The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco

Plague in San Francisco: an essay review.

[Rieux] knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up it...

Frederick Novy and the 1901 San Francisco plague commission investigation.

The 1900 San Francisco plague is a significant event in which citizens, physicians, and public health officials denied a diagnosis of plague on economic, political, and social grounds. To resolve the controversy, Surgeon General Walter Wyman appointed an independent federal commission of university-based experts to investigate whether plague was present. I use the activities of Frederick Novy, ...

Was the Black Death yersinial plague?

Didier Raoult and Michel Drancourt argue that their recovery of DNAsequences specific to Yersinia pestis from skeletons believed to date from the mid-14th-century Black Death should put a stop to further “speculation” regarding the cause of the epidemic “unless our work is proved to be wrong.” There are several reasons to question the ancient DNA results reported for the Black Death pathogen by...

UC San Francisco UC San Francisco Previously Published Works Title

The April Meeting Op the San Francisco