Brought to you today by your television provider. Let me tell you a little bit about our author this evening. David randles a Senior Reporter and this tickled me im going to share pretty covers everything from cannabis, to knock knock jokes. His two previous books are dreamland, adventures and strange science of sleep. And the king and queen of malibu, the true story of the battle for paradise which is currently in development as a television series. Hes appeared on ennis nbc, fox, reuters, and rp, and elsewhere. His third book the black death of the gold eight entering dates. Please join me in welcoming david randall. [applause] guest thank you all for coming, especially given the weather outside. It is nice to be inside where it is dry as to oppose to outside works wet. One thing i realize, so my first book was about sleep science. And when i went and talked about that book i realize that many people were coming to the talks because there had their own sleep disorders and they wanted to talk with someone about it. This book is about the plague, if you think you have the plague, this is not the place for you. [laughter] i think theres a hospital about three blocks that way, thats where you should go instead. So, one of the questions people always ask me is how did you get interested in this book . Well, the last book i wrote was about malibu is about the family who owned all of malibu and how they lost it. One of the main characters comes up to San Francisco around 1900 any rights at letter back to his wife saying this is the wicked displays ive ever seen. There are rumors the plague is here. I got stuck by the word rumors. It seemed like one of those things that you would know if the plague was there or not. Everybody would know about the outbreak. I started looking into it and i learned there was a conspiracy between city officials, the governor of california, the editors of the states most powerful newspapers to conceal the truth of the plague. By extension, put millions of peoples lives at risk. I had never heard of this before i started realizing this was actually three stories and one at story of a disease, story of place industry people. We will go through all of those. Starting off with the bubonic plague. Most people heard of it because of medical school or high school you hear about it killed half of the population. Its the same disease it never really went away. What happens when you have the bubonic plague is that you have whats called a bobo, swollen glands and its either in your groin or armpit and it fills with blood. This is where bubonic plague comes from. You typically die within 48 or 72 hours. And then the longer it stays in your body, before you die you change different forms. It starts with the bubonic plague thing comes with septicemic plane which means it gets in your bloodstream then it becomes the pneumatic plague which you can spread it just by coughing. This is what decimated europe. People coughed and just basically wiped everybody out. At the time of this outbreak was in the early 20th century there is no cure theres no vaccine with self no vaccine now this is where the world was connecting people and goods are closer connected so disease could travel faster than ever before the plague emerged in 1870 in china people dont know why but it started spreading and it spread very rapidly. So it reaches hong kong, decimates the city, hospitals they are reporting something lincoln 95 death rate among patients. Eventually it kills 10 Million People in china. It kills another 5 Million People in india, it spreads to australia, scotland, and it seems like its only a matter of time before the plague reaches north america for the first time. And this is an important thing to realize too, is this an era where science and medicine is still in its infancy. It still on the doorstep of the modern age. So this is a time where many doctors are considered a good dr. If you are fast. Because theres not pain medication, theres not everything else. The idea that science and medicine is something that people in White Lab Coats do with microscopes and xray machines, and everything else. That is still in its infancy and only still becoming accepted. This is a time when science is really fighting for legitimacy. And this is a disease that no one knows what to do with. Even though its almost a modern age, medical science has a medical understanding of this disease really stills not that different from the middle ages. Nothing is changed in 500 years. They just know that this is a disease that you cant fight. It has no cure. You dont know what to do with. So, you have on one hand the most terrifying disease in humans since the history and it is spreading again. Where does it spread to . It spreads to San Francisco. Which is perhaps the least the worst place in the world for it to spread there are many reasons why. The one thing when you get the disease its a gruesome death. Even a little bit from the book probably one of the grosser scenes in the book so if your little squeamish i learned a lot of very gross things i held back on most of them you want at the grossest stuff come up to me after words and ill tell you. Before the plague reached San Francisco it reached honolulu. It was found in chinatown there as well. So in this scene, doctor lee is a doctor in chinatown, the victims name is yet coy. A man who brings him to doctor lee is a man named phong. They lived in the same essentially flophouse in china. Phong saw that your coit was near death, picks them up, put them on his back and walks them two or three blocks to the doctors office, trying to