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Joseph J. Kinyoun

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joseph J. Kinyoun
1st Director of the U.S. Hygienic Laboratory
In office
August 1887 – April 30, 1899
President
Succeeded byMilton J. Rosenau
Personal details
Born(1860-11-25)November 25, 1860
East Bend, North Carolina
DiedFebruary 14, 1919(1919-02-14) (aged 58)
Washington, D.C.
Resting placeCenterview Cemetery
38°45′01.8″N 93°50′38.7″W / 38.750500°N 93.844083°W / 38.750500; -93.844083 (Joseph J. Kinyoun burial site)
NationalityAmerican
Children5
Alma materBellevue Medical College
Known for
  • Discovered a bacterium strain of Vibrio cholerae which causes cholera
  • Founder and first director of the U.S. Laboratory of Hygiene
Scientific career
FieldsBacteriology, Public health
InstitutionsMarine Hospital Service
George Washington University
Uniformed service
Allegiance United States
Service/branchMarine Hospital Service
United States Army
Years of service1886–1902
1917–1919
RankSurgeon (MHS)
Major (USA)

Joseph James Kinyoun (November 25, 1860 – February 14, 1919) was an American physician and the founder of the United States' Hygienic Laboratory, the predecessor of the National Institutes of Health.[1]

His career was nearly ended by his insistence, while serving as head of the Marine Hospital Service in San Francisco, on taking vigorous measures to contain the spread of the bubonic plague. He resigned his position in 1901 after being attacked for his diagnoses, including claims by California Governor Henry Gage that he and other federal employees had falsified evidence by injecting cadavers with bacilli. He was ultimately proven correct by independent testing and the appearance of further cases.

Kinyoun's later career was spent in private companies and as a professor of bacteriology and pathology at George Washington University[2] before becoming a bacteriologist for the District of Columbia Health Department, a position he held until his death. In 1909, Kinyoun served as president of the American Society for Microbiology. In 1915, he developed the Kinyoun stain, a procedure used to stain acid-fast bacteria.

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Transcription

Centers for Disease Control and ... at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after joining the CDC staff Dr. Morens served as a medical virologist studying enteric viruses and gastroenteritis viruses as chief of CDC’s Respiratory and Special Pathogens Branch and for two years he studied Lassa fever in Sierra Leone West Africa from 1982 to 1998 Dr. Morens was professor of tropical medicine at the University of Hawaii and from 1987 to 1998 he was professor and chairman about the epidemiology department in the School of Public Health at the university Doctor Morens has studied the epidemiology of viral hemorrhagic fevers viral pathogenesis and the integration and role of epidemiology and biomedical science and research his career interest for over thirty five years has been on emerging infectious diseases and on diseases of unknown etiology in the past decade he has published and spoken published and spoken on numerous aspects of history of epidemiology and infectious diseases so please join me in welcoming Doctor Morens today speaking on the forgotten indispensable man Joe Kinyoun and the birth of the NIH thank you Jeff that’s quite an introduction I feel like my time is almost up so we can all leave anyways thank you not only to Jeff but thanks to the NLM for inviting me here 0:01:31.630,0:01:35.560 it’s always a pleasure to join you for these seminars and what I’m going to do today is ... not so much a history talk as a show-and-tell you're gonna see a lot of slides that go by very quickly but there's nothing written on those slides that you really need to read word for word because I will be telling you the story that I want to tell you and this is about our founder ... Joe Kinyoun that's what he called himself as his medical letterhead paper said from the office of Joe J Kinyoun ... not much is known about Kinyoun but I think everybody in the audience knows that he is our founder of NIH and of NIAID my institute but very little is known about him otherwise and it turns out that that's kind of not for any particular reason except that nobody has really looked and what I’ve been doing for about the past six years or so as a hobby on my own in spare time is trying to dig into the life and history of Joe Kinyoun and now we also have a Stetten scholar Ava Ahren in the audience here It’s dark in here so I can’t see her there she is And she has already joined us and starting to work on Kinyoun too and i think that the baton will soon be passing to her and ... sometime not too far in the future I hope you'll be hearing from her again on Kinyoun so let me give a little background history and by the way what you're looking at is an actual photograph of Joe Kinyoun’s little baby 1860 he was born and this is probably early 1861 one sitting on the lap of his father who was a year a surgeon in the Confederate army during the civil war now to give you a little background on the and Marine Hospital Service which became the Public Health Service there were terrible yellow fever epidemics that occurred in the 1790’s the early days of the United States and in 1798 President Adams signed a bill