Black Death at the Golden Gate

Just a cheerful book about the plague to round out my holiday reading.

In the early 1900s, plague visited California. It creeped in, set up shop in Chinatown in San Francisco, and proceeded to puzzle scientists as it would pick victims seemingly at random. Compounding their efforts to isolate a cause, local politicians staunchly refused to assist the scientists and frighten the residents. San Francisco was growing, California as a whole was growing, and it wouldn't do to frighten people, close borders, and basically anything sensible to combat the disease. Everything's fine in Ba Sing Se. It went about as well as expected.

It was an interesting read about a situation I hadn't heard of before. If the politicians in charge then had had their way, things might have turned out much worse for San Francisco, California, and the United States as a whole. I liked that the book profiled the rotating cast of doctors-in-charge and the many ways their efforts to control the disease were brought up short by everyone around them. We're apparently really good at burying our heads in the sand for the sake of personal convenience and never really learned important lessons from the past. Who knew.

I did think the book meandered a bit more than was necessary, which caused my attention to wander a bit. There was an extensive section about the California gold rush which, while relevant to explain California's development, wasn't necessarily relevant to the plague story being told. I like my sidebars and rabbit holes as much as the next person, but it made the story as a whole feel less cohesive.

Still, a super engaging read and interesting story about how politics and medical science can never seem to see eye-to-eye on anything.