save his life. So this is the scene max or doctor lee alone and phong burst in and laid him in front of him. The man was covered in feces and vomit and raved in madness. Doctor lees struggle to hold his new patient still all the while wondering how he was still life. A finger to his wrist revealed a racing pulse. As if the body was facing an internal terror. While his forehead was so warm to the touch that doctor lee fought the instinct to pull his hand away. When he yelled sounded wet as if emerging from below the sea. The mans skin, which days before and glimmered in the balding hawaiian son, was pocketed with black spotted open red swords, leaving a line between bodily tissue in the outside world and unsettled question. The lymph nodes and his thighs were so swollen that it looked as if his leg up and been pumped full of air was at risk of floating away. A mixture of blood and phone began leaking out of his mouth. A sign of ruptured blood vessels pretty soon fell into a coma from which doctor lee knew he would never recover. So you have a terrifying disease coming to San Francisco. San francisco the time was still essentially the wild west. San francisco was the most important city in the entire western path of the country. Its the biggest city, it was the richest city, it was the most connected to the rest of the world through trade. Both coming through the golden gates before the bridges theyre obvious that, of votes would come in a kobe from alaska, russia, hawaii, japan, australia. It could be from new york, people going around the horn to get up to the golden gate and San Francisco. This would be anyplace in the world. San francisco was still like a boomtown. This is only 50 years after the gold rush and statehood. She still had people walking the streets of San Francisco who were literally gold miners. It was the whole mindset of the city, describe it in the book that they believed in faith rather than skill. When you think about what the gold miners mind set is for you dont mind for gold because you think youre better at mining for gold and everybody else. Youre doing it because you think youre going to be lucky. I am going to find the right spot i am getting at the biggest nugget, im going to become a wealthy personal aside. And if that is your mindset, they are counting on being lucky, you dont anybody to get in the way of you becoming lucky. There is no idea that you could have Public Health or public goods, or this idea that you had a civil society. One thing i was struck by in the book was asked several cisco group, its spending on Public Health declined we had a big city with festering problems of a boomtown. It place we walked on the street and there would be horse caucuses around. And people with their trash and food into the street praying and expecting for rasa take it away. In the book i quote someone who said their talk about rats is god made them scavengers to let them scavenge. That was the mindset. And not only that, but San Francisco was every man for himself type of place. It is also the very first time hitting its middle age where people cant get jobs as easily as before. They find it chinatown in San Francisco is the largest outside of asia and it still is. Has about about 20 of the citys population. And like immigrants anywhere, chinese are willing to do the jobs nobody else will. So its laundries, cooks, porters and hotels and its everything else. There is rampant and blatant anti asian bigotry and racism in ways, now you look back at it its shocking. So the mayor at the time was named james phelan. He later becomes and runs for and wins the seat at the u. S. Senate seat in california. And his Campaign Signs really say, literally keep california whites. That was the focus was a very easy scapegoat for all of the problems that were happening in San Francisco. And the governor at the time was in man named henry gage. And like politicians now, he pioneered the idea of calling anything he didnt agree with or anything that was negative fake news. So you have the worst of these in history coming to a place that in no way once a deal with it. And in no weightless to acknowledge that it could be in any danger. This is also the gateway to the entire country. So you have everything ripe for a crisis. And lo and behold, a crisis happens. Somebody by the name at chinese immigrant name wong king is the first known victim of plague in San Francisco. A Health Inspector is writing out the death certificate and he does a cursory examination of the body. This is something he hasnt usually done the same Health Inspectors already been fired before for making up causes of death. Oh, its a stabbing wound, its a heart attack, he had no ideas just writing things down. So looking at the body once and he sees a booboo jumps back in fear and he knows what it is for he knows the danger and he knows it could be hong kong San Francisco could become converted quickly. To have this danger, you have this disease, and the final part is you have the people. You have at this time federal health officer, its the Marine Health service which is the forerunner of the u. S. Public Health Service today. You have a man by them joseph who is in San Francisco for he thought of a known as one of the most brilliant doctors the entire country. He knows more about plague than anybody else in the country because he studied with the people who worked in the outbreaks in china and were the first ones to discovered how the plague was spread. Or the bacteria that causes plague. But kenyons problem is that he is so brilliant, but he almost has a talent that make being people