authorizing an act for the relief of sick and disabled seamen which became the Marine Hospital Service and eventually what is now the Public Health Service there were no quarantine provisions of that act because quarantine was then under the purview of the states but over time particularly in the 1870's the Marine Hospital Service began to conduct quarantine in assisting the states in their quarantine activities and here you see some pictures of what quarantine was like in in the middle and late 1800's quarantine was the major public health activity there was the concern that these epidemic and pandemic diseases that everybody feared particularly cholera plague play yellow fever and small pox would be imported from abroad where they were often epidemic or pandemic and a major public health activity was to try to keep them out with quarantine and that meant reading ships fumigating ships fumigating baggages of passengers and the passengers themselves this was all in the era before microbiology but during this time from the eighteen thirties until the 1870's ... what we were in retrospect it's clear we were approaching the era of microbiology in which we would realize that most of these epidemic diseases were caused by single organisms the first human infectious disease to fully established and proven by modern criteria was anthrax based on the work of Casimir Davaine over about twenty five years but capped off by Koch’s publication in 1876 and anthrax was the first human infectious diseases to be established as a human infectious disease by the new microbiology criteria we now call those criteria Koch’s postulates here you see Koch the hand-drawing he made in 1876 and the photomicrograph one of the first photomicrographs I’ve ever seen published the following year in 1877 as we go forward now talking about Joe Kinyoun I’m just going to show you a few photographs you'll see all of these again and you you’ll also see a little yellow a little yellow circle here if you haven’t figured out what that is we'll talk about it a little bit later first I’m going to talk about the early life of Kinyoun about his birth in 1860 and so on you don't need to look at this carefully because I’m gonna go over it he was born in East Bend North Carolina that's where the family had lived his father had been born in that area and as as we'll see He moved quite a bit during his life I mentioned his father was a surgeon in the Confederate army and they lived in a very rural part of the Appalachian mountains where there was not much ... civilization there these were tiny little towns but somehow for some reason his father was able to get a tremendous education the Kinyoun’s seemed to be a progressive energetic independent almost itinerant family and you can see that his father went East to the east coast to get training and ended up with first a law degree and then a medical degree from ... from Bellevue Hospital Medical School or what became Bellevue Hospital Medical School New York University during this... Kinyoun was born in 1860 of course the Civil War started within the year and his dad left him Joe and his infant sister and the mother at home and went off to fight the Civil War you’re looking at the battle flag that that Kinyoun carried or one like it and for those that who know the Confederate anthem Dixie there is a are verses that go on forever and ever hundreds of them, probably but there is a verse that mentions Kinyoun the father and his exploits in the Civil War well after the war the Kinyoun’s moved to to western Mississippi this was really the frontier the railroad had got there just a year before and ... this was in Centre View, Missouri where they settled was the last outpost for trading and sending off supplies on the wagons that went west and this was a really wild and lawless place the remnants of Quantrill’s raiders were there Jesse James and the James Gang was there There were constant murders in vigilante group lynchings and this is the environment that Kinyoun grew up in as a child from the age of five I don't have any photograph of Kinyoun’s residence but a house that was very close to where the Kinyoun’s lived as shown in the lower left hand corner so Kinyoun ... lived in this environment but somehow got training through a preceptor meaning a tutor and by the age of fourteen he was studying algebra and geometry and was also speaking German French and Spanish pretty remarkable for the wild west and apparently must have been relatively promising as a student when he ... was of the age of in those days you didn't have to graduate from high school even if he hadn’t been able to but he transitioned into apprenticing with his father probably went with his dad to see patients in their country practice and then in the year 1881 went to St. Louis East ... and took one course in the newly-created St. Louis College of Physicians and Surgeons which you see a picture of here and after that went on to Bellevue Hospital in Medical College in New York one of the top medical schools in the country and took courses under some of the great men of those days including Austin Flint you can see his name in the circle here but may be a little dark but not sure if you can see that that but Austin Flint for whom The Austin Flint Murmur is named one of the American fathers of cardiology and a famous internist of