Black Death at the Golden Gate, by David K. Randall
I've always been fascinated by the black death, but know it mainly through my medieval history studies in college. This page-turner of a medical mystery brings the dreaded plague to light in a whole new setting, one that is very familiar to me here in the Bay Area.
San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century was a dirty, corrupt, anarchic mess of a city. An important port of call for overseas shipping, San Francisco was the first line of defense against infectious diseases being carried on ships from the Far East and Russia. In 1900, shortly after the Chinatown of Honolulu was burned to the ground in defense against a plague epidemic, a Chinese worker living in San Francisco's own Chinatown fell victim to the plague. The health officer of the region, stationed at Angel Island, was a brilliant scientist but a poor communicator. He tried to get the city's officials to enact quarantines on Chinatown, but both the government and local businesses were combative in response, and it didn't help that many still thought the disease had a racial element, a belief that blinded people in the face of good scientific work and also lead to a significant backlash by the Chinese business community, who utilized the 14th Amendment to prevent quarantines around Chinatown. He finally gave up, and it took a few years of occasional outbreaks until Rupert Blue came to town to fix the problem once and for all. Blue was more well-rounded than his predecessor; he knew how to make difficult people listen to him and was finally able to get the government to admit plague was a genuine problem and did his best to eradicate it. In the cities, he succeeded, though it's important to note that plague still infects some of the rodent population in rural areas in the West, most notably squirrels, due to the city's unwillingness to deal with the problem. Luckily, plague lost its teeth with the introduction of antibiotics, and is now highly curable.
If you like medical mysteries, American history, or just want to read a really fascinating story, Black Death at the Golden Gate is a fantastic page-turner about this little-known incident in our past.
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San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century was a dirty, corrupt, anarchic mess of a city. An important port of call for overseas shipping, San Francisco was the first line of defense against infectious diseases being carried on ships from the Far East and Russia. In 1900, shortly after the Chinatown of Honolulu was burned to the ground in defense against a plague epidemic, a Chinese worker living in San Francisco's own Chinatown fell victim to the plague. The health officer of the region, stationed at Angel Island, was a brilliant scientist but a poor communicator. He tried to get the city's officials to enact quarantines on Chinatown, but both the government and local businesses were combative in response, and it didn't help that many still thought the disease had a racial element, a belief that blinded people in the face of good scientific work and also lead to a significant backlash by the Chinese business community, who utilized the 14th Amendment to prevent quarantines around Chinatown. He finally gave up, and it took a few years of occasional outbreaks until Rupert Blue came to town to fix the problem once and for all. Blue was more well-rounded than his predecessor; he knew how to make difficult people listen to him and was finally able to get the government to admit plague was a genuine problem and did his best to eradicate it. In the cities, he succeeded, though it's important to note that plague still infects some of the rodent population in rural areas in the West, most notably squirrels, due to the city's unwillingness to deal with the problem. Luckily, plague lost its teeth with the introduction of antibiotics, and is now highly curable.
If you like medical mysteries, American history, or just want to read a really fascinating story, Black Death at the Golden Gate is a fantastic page-turner about this little-known incident in our past.
Shop indie!
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