hate him. Im sure you know people like this they cant get that knowledge to give somebody else to trust them like them and agree with them. The only reason he was in San Francisco in the first place is almost happenstance anyway. He had been in washington, and the u. S. Surgeon general, somebody writes an article saying kenyon should be the true Surgeon General because he is bringing the scientific level of the Health Service up to new level. This drives a Surgeon General crazy with envy, he doesnt want to have any threat to his power. So essentially exiles kenyon out to San Francisco to get him as far away from washington as possible. So kenyon is here, he is the forerunner of a new era of medicine. He has done this because of personal pain his youngest daughter recently died from which is this the most devastating diseases of a child back then. Now you get shots and vaccines in your fine but that time it didnt happen. Even sewed depressed by the death of his daughter that equip medicine for a while then he came back because he felt like this is way out of pain. He studied in germany and the first vaccinations. He sees children who are is the same age of his daughter receiving shots and recovering it as if by magic. And in the book i describe the prometheus has returned and stolen another secret from the gods. I cant imagine, this is like magic how are people surviving. So kenyon knows that with medicine people dont have to die. He writes a letter to the people back home saying every preventable death seems like manslaughter. It weighs very heavily on his conscience. He sees plague, he knows what can happen. And he is paranoid, he knows that it only takes one person getting on a train heading east comments suddenly that plague in detroit and chicago and pittsburgh and cleveland and new york and every other stop along the way. So much so, that there would be no way to ever recover from the disease. The entire country would be ruined. So he does whatever he can and he takes drastic measures because he knows its an emergency. But because of his aggressiveness, everybody recoils from him. The city and state officials they dont want to admit the plague is there because if they do, that can lead to public panic. But on top of that can decimate the economy. California zone is a golden state for reason. People come out here because they think they can literally find gold. Or they could find the life of paradise that they want. If there is acknowledgment of this plague here, everyone will stop coming. The economy will collapse. So there is no need, no want to acknowledge this disease. The City Health Officials also start claiming that maybe kenyon is just in this for himself. Trying to take money from the city coffers. The Marine Health official doctors who should be as natural allies, want nothing to do with him because they think that he thanks he is better than all of them. Any kind of does any kind of makes that known. They dont want to have anything to do with him whatsoever. Then the chinese in chinatown who are online of the disease, they see his aggressiveness and they recoil in the wolf doctor. This is especially after theres no vaccine, no medicine for plague at the time. There is something called a half keen serum which if you take it, its proven in some studies in india at the time, it prevents your chances of getting plagued by about 40 . Its isnt that much, but at the same time it has very obvious and detrimental side effects. Your whole body becomes a flush for several days, you have a high fever, you have delusions, nausea, bodyaches and pains. It almost seems as bad as gaily disease himself. Kenyon tries to go through Chinatown Police officers basically knocking down doors and forcibly injecting people with this. Nobody was to do it. It causes a right and chinatown. People start, and chinatown the start hiding the bodies. So kenyon is essentially flying blind he doesnt know where the disease is spreading awareness going next. Because they are hiding the bodies, the governor and other people to point to kenyon and saying theres an outbreak here, show me the bodies, show me the victims and he cant. He knows they are out there but he doesnt know where. So he is found by this time about 200 victims of the plague. But he thanks there are many times more and theyre most likely. He goes farther and farther and he eventually quarantines the entire state of california. He says nobody can leave the state unless an assigned paper from him saying theyre healthy. This strikes everybody in california insane. State senator and sacramento stands on the senate floor and says kenyon should be hanged for this. So he is essentially run out of town. Then you have another Public Health officer by the name of rupert blue come in. And wheres kenyon was thought of the most brilliant doctor, blue is thought of as someone who is a little bit lazy. He kind of has been a little bit lazy. What he has going for him is he is very nice, he has an ability to get people to like him and trust him. Hes also, you think of the best of San Francisco tech workers now, the willingness to look at things of new angles and to fail. Hes willing to look at things in a different way. So kenyon for as brilliant as he is he can never get past the idea of race two. Plague is really thought of for some reason as a racial disease. I just thought of something that only asians can get. So blue starts treating the disease as if it is a real disease that anybody can get. He does so many things that are considered radical to type or he hires a chinese translator and treats him like a full member of the