Plague in San Francisco: rats, racism and reform

In his rousing book Black Death at the Golden Gate, journalist David Randall describes just that: the bubonic-plague epidemic that struck San Francisco, California, in 1900. Joseph Kinyoun was a veteran of the federal Marine Hospital Service (MHS) in Washington DC, the Bellevue Hospital in New York City (see D. Dobbs Nature 539, 354–355; 2016) and the European labs of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. San Francisco’s magnitude-7.9 earthquake in 1906 destroyed some 80% of the city’s infrastructure and left more than 250,000 people homeless, with rats massing over devastated land and open sewers.

Source: www.nature.com