that era was his teacher after medical school Kinyoun continued on and took post-graduate courses in ... in surgery and obstetrics in toxicology and in another subject which I don’t remember at the moment and was also practicing in New York City presumably to make the money to continue his postgraduate education throughout the rest of the year of 1882 so he graduated in March of eighteen eighty-two and stayed there for the rest of that year and was apparently doing fine until he lost his very first patient a little girl with diphtheria who died of diphtheria and it was a big ... it was a big turning point in his life he was just devastated by the loss of his first ... patient by disease he couldn't couldn't control couldn’t cure and he was he was very depressed and hard on himself in his letters at that time show that he was near the quitting medicine he wanted to just give it all up he couldn't bear to see a little child die who was his patient, but he didn't quit he went back home and worked with his father for three years in private practice seeing mostly little children and ... and pregnant women charging a dollar for a house visit and five dollars for a delivery and also seeing his father's deadbeat patients who weren’t paying their money paying their bills maybe is father stuck them with the deadbeat patients I really don’t know but the remarkable thing is that during this time he somehow got a hold of a microscope there was no microscopy in New York when he had been in medical school or post-graduate courses I’m sorry there was a microscopy but there was no Bacteriology and so he'd had no bacteriology training in New York we knew this was a coming thing got a microscope can begin studying farm animal diseases particularly anthrax and ... and the Pasteurellosis and then in 1885 he decided to go back to New York to study under an old classmate of his at the medical school of Herman Biggs who had become an instructor in a brand new laboratory set up by Andrew Carnegie at Bellevue and that laboratory is said to be the first or one of the first in the United States to actually do bacteriology that was 1885 by early 1886 he decided he wanted to join the marine hospital service he wrote them a letter and said what do I have to do to get in and this is the reply from ... Surgeon General John Hamilton saying you gotta come and take the test so he did come and take the test entrance exam for the marine hospital service and in in supporting letters and political control interference he pulled on the people you see here we'll take a minute to mention who they are in the upper left you see Fred Dennis he is one of his professors from Bellevue who became one of the prominent surgeons in the United States Austin Flint who of course I mentioned already he got letters from them he also got a letter from Biggs who was about the same age as he was and he called on his Missouri Senator Francis Cockrell Cockrell had been a general in the Confederate army and a great war hero and now he was a ... Missouri State Senator and the governor ... Thomas Crittenden who had been on the Union side and had been a colonel in a moderately famous colonel in the ... in the ... Union army and then two other people I want to mention this fellow is really interesting professor Frank James had been his professor in Saint Louis in 1881 and James was interesting because he had spent much time in his youth in Europe training with Justis von Liebig probably the leading one of the leading chemists medical chemist of that era and infectious disease theorist and when the civil war broke out James was in Germany decided to come back to the United States stopped off at the embassy in Germany and was asked to take secret papers to Confederate President Jefferson Davis which he did he went through the Union lines and got to Richmond to meet with Jefferson Davis and discussing things Davis found out he was a chemist and knew how to make explosives so Davis hired him on as a personal assistant and terrorist and he spent the rest of the war blowing up Union ships and ... undertaking spy activities for the Confederacy and then when the war was over he went to be a medical school professor and Kinyoun met him and got a letter of recommendation from him this other fellow here Preston Bailhache was a is was at the time a surgeon a senior surgeon in the marine hospital service where Kinyoun was applying and ... he had been a good friend of President Lincoln in the White House he played games with Lincoln sports games and card games I believe and was also the physician who took care of President Lincoln’s children and he was Kinyoun’s uncle so it may be that Bailhache and others that there's all these connections suggest there may have been some strings pulled to get him into the Marine Hospital Service he took the entrance exam and barely passed and was fifth out of nine with a score of seventy three with seventy being the cut-off but he got in and joined the marine hospital service in 1886 and while he was waiting to hear about his condition that is after he'd been accepted but before he was able to start his two-year-old daughter Bettie died of diphtheria the same disease that killed his first patient a few years earlier and this was just a devastating tragedy that he could never forget I want to point out too for those of you are interested