staff. He starts Building Trust among the chinese. Work kenyon always stayed in his laboratory on angel island, blue opens up a laboratory and chinatown itself. He walks the street, making connections with people. Soon, people are starting to show the chinese are starting to show him where the bodies are. He is finding victims that kenyon was never able to find. The big mystery in the book, i dont want to give it away too much, is that in every of the place the world, all the other big cities were plague has an outbreak, it spreads slowly at first and then it explodes into the population. It has not exploded yet in San Francisco and something is preventing that. They dont know what it is. But they know its biding time. So blue knows the top of the clock is ticking faster and faster and faster. So he starts implementing all these radical ideas which we now take for granted in terms of public sanitation. He does things like institutes street sweeping for the first time ever. Wrap roofing trash cans, having cement sidewalks arrest cant burrow underneath. He is the first one who demonstrates that they knew since the middle ages that rats are associated plague, but they did not know how plague was spread. He is the first woman demonstrates conclusively that his fleas on rats that are spreading the disease. So he institutes a rat eradication program. Overall, he does everything paying people a nickel a recorder for every route they bring into him. So essentially creates teams of young kids going through the city picking up as many rats as they can i can amateur rat killing squad. He gets a bunch of healthy rats in the eight dies there for different colors, red, blue, green and releases them in the sewer system. He put the flyer saying if you see a different colored rattler to snow. This is his only way of trying to track the subterranean passageways to the city. He is trying to find out exactly where he should lay traps, or rats are coming, how they are migrating. Everything he can take and understand the disease. Because of all of this, over time they killed Something Like 2 million rats in San Francisco. Which is five times the citys population. He contains the disease and chinatown. It is safe enough that he is sent out somewhere else to stop the next fire. And then theres the great earthquake in San Francisco in 19 oh six. And now plague is spread everywhere. Before assignment forms of the disease the most terrifying form is magic. This is what happened. Sixty people die in the span of two weeks or so. And not only are people dying quickly, but they are throughout the city now. So it has the citys attention. You can no longer say its a disease of chinatown disease of immigrants. Now it is from north beach to this neighborhood, its everywhere. And the geography of San Francisco, when he think about it from a Public Health perspective, it is perhaps the most terrifying landscape you could ever deal with. Its everything from forests to oceans, skyscrapers horse stables. Its every possible thing you can think of you have to deal with. So blue, through the focus on Public Health and everything else. He is able to once again contain the disease. One of the big lessons took from this book diseases are not confined to the past. All you have to see is the Measles Outbreak now. A lot of things he move past that we moved suddenly the hard science that saves the day, can you new the science, he knew the epidemiology he knew how to track a disease. But he was ineffectual and he ended up a failure because he ignored the soft science of persuasion. Which is almost as important as the hard science and the crisis. Blue had that in spades for it he knew how to get people to trust in him and to trust what he was doing to take steps to not only protect himself but to protect everybody else. And blue is one of those people who actually hes one of the american heroes nobody knows about because millions of peoples of lives were saved for it he leaders becomes a u. S. Surgeon general himself, he loses that job after the 1918 flu outbreak. He becomes the fall guy for that. He does this radical thing of staying with the Health Service just think about your job whoevers the ceo and the baskets demoted and they stay. Nobody stays they go into something else. But blue is driven by his own reasons too. Kenyon was driven by his personal pain, blue is to to a different extent. Blue is Something Like the seventh of eight kids. His older brother victor was the family favorite. Victor becomes a war hero and rupert blue, decides as a kid perhaps victors purpose in life is to hurt and my purpose in life is to heal. It follows that there is entire life. This another outbreak in los angeles in 19204. Just like in San Francisco 1900. It happens in an immigrant community thats not very from Union Station is now. With the twin towers correctional facilities is which is one of the largest places in california. The Mexican American immigrants he died after finding the disease rat under his house. Over the next two weeks, Something Like 75 people died. Theres all this trail of dead that can be connected back to him. As nunnally him, his daughter dies, the help next door that helps to take care of him she dies, her family dies, the nurses that took care of them die, the hospital drivers died, the priest who delivered the last rites die and once again its city officials started firing everybody whos latina saying this is an immigrant disease and we dont want to be connected with it. Its a huge place going from the port to pasadenas 30 or 40 miles, the disease cant spread that quickly. So blue comes in