Driven By Fear - A Guest Blog Post by Dr. Guenter Risse

On Thursday, June 2, the San Francisco History Center is pleased to present Guenter Risse, author of Driven By Fear: Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco's House of Pestilence. He will be talking about his book and his research in the Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room in the Lower Level of the Main Library at 6:00p.m.

As a preview to his talk, Dr. Guenter Risse has written a guest blog post for the SF History Center's blog:

Since its inception, America has exhibited an exaggerated sense of vulnerability and fear with respect to the introduction of foreign diseases through visitors and immigrants. Blaming such arriving others for the appearance and transmission of sickness remains a common national practice, particularly fueling the fires of xenophobia and racism. The danger of contagion lurks everywhere; endangering our anxious lives in spite of ubiquitous sanitary measures. Delving into the spectrum of emotions that drove Americans to harsh measures like segregation and isolation is illustrative. Fed by psychological, ideological, and pragmatic urges, these efforts succeeded in stereotyping and scapegoating victims of disease.

With the Gold Rush, people migrating from many parts of the country and the world flocked to San Francisco, freely sharing their ambitions and health burdens in a rapidly expanding urban environment. Outbreaks of infectious disease, notably smallpox, syphilis, leprosy and plague, threatened the burgeoning population and jeopardized trade, prompting local authorities to seek social distancing through traditional protective measures including quarantines and isolation facilities. To this day, an aggressive public health policy has arbitrarily dictated the spatial boundaries of diseased and stigmatized bodies considered threats to society. According to Charles V. Chapin, a prominent 19tth century American public health authority, pest houses were deemed “essential” not only for the control of infectious diseases but also for “the welfare of both community and the patients who were institutionalized.”

San Francisco Pesthouse Annex, San Francisco Call, January 3, 1896.

Anticipating a cholera epidemic in 1850, San Francisco quickly built its first pest house, a temporary shack situated north of the area that would become Chinatown. Transferred to a distant location on a Potrero Nuevo hillside in the 1860s, the San Francisco Pesthouse became a temporary destination for local smallpox sufferers, forcefully removed from their homes to prevent further spread of the disease. A decade later, this establishment added a cottage, otherwise known as a “lock hospital,” for housing Chinese suffering from advanced stages of venereal disease. With the appearance of leprosy in the early 1870s, the San Francisco Pesthouse also started to receive a veritable “colony” of sufferers of this disease in spite of repeated efforts to return them to Hawaii and China. During a brief outbreak of bubonic plague after the 1906 earthquake, another tent in the compound collected individuals suspected of harboring this frequently fatal disease. By the late 1910s all infectious cases started to be rerouted and hospitalized at a new isolation pavilion of the San Francisco General Hospital. Finally, in March 1923, remaining inmates suffering from leprosy were finally transferred to the federal public health service facility in Carville, Louisiana, prompting the final closure and destruction of San Francisco’s most dreaded institution.

Practically erased from the historical record, this important establishment arose within a political climate strongly dominated by xenophobia and racism. Since the local authorities chose to protect the city's reputation as a haven for health restoration, the almost invisible institutional trajectory of its isolation facllity occurred outside the metropolis in an environment of want and despair. Since the Black Death, so-called lazarettos or pest houses have historically exposed some of the most coercive qualities of state power. Ultimately, the San Francisco Pesthouse story aims to reclaim people and events hitherto ignored while offering valuable comparisons with American reactions to AIDS, SARS, and more recently Ebola fever. Historical case studies can serve as cautionary tales, particularly in an era in which our government attempts to nationalize and militarize sanitary measures to achieve “bio preparedness” in the event of natural or terrorist-inspired contagion.

Unlike my previous work (Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco's Chinatown) about the plague in Chinatown between 1900 and 1904, researching this topic at San Francisco Public Library posed special challenges because of a lack of institutional records, including administrative and medical information. Those who wish to peruse my earlier research materials employed in the study of plague will find several binders with background documentation collected with the support of a National Library of Medicine grant. The Guenter B. Risse Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco's Chinatown Research Files, donated to the San Francisco History Center, include chronologies, English translations from Chinatown’s contemporary newspaper, the Chung Sai Yat Po or Chinese Western Daily, as well as correspondence between members of the US Marine Hospital Service stationed in Washington DC and San Francisco.