in this why I circled this twice this is a trip player for a camera it turns out that Joe Kinyoun was a very sophisticated amateur photographer and a lot of if you see it if you see somebody in a picture in this era And you can't make out who it is and there's a little line in his left hand or his right hand it’s probably Joe Kinyoun pulling the trigger I haven't mentioned yet but I will later that ... the great-grandchildren of Joe Kinyoun we made connections with and ... a huge amount of his personal material including hundreds of photographs that he took and processed in his darkroom are in existence that we hope will someday in the not to far distant future be donated to the NIH so Kinyoun got into the marine hospital service in 1886 he was assigned to Staten Island where which was near Ellis Island and it was the major port of entry for cholera and other diseases that would be imported from Europe he took care of patients on these wards and he got rid of his hippie haircut and ... cleaned up his act this is 1887 one year later and now this is the clean-cut Joe Kinyoun and in 1887 Surgeon General Hamilton authorized Kinyoun to set up a what came to be called a Hygienic Laboratory in a ground floor room in the in the Stapleton Staten Island Hospital now Hamilton the Surgeon General had ... been very interested in cholera and had just co-written a book about it published in 1885 it's very likely that he was looking for somebody like Kinyoun to come along and put the Marine Hospital Service and him on the map by isolating cholera which had never been isolated in the United States Low and behold within two years of opening, within two months of opening the Hygienic Lab ... Kinyoun isolated cholera from a patient in New York who came in on a ship from Italy along with a fellow marine hospital service officer Samuel Treat Armstrong you see here son of a Missouri senator all these connections are, and there's a huge amount of civil war and family connections that go on here Armstrong went on to become famous psychiatrist but at the time he was just the senior guy working with Kinyoun and Kinyoun made the isolation of cholera which was national news and it sort of helped put the Marine Hospital Service on the map and fend off a competing federal entity called the National Board of Health which was with headed by our guy John Shaw Billings, sorry NLM and ... and ... National Board of Health was eventually ... struck by the wayside many historians say in part because of Kinyoun so here we see Kinyoun at the Stapleton Staten Island Hospital this is Kinyoun, this is his boss later Surgeon General Walter Wyman and this is the back of the hospital, the Stapleton Hospital these are tuberculosis isolation tents Kinyoun once he got there one of the first things he did and say hey Koch isolated tuberculosis in 1882 it's a bug it can be transmitted why don't we isolate patients that wasn't being done in the United States he was probably one of the first and these isolation tents were set up Kinyoun tried to get all the other marine hospitals to ... isolate as well but he wasn't very successful now we're looking at the Stapleton Hospitals still exist today this is thanks to Google satellite this is a Google satellite looking down on the hospital the same one you saw in the picture and we know from historical records that the Hygienic Laboratory was in one of these ground floor rooms on either this side this is the front or it is a mirror image in the back and ... one of the things I hope we could do some day before they condemn this building it's been unoccupied for thirty years but before they tear it down is to identify where the actual room was and we should be able to do that because of chemicals that were used residue would exist today certain laboratory chemicals that were used and also these very heavy cabinets were in the days before dry wall were undoubtedly bolted into the walls and even if they put up drive dry wall all over it it should be possible to to identify where that room was and I hope someday we can do that within a year I’m sorry within three years of Kinyoun joining and two years of the Marine Hospital setting up the Hygienic Lab the government set up in a spinoff lab in the Dry Tortugas Florida headed by Kinyoun’s assistant at the time Henry Geddings and this is the building in which that laboratory was set up we don't have any picture of the laboratory so just to fast forward a minute about Kinyoun’s career ... and I'm gonna talk about all these things so no need to look at these things he had a long federal career that began with the Marine Hospital Service went into the Navy Reserves when he left the Marine Hospital Service and ended up in the Army he was in uniform continually in the uniformed services his whole adult life after 1876 in 1891 the Hygienic Laboratory left Staten Island and moved to Washington DC this is the Butler building and it no longer exists and the Marine Hospital Service ... within the Butler Building in the Hygienic Laboratory took over the whole fourth floor ...I don't have a picture of the Butler Building from the capitol dome this is the capitol dome view looking down Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast the Butler building is just out of the picture unfortunately but here we see the Capitol in the 1890's and Kinyoun’s personal