Fort Worth’s reactions to the coronavirus have eerie similarities to past epidemics.
Our current alarm over the coronavirus pandemic should not blind us to the fact that Fort Worth has faced epidemics like this before.
Older residents with long memories may remember the polio epidemics of the 1940s and ‘50s, which always hit in the summer, causing concerned parents to keep their children away from public swimming pools.
Even scarier were the diseases of earlier generations when there were no antibiotics, no hospital ERs, no high-tech labs working on a cure. The history books tell us about the flu pandemic of 1918-19, but even before that there were epidemics that seemed to come out of nowhere and kill indiscriminately. Among the most frightening of those early epidemics was meningitis. It hit Fort Worth and Dallas equally hard.
The first epidemic to truly shut the city down was the meningitis epidemic of 1911-12. Meningitis is an acute inflammation of the brain and spinal cord. It can be viral, bacterial, or fungal in origin. People didn’t understand the difference and just referred to the cause as a “germ.” Fort Worthers were aware of the disease as early as 1881. Victims didn’t recover.
Thirty years later, meningitis struck again starting in October 1911, this time in the entire state. The state Board of Health reported 261 deaths through November. By early January 1912, Fort Worth had 11 cases; Dallas had 15. The numbers jumped dramatically after that.
By the third week, Dallas had 202 reported cases, including 99 deaths. Fort Worth had 52 cases, including 21 deaths. Hospitals in both cities initially refused to admit patients with meningitis symptoms out of concern for their staff and other patients.
There was a vaccine known as the Flexner serum that had been around for a decade and was effective, but it had limited availability and was useless if administered after the disease had been contracted. City fathers fell back on the old reliable practices of social isolation, enforced quarantine, and spraying to prevent a full-blown outbreak. Mayor W.D. Davis could not even bring himself to use the word “epidemic.” He called it a “situation.”
The epidemic disrupted normal life to an extent never before seen in Texas. Ninety-six Texas towns slapped a quarantine on any place that had a reported meningitis case, meaning people from those places were barred from entering their town. The ban was backed up by armed guards at train stations across the state.
The effects rolled over the economy, too. Railroads cut their schedules, factories reduced their hours, retail businesses laid off employees, and pastors even stopped holding church services.
The newspapers dutifully printed official pronouncements aiming to allay public fears. Readers were assured, for instance, that “meningitis is a preventable disease,” no more dangerous than tuberculosis, typhoid fever, or pneumonia, and that all of those had a higher death rate.
Doctors issued instructions for the best way to avoid catching meningitis: “clean bodies, clean homes, good ventilation, sunlight and exercise, together with proper food.”
Yet still the epidemic raged on into the spring of 1912. Fort Worth officials jumped the gun on Feb. 19, declaring, “The meningitis scare is over.” It wasn’t. Three weeks later the city physician reported there had been 75 cases, 32 deaths, in the month of February.
Finally, in May came believable good news that the epidemic had been “wholly stamped out.” What was left was to count the cost. Dallas reported 665 cases since December. Of that total, 125 had died. Fort Worth never produced a statistical after-action report. Life, it seemed, was back to normal.
There are eerie similarities between the 1912 epidemic and the current pandemic in terms of their spread, the public reaction, and official response. One visiting official from St. Paul, Minnesota, chastised Fort Worth authorities for “publicizing meningitis cases,” adding, “Your town has been getting the kind of advertising that isn’t helping any.”
One awkward similarity between then and now is that the epidemics also hit the poor especially hard, meaning the black and Latino communities. In the age of natural selection and Jim Crow it, wrongly, made sense to many that blacks and Latinos were more susceptible to certain diseases.
An 1885 smallpox outbreak in Fort Worth was blamed on “Mexicans arriving from infected districts,” producing calls to stop all Mexicans at the city limits. That didn’t happen. Instead the official response took two forms: burn the houses of the infected or quarantine them in the “pest house.” The former was done to a few houses in a small black neighborhood. The latter was an empty house away from the heart of the city where those infected could be banished until they got well or died.
The house was run by the sheriff, not medical personnel, which shows that the emphasis was not on treatment but on protecting the public by force if necessary. No home of the privileged was ever burned and no one of that class was ever banished to the pest house.
In 1912, the Star-Telegram carried a story that, “Negroes are easy meningitis victims” on account of “their habits and environment.” How else to explain why “far more colored persons [than whites] are afflicted, and the death rate among them is greatly in excess of that among white patients.”
In time, penicillin and other antibiotics would emerge that made some epidemics a thing of the past. But other diseases come along that raise the same old questions: What preventive measures need to be taken? Will the hospital treat me? When are we going to get a vaccine? Businesses open or closed? Schools open or closed?
Every new epidemic brings the same old questions.
Author-historian Richard Selcer is a Fort Worth native and proud graduate of Paschal High and TCU.