Bubonic Plague

“Medicine at the time largely considered plague a disease of filth, and had few conceptions of how it was transmitted from victim to victim. Paul-Louis Simond . . . had made a breakthrough discovery four years earlier, yet his finding was not yet widely accepted; he “went searching for what species was capable of transmitting the disease not just from person to person, but from rat to rat . . . he turned his attention to fleas . . . [he began dunking dead rates from homes of plague victims and gathering fleas from their corpses. When he examined the intestines of the insects under a microscope, he found that the fleas were saturated with plague bacilli” (Randall,138-139). Simond’s approach (kill the rats that carry infected fleas, the intermediates) adopted by Rupert Blue in San Francisco in 1907, when, a year after the earthquake of April 1906, infected rats with infect flees all but took over the city. Blue’s Marine Hospital Service men were capturing 13k rats a week (191), but this was inadequate. He effectively deputized the entire population to aid in eliminating rats, and his deputy, Colby Rucker, wrote a primer, “How to Catch Rats,” widely distributed throughout the city (189-192),