residence was a just about here and the Butler Building is somewhere back in here covered by the by the right-hand wing of the White House of the Capitol rather and here we can see it from overhead this is an 1817 map a street map if I can’t find it 1890’s street map and and the streets had been changed already by 1917 and were changed further to now but Kinyoun lived right here 210 New Jersey Avenue Northwest and he worked in the Butler Building right here at New Jersey Avenue Southeast at B Street and he would have had to, also I could imagine which way did he walk to get to work either around the Capitol or behind it we don't know this is a view standing on working where Kinyoun’s house was looking southeast and this would have been the view from his front yard as he looked at the north wing of the Capitol now in the Marine Hospital Service Kinyoun ... went far and wide traveling he went to Europe a number of times and he worked personally with Koch and Koch's lab became Koch’s sort of treated him as apparently as kind of ... a son took him under his wing and they had a lot of long talks together Koch had him doing experiments and ... gave him reagents which he brought back and he also studied in Paris with Pasteur on sequential trips and got to know a lot of the famous scientists of that day in in Berlin his closest contacts were Robert Koch and later Baron Kitasato who became one of his closest friend and he also Kinyoun also worked with Virchow who at that time was the critic of Koch and in in the Pasteur lab His closest friend became Roux so when Kinyoun came back from Berlin when Kinyoun was in Berlin in 1894 something that was the most astonishing breakthrough that era it's hard to remember now but it was really it astonished everybody including Kinyoun and that is the discovery of diphtheria antitoxin an actual preparation that could be made in horses it would save the lives of children dying with diphtheria it was antibodies immune serum that made in horses and large blood volume you could give this to little kids and it would save their lives and Kinyoun got the formulas and ... sent it all back even while he was in Europe he cabled it back to Gedding and said let's set up some research experiments went into the hospitals here in DC and I’m sorry in New York rather they were still up in New York when this happened and ... no they were not they were down here what am I saying no they were down in DC and and ... the the bottom line is he introduced antiserum and distributed in the United States and it was a great breakthrough he also started he'd been to Paris and learned how to make rabies vaccines and somehow we was making that, virtually every biological that could be made and he became the first physician to treat smallpox within immune serum and ... you know his research in this year was just phenomenal now of course he was also working with stains that was one of the major microbiology techniques in those days and some of you who are physicians may remember the Kinyoun Stain for AFB which is now a days not as popular as the Ziehl Nielsen stain but still Kinyoun if you google Kinyoun you'll come up on endless ... references for the stain he also began moving beyond bacteriological support for the Marine Hospital Service labs and he serviced all the Marine hospitals and hospitals and officers all up around the country and indeed abroad but he also began doing general public health research related to problems in civilian life including District of Columbia which had a huge water problem, the Potomac was contaminated most of the water supplies in the city were contaminated typhoid fever all sorts of other things and he began working with colleagues like Theobold Smith to do groundbreaking studies on essentially enteric diseases that were water-borne and in fact there was a time when these studies were said to be the greatest public health studies ever conducted now we forget about them they don't seem so great back at the time they were more ground breaking than anything that Koch and Pasteur had done a year ago according to many Americans he was the first to develop a credible theory on why respiratory diseases occur in the winter and although it’s not clear from the research there are indications as he didn't publish it there indications that that he may have made the first pneumococcal antiserum and the first pneumococcal vaccine he was also an inventor he had a number of ... pieces of equipment you see some of them here made with a company he worked with and these were for fumigating and disinfecting they're essentially autoclaves and fumigators there's a whole bunch of them and these were called Kinyoun devices Kinyoun Disinfecting Chambers and Kinyoun Sulphur Fumigators and all sorts of things that he made and the Marine Hospital Service and others who use them when the ah House of Representatives because he was so close he knew a lot of Senators and Congressmen and he was in the same clubs with them anyways so when the House of Representatives decided that the chambers the House Chambers were just impossibly badly ventilated and stunk to high heaven it brought in Kinyoun and an engineer to do an investigation he investigated the Capitol and ... and made a a fairly extensive report which was of course a scientific report and told the House of Representatives what they needed