736: The Herd
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A quick warning. There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. We all know how it is today. For most of a year, medical experts and government officials told us all to wear face masks. Half of us don't do it. Now that we finally have a vaccine, a third are hesitant to take it or say they definitely will not take it. But it wasn't always like this. Things used to do what they were asked by medical authorities, mostly. Like when the 1918 flu pandemic hit the United States, killing similar numbers of Americans like COVID is killing today. Let's look at one American city that did a pretty good job minimizing deaths back then. Howard Markle writes about the history of American epidemics. So a great example, the example I love to use is St. Louis, Missouri. And they had a very adept commissioner of health named Max Starcloth. The commissioner of health is the local official, usually a doctor, who tells everybody what to do when there's an epidemic or other health emergency. For instance, Max Starcloth closed schools, he ended up with public gatherings of all sorts. He ordered people who were sick to be quarantined. Dr. Starcloth was a good political operator. But he was also very good at communicating to the public and made twice daily statements that were reported in the newspapers. And you have to remember back then, most newspapers had six or more editions per day. So they updated them much like CNN would update its stories. What was his messaging? Do you know? Yeah, it was like be a good St. Louisian, I remember, you know, and don't spread the flu. It is a socially mediated disease and we've got to work together. How is this Dr. Starcloth had all kinds of messages telling people to wash their hands, don't cough on others, because medicine was so primitive back then, they hadn't actually isolated the flu virus. So they had no way to confirm if you had it, they couldn't test you. So the only way they could keep track of the disease was the people who were sneezing and sick told authorities to start off with tell the public. These are the symptoms that you need to call us about. You need to communicate this to us. That's where the word communicable disease comes from, by the way. Not so much that it's infectious, even though it is, but that one source is communicating it to a higher source, to a public health department. Oh, wow. Yeah. So that works because if you can get people on board with that, they're self-isolating, they're self-reporting, they're self-quarantining, and so on. So that's good. To be clear, not everybody was on board. Just push back from the public in every American epidemic, Howard says, German immigrants rioted rather than get vaccinated in the 1880s.
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