INFECTION HUNTER
“Infectious disease is one of the few adventures left in the world,” wrote Hans Zinsser in his 1935 work Rats, Lice, and History. For medical adventurer Rupert Blue, such a chance beckoned in San Francisco in 1900. After a few deaths from plague came to light, business owners squared off with the leading local public health official, adamantly opposing a quarantine and pushing to suppress word of a mysterious ailment that was swiftly—but only occasionally—killing residents of San Francisco’s dilapidated, fetid Chinatown, where residents commonly crammed lightless subterranean quarters, defecating in latrines hacked out of the soil.
Blue, a 36-year-old physician, was assigned to manage the malady.