to do to get better ventilation they did it but it's also interesting that his report has very wry between the lines comments which the implication of which is this if the congressman would stop spitting tobacco juice on the carpet it wouldn't smell so bad in here when the World's Fair came along in 1893 Kinyoun took an exhibit to the World's Fair you see it all boxed up here and here it is setup and it's one of the things that was little-known and perhaps even unknown about Kinyoun is he developed ... a better vaccination technique for smallpox vaccination before we had the bifurcated needle and that was important because people who got smallpox vaccination often got infections and they're needed to be a technique which would work and which would not cause infections and he developed one never published it but shared it widely and people referred to it for decades as the Kinyoun technique he brought into his laboratory a scientist from the Venezuelan delegation named Eduardo Andrade-Penny and ... probably because he trained him in the lab for a few years and sent him back to some of his own activity in Venezuela he received the highest award from Venezuela the Order of Bolivar which you see here now during his time in Washington he ... also was a professor at Georgetown got a degree at Georgetown a PhD all the time he's doing all this research I don’t know how the guy got he was probably like doctor Fauci never went home just worked all the time and ... he got a PhD from Georgetown and in addition to that he started experimenting with a brand new technique that he loved called radiology and ... afterwards in in his later life in DC he left Georgetown and became a professor of pathology and bacteriology at George Washington U when the Spanish-American War started and Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders went down to Cuba to fight they had to be quarantined when they came back as there was a lot of diseases down there that could be imported yellow fever malaria and so on and so Kinyoun volunteered to put them under quarantine on Long Island and and he was sent there to do that and here you see some pictures of the quarantine with President Roosevelt in the center I’m sorry future President Roosevelt in the Senate and President McKinley coming to visit all the time Kinyoun has them under quarantine and these videos play this is actually Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders staging their charge on San Juan Hill in Montauk Long Island under Kinyoun’s quarantine I guess there's nothing better to do except restage an enactment of the charge in San Juan Hill the beginning of this video clip says 1903 that's the copyright year this is obviously several years earlier than that here's Kinyoun under quarantine and you see him in his oil skinned coat this this probably he was wearing these because this is what you had to wear when you went in and fumigated at the very least you were spraying hot steam around get your clothes all messed up with hot steam but often times ... fumigation was done with sulfur and which would be corrosive and later on around this time he introduced formaldehyde as a fumigating agent so this is protective clothing here's the Hygienic Laboratory around 1889 probably 1899 probably early 1899 and it's interesting to see some of the people in here Ezra Sprague was his then number two in charge and a brand new officer Hugh Cumming who later became the Surgeon General and another young trainee these guys were trainees JM Eager who later became Assistant Surgeon General this is the Butler Building to fourth floor these are the men who were Kinyoun’s assistants during the 1890’s Henry Downes Gedding the fellow who set up the Dry Tortugas lab as Ezra Kimball Sprague the fellow we just saw in the picture and his successor who was never really his assistant that became a great ... laboratory director after Kinyoun, Milton Rosenau and ... and also a great leader in public health so 1900 comes along and Wyman the Surgeon General now the Surgeon General decides he's gonna transfer Kinyoun to San Francisco and ask him to step down as head of the lab after thirteen years and this may sound like a demotion but in fact a plague pandemic was occurring and the plague was the most fear disease of all people remember the black death of the fourteenth century and ... needed to do something about it Kinyoun sent him to San Francisco where he set up the quarantine and was put in charge of all quarantine on the west coast and here we see the quarantine station a little footnote is in addition to quarantine he had to inspect arriving immigrants to disqualify them if they had a disease or a disability and one of the guys he was almost ready to send back to Japan was ...a young man named Hideyo Noguchi but he took pity on him for some reason Noguchi went on to be a great scientist in America and discovered the cause of syphilis this is Kinyoun’s boarding launch for quarantine in San Francisco and this is the actual flag he used on that ship you see it circled in the front on March sixth 1900 plaguing broke out in San Francisco which brought about one of the most ... infamous public health events and all of United States history and it's too complicated to go in to detail here I’m sorry but it's just an extraordinarily complicated thing and I'll try to skim over