![]() ![]() In a timeline of outbreaks and a story rich in characters, Chase traces a public-health journey fraught with denial, racial discrimination, government obstinacy, a massive earthquake and subsequent inferno, and a burgeoning population of infected rats whose fleas transmitted the disease. ![]() "It arrived aboard vessels bearing rich cargoes, hopeful immigrants and infected vermin," she writes. With the fear of epidemics and chemical and biological terrorism a current vexation, author Marilyn Chase strikes close to home in "The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco," a study of the bubonic plague epidemic at the turn of the 20th century and the two doctors who fought it.Ĭhase, with a flair for drama and keen sense of history, goes back to 1900 in San Francisco, where the infectious bacterial disease docked and first flourished in Chinatown. ![]()
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