TYPHUS
Often called “camp fever”, “war fever”, and “jail fever”, because it strikes in the crowded conditions of jails and camps, typhus is caused by microorganisms called rickettsia . They are transmitted to humans through body lice and tend to strike in cold weather, especially in times of famine. Symptoms include high fever, head and body aches, nausea, exhaustion and body rash. The organism attacks the central nervous system and causes delirium and seizures. It usually lasts about three weeks, and the death rate is typically 10-40%. [1] It was a major killer during World War II, in both concentration camps and prisoner of war camps.
Typhus House, 5 Essex Street
You are now standing in front of the tenement house where hundreds of immigrants were quarantined during the February 1892 typhus epidemic. A recent immigrant aboard the Massilia, a passenger named Henoch Griner, and his five brothers were found to have the disease. After the Health Department was notified, Chief Inspector Cyrus Edson ordered the raid of several houses in the area, where those found to be ill were rounded up both here and at 42 E. 12th Street. Some 200 Russian immigrants were found to have contracted the disease. Declaring that “all the cases have occurred among the Jewish people,” Edson ordered the round up of all Russian Jewish passengers who had been aboard the ship, and they were forcibly shipped off to Riverside Hospital. Among the 1,200 people who were quarantined there from February 12 to April 1st, 1892, 1,150 were healthy. They were there for 21 days. [2]
This move caused considerable (quite a bit) outrage among the Jewish communities of the Lower East Side. Abraham Cahan wrote in the weekly newspaper Arbeiter Zeitung on February 26, 1892:
The Health men imprisoned healthy Jews on the ships coming into New York and on the island. They packed them together and dragged them… These poor Jews could have become
sick simply from being lumped together with the true typhus patients. The health inspectors burned the poor people’s belongings, they emptied out their houses and ran around sending alarming telegrams. [3]
Typically, believing the disease to be limited to poor neighborhoods because of their dissolute (immoral; dirty) habits, health officials refused to believe that the disease could spread to middle class homes. The Sanitary Aid Society described the people they served as “human maggots... [living in] so much filth, so many filthy homes and pestilential rookeries (disease-filled hidey holes), so many human beings with insufficient (not enough) breathing space, bad ventilation (air circulation), plumbing [and] festering masses.” [4] Edson himself described victims as “shiftless, lazy and ignorant who live upon unwholesome (not good for you) food and who habitually (always) violate moral and sanitary laws.” [5] As they had with the cholera, the Health Department refused at first to acknowledge evidence that typhus had spread to the middle classes. When doctors reported two girls infected with the disease living uptown, they said the diagnosis was “impossible” since the children had no contact with ship’s passengers or lived on the Lower East Side. [6]
Many Americans began agitating (fighting for) at this point in time for a halt (stop) to immigration, as immigrants, particularly Jewish ones, were believed to be harboring every major disease. The New York Times opined on February 13, 1892: “Such immigrants are not wanted either in this city or any other part of the United States. They should be excluded. The doors should be shut against them.” [7]
[1] Kiple, Kenneth. Plague, Pox and Pestilence. (Phoenix Illustrated: London, 1997), p. 103-9.
[2] Markel, p. 49-50.
[3] Markel, p. 70.
[4] Markel, p. 31.
[5] Markel, p. 44.
[6] Markel, p. 63.
[7] Markel p. 67.