History of Medicine

  BURN DOWN THE QUARANTINE STATION!

 

         In the 1850s ships disgorged over two million immigrants into New York City, packing crowded tenement buildings to the limit. Cargo arrived too, much of it from the Caribbean where yellow fever was endemic. Frequently vessels carried epidemic diseases, of which four triggered a quarantine: smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, and typhus. Before the discoveries of bacteriology and the role of insects in disease transmission, informed opinion cited miasmas, polluted air, and fermenting ship holds as sources of these maladies. To protect the public New York had erected, in 1799, a quarantine station on Staten Island, about five miles from lower Manhattan and quite close to New Jersey. 

Map of Staten Island in 1858. X marks quarantine station. Brooklyn is to the right and Manhattan is 5 miles north. (Wikipedia and N.Y. Public Library digital collection)

Over the years, the station enlarged and played frequent host to the four diseases mentioned. Surrounding the station was a six-foot-high brick wall, sealing it from the surrounding village of Tompkinsville, while inside there were as many as 1500 people in quarantine during years of peak immigration (1840s and 1850s). Numerous personnel lived and worked within, including the medical director, a few physicians, nurses, orderlies, and various hospital employees. Resident boatmen rowed in the immigrants and stevedores brought in cargo from infected ships. 

View of station, 1858. White building with cupola behind the pier is St. Nicolas Hospital, for cabin
class passengers and VIPs only. Vegetable garden is on slope. (Wikipedia and N.Y. Public Library)

                              

Duty was considered hazardous. Four physicians died of typhus in 1851 and another in 1856. Thirty-three workers came down with yellow fever in 1856. Needless to say, the residents of the surrounding towns feared this fountain of pestilence next door. Though much of Staten Island was thinly-populated farmland, several villages and towns along the eastern shore, near the station, suffered yellow fever outbreaks over the years. Whether they originated from the quarantine station or not, the locals saw the quarantine station as the source. They were particularly angry at the staff, who, in defiance of rules, often visited the local communities for shopping or pleasure. 

Staten Islanders had actually resisted the quarantine station from the start, but New York State, heedless, exerted “the right of eminent domain” over 30 acres of land and built the station. Small outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever harassed the communities intermittently and large outbreaks of yellow fever attacked in 1848 and 1856. After the 1848 flare-up, the New York legislature agreed to move the station to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, but New Jersey objected, shippers did not want a change, and the matter drifted. After the 1856 episode, the N. Y. Legislature authorized a station on the other side of Staten Island but the residents there burned it down twice during construction. Meanwhile, at the original station, the locals put up their own fence and insisted on a Harbor Police force to keep station personnel from wandering out. Threats and counterthreats mounted. Finally, on September 1, 1858, the Tompkinsville Board of Health met and recommended that citizens protect themselves by “abating this abominable nuisance without delay.”

That very night men crept through a hole in the station’s wall, stuffed straw mattresses in strategic sites in both hospital and residential buildings and set them on fire. The Fire Department arrived, but did nothing, claiming that their hoses had been cut. The Harbor Police were overwhelmed. The mob’s ringleader agreed to spare a building to house the patients in exchange for releasing prisoners taken. The mob grew to several hundred, opened another hole in the wall with a battering ram, and incinerated more buildings. Some patients were placed in the spared Female Hospital, others remained outdoors. 

Newspaper sketch of burning the quarantine station. (Wikipedia and N.Y. Public Library)

                      

The next day the N.Y. Mayor and the Police Chief promised police backup, but none arrived. Meanwhile Richmond County, where the station was, had a stormy meeting during which angered residents resolved to finish the job. Station staff moved their furniture to the street and watched that night as the mob burned down all the remaining buildings, including the Female Hospital and the pier. Patients from the hospital, moved outside, were stuck between two burning buildings and had to be cooled down with buckets of water. Other patients and staff sat in the rain that fell during the night.

The New York Times castigated the Staten Islanders as lawless and selfish, while the New York Herald, Horace Greely’s paper, was more sympathetic, criticizing the New York authorities for not heeding the Staten Islanders’ repeated pleas for relief. To maintain peace, this time over 100 policemen and the State militia arrived  and tents were supplied to house the sick. Several of the mob were jailed for breaking quarantine regulations but Cornelius Vanderbilt, born on Staten Island, bailed them out. Two ringleaders were prosecuted by the State. Their defense, buttressed by witnesses, was that the station personnel had repeatedly broken rules by wandering into the neighboring communities, spreading disease, and that the mob had acted in self-defense and were seeking “freedom from State tyranny.” The judge ruled in their favor, brushing aside the charges of violence and property destruction. The judge, probably not impartial, owned property on the island and his brother-in-law had died of yellow fever.

The quarantine station moved temporarily to a large vessel, the Florence Nightingale, anchored further out in the harbor. Meanwhile, two islands, Hoffman and Swinburne Islands, were created artificially (opened in 1866) to house quarantined passengers, one island for the sick, and one for those who were well but exposed to disease. 

Quarantine hospital on Swinburne Island, 1879 (Wikipedia and 
New York Public Library)

The moral of the story? Quarantine is fine, but "not in my back yard." Using islands, as New York finally did, frequently solved the problem. Another example was the choice of Angel Island for the quarantine station at San Francisco.

 

SOURCES:

Garrison, F, “The Destruction of the Quarantine Station on Staten Island in 1858.” 1926; Bull N Y Acad Med 2 (1): 1-5.

N Y Times, Sept. 2 through 5, 1858.

N Y Herald, Sept 2 through 5, 1858.

Stephenson, K, “The Quarantine War: The Burning of the New York Marine Hospital in 1858.” 2004; Pub Health Reports 119 (Jan-Feb): 79-92.