once again takes a radical step of showing that medicine is not racially biased. Its focused on science. I creates us to error or we recognize disease in a different way we recognize on Sanitation Health such as the most tidy stories of the past three see how close we came to a crisis and pat ourselves in the back are we lucky. There might be another crisis again. That is because climate change. Rats, fleas on rats and other rodents, his claim is get warmer into the breeding season extends. Rats are hyper fertile animals. If they werent so filthy they be really amazing. Because single rack and 15000 descendents in a single year. Theyre stronger than steel they can drop off a fourstory building and be fine they can collapse their bodies and skulls downshift pinhole so they can fit their pretty much any opening. And on top of that they can swim. So rats can survive almost anything. Single pair of rats will have about 70 pups in a year. If you extend that breeding season by four months because its just longer and warmer, thats in there 12 or 15. Rats can start having their own descendents when about two or three months old. Thats whites hyper fertility rates. The more rats there are, the more fleas there are. The more fleas there are the more plague. The more contact between humans and the disease. I was speaking with somebody who is a professor at uc davis. Some of the best vets in the world. In certain areas of the country people know plague is a risk, decide if you go to you 70 careful to the squirrels they can carry a plague. Its an idaho and mexico to other places. People there no that its a risk factor they look for other places they dont in the first 12 hours of plague looks like the flu in a lot of places. The geography of diseases change as the geography of climate change, diseases will start coming and places you dont expect. Its going to put more people in danger in different ways. I dont want to oversell it its not leica Michael Price novel where everything is going to an outbreak we are all going to die immediately. It is a risk. One of the things i think this book shows, is that as much as times change people dont change. So perhaps we need to continue to lead and show, lean on the things the lessons like rupert blue shows us on how important persuasion is in a crisis. They look in the past helps solve the problems of a new scary future. Thank you so much for coming, im happy to answer any questions you may have. Started check out rumors of a plague outbreak and the officials trying to covered up or being in denial. She figure out timeline of when the outbreak actually started, what tools are jews and had a jew manage affair was going on . Guest one thing i was very fortunate to find, couple of things, can you had a habit of writing really long letters to people. Like 60 page letters going to the scenes of what he knew and when. That was an invaluable resource. Then i also found that great, great nephew, there might be another great and they are not. Of rupert blue who still had Something Like 100 letters that blue wrote to family members when he grew up in south carolina. It is incredible for me to it actually hold this letter from 120 years ago and to compare what blue and other people were saying in the newspapers to what is actually feeling. His saying he sued in union square after the earthquake saying we can contain this is going to be okay. And essentially wrote a letter back home saying i have no idea what im doing or if this is even going to be possible. We might have to quarantine all of San Francisco or california again. You got to see the difference between the private and the public. The other thing is this is an error of telegrams and wires. They were sending constant fleury between washington and here. For some reason, i dont know why, the Retail Service had a policy they would collect them all in a year end publish them in a gigantic book. So you can see people talking about each other behind their backs. In real time. Someone was saying canyon is showing more selfrestraint than i thought possible. So really you got to feel as i was writing the book, you could feel the day by day, how the pressure continues to rise higher, higher, and higher. You got to feel like you or they are neat didnt have to make things up. They really did not know what theyre doing it all. But they knew people were dying. Any other questions . No . Well thank you very much for coming i appreciate it and i hope you enjoy the book. [applause] i am happy to sign copies as well. they are interviewed by oregon senators. He recalls growing up in the idaho country in idaho mountains and the formal introduction at the age of 17 in her book educated. After that turning Point Charlie kurt and his book the mega doctrine on the new conservative agenda. Then finance editor for the New York Times with a critical look at germany georgia back. And then anna and her memoir uncanny valley and her experience working for Tech Startups in silicon valley. Next on book tv after words, they reported on issues facing the working class in rural america. There book is tight rope. Americans reaching for hope. They are interviewed by oregon senator jeff markley. I am pleased to be with you to talk to about the new book you put outcome of the tight rope, and particularly because its taking a look at a small town in oregon, a town that you come from nick, and i come from a small rural town in oregon, and i just ponder how as youre traveling the world, you are living in a different environment completely, but you have reported on w
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