epidemic, with its millions of dollars of loss to the city of New Orleans, might have been averted at a comparatively small cost, had the city fathers possessed the intelligence and foresight to adopt a plan devised by Dr. Quitman Kohnke, the city health officer. New Orleans gets its drinking water from private cisterns. Each of these is a breeding place for the yellow-fever-bearing mosquito. Dr. Kohnke introduced a bill a year before the epidemic, providing for the screening of all the cisterns, so that the mosquitos might not spread abroad; and also for the destruction by oil of the insects in the open pools. The total cost would hardly have exceeded $200,000. But there was no yellow fever in the city then; the public had recovered from its latest scare; and the bill was voted down with derision. I suppose the saving of that $200,000 cost New Orleans some forty or fifty million dollars in all.
Seldom does a Southern State discover yellow fever within its own borders. It is always Mississippi that finds the infection in New Orleans, and Louisiana that finds it in Galveston. This apparently curious condition of affairs is explicable readily enough, on the ground that no State wishes to discover the germ in its own veins, but is quite willing, for commercial reasons, to point out the bacillus in the system of its neighbor. In 1897 Texas was infected pretty widely with yellow fever; but pressure on the boards of health kept them from reporting it for what it was. In light cases they called it dengue or breakbone fever. Now, dengue has this short-coming: that people do not die of it. Disobliging sufferers from the alleged "dengue" began to fill up the cemeteries, thereby embarrassing the local authorities, until one of the health officers had a brilliant idea. "When they die," he said, "we'll call it malarial fever." And as such it went upon the records. Two recalcitrant members of the Galveston Health Board reported certain extremely definite cases as yellow fever. They were forced to resign, and the remainder of the Board passed resolutions declaring that there was no yellow fever, there never had been any yellow fever, and there never would be any yellow fever as long as they held their jobs—or words to that effect. San Antonio also had the epidemic; so much of it that the mail service was suspended; but nothing worse than dengue was permitted to go on the records. Later a Marine Hospital Service surgeon was sent by the government to investigate and report on the Texas situation. He told the truth as he found it and became exceedingly unpopular. Lynching was one of the mildest things they were going to do to him in Texas. And all this time, while Texas was strenuously claiming freedom from the yellow plague, her emissaries were discovering cases in New Orleans that the local authorities there had somehow carelessly overlooked. The game of quarantine, as played by the health authorities of the far Southern States, and played for money stakes, if you please, is not an edifying spectacle in twentieth century civilization.