A few months after bubonic plague had allegedly arrived in San Francisco and thus finally reached the Americas for the very first time, the popular local newspaper San Francisco Call arrived at its own diagnosis. What had plagued the city, the bay area and the minds of the people therein was not plague, but a disease called “Kinyounism" it announced on June 22, 1900. The affliction was characterized by an autocratic federal power-ridden quarantine officer, who based his drastic and tremendously damaging quarantine measures against a suspected threat of bubonic plague solely on the strange and sometimes ridiculous procedures of a young, often mysterious and suspect science: bacteriology.
Fig 1 - The San Francisco Call, 10 March 1990. Fair use.For the Call, the Governor of California and a good number of local clinicians, plague had never arrived, but a ‘plague craze’ was made up by the federal quarantine officer J. J. Kinyoun.(Fig1) He was accused of conspiring against the State of California, the City of San Francisco, its people and their health. The person who had claimed to have found, isolated and proven plague in San Francisco and furthermore was responsible for safeguarding the city against infectious diseases had been ridiculed, dragged to court and was about to face threats to his life in the months that followed. The bacteriologist himself had become a disease, his scientific practice a threatening foreign regime.