it in thumbnail because it ... it was the greatest challenge for the Marine Hospital Service and ended the career of Kinyoun so Kinyoun was the one who made the isolations and the Board of Health of San Francisco immediately put Chinatown under quarantine the idea being that any plague case that Kinyoun was going to be brought by Chinese visitors and any plague cases that occurred in San Francisco would be a Chinese residents which in fact turned out to be true but of course not only the Chinese but the but the businessmen in California went crazy because this was terribly bad for business to have the black death organism isolated in San Francisco so the governor and everybody else denied that there is an epidemic meanwhile Kinyoun and ... health board ...the in San Francisco tried to get rid of that try to get rid of the epidemic by fumigating in the sewers in doing house-to-house searches even brought in a so-called Danysz virus one of the first attempts to biologically eradicate a disease the Danysz virus turned out to be Salmonella enteritidis by the way and it was used for rat control as late as the 1950's and in east eastern Europe anyways California Governor Gage down in the lower left hand corner and his California State Board absolutely denied the belief that the plague existed meanwhile case totals were mounting they went up to almost a hundred over the first two years and despite the fact that there were cases and in other Pacific ports Gage just denied it existed all this took place in a era of violent racism anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese prejudice and Kinyoun was caught in the middle of that and the governor personally accused Kinyoun of being, of orchestrating a plague fake so as to attract more federal and state and city dollars into public health and it was in all the newspapers this was national news by the way the whole country followed this week after week month after month and Kinyoun was vilified as a plague faker who was introducing plague and as I’ve said I think ... Governor Gage formally officially publicly accused him of being a bio terrorist by trying to plant plague organisms on the bodies of Chinese who died of other things and a big scandal erupted it was a horrible story it's been a... it's being written about now even a hundred and some odd years later now but the bottom line of it was that the California governor and the Republican party was not going to let up unless they made a deal and so when President McKinley’s office a deal was cut as follows the Governor of California and the State of California would allow the Marine Hospital Service to come in and take charge of plague eradication on two conditions they never had to admit that plague existed in the first place and Kinyoun would be fired they fired him Henry Rose Carter the fellow Marine Hospital Service officer who helped Walter Reed helped Walter Reed discover the transmission of yellow fever was one of his closest friends and and urged him not to not to leave the Marine Hospital Service and as you can see here said don't do it old man believe me your life and good works will never be lost nevertheless Kinyoun did resign and the during the process Walter Wyman called in an outside expert committee of ... three of the top bacteriologists in the country Simon Flexnor as well as Lewellys Baker, Frederick Novy and ... they all verified that all Kinyoun’s work was correct the isolations were correct they re-isolated plague there was really no more doubt if there ever was the plague was there but it didn't save Kinyoun during the time he was in San Francisco citizens got together and took out a seven thousand dollar contract on his life he had to carry firearms at all times have a launch ready to leave the San Francisco City government had to assign up to a hundred policemen at one time to protect them and then another point the United States Army had to be called in to protect him and if that wasn't the worst thing the day he was supposed to leave San Francisco he was charged with murder and it turned out he had to go to court and clear his name and it turned out to be a case of mistaken identity but a man who he had once vaccinated who was a deaf mute claimed that Kinyoun ... had pulled out his firearms and he was sitting in a boat offshore and had fired on him and tried to kill him when all the testimony came out what what had happened is that the military had fired on him US Army fired on him because of a military prisoner had escaped was running in the direction of the water front where the boat was they had assumed that the deaf man didn't know he was deaf of course they assumed the deaf man was ... an accomplice in a getaway boat and Kinyoun was there trying to warn the poor man to get out of the way because he was going to be fired on and ... the was accused himself so but I think he took it with as good a humor as he could and said it was really a tragic occurrence but all tragedies are tempered with comedy this is Fred Ackerman and I show his picture for one reason I’m going to show you a video now and I want to point out something Fred Ackerman was a cameraman who was in San Francisco on September 15th 1900 filming in Chinatown this is 1900 not 1903 the copyright date I want you to watch a particular man the archives say this is the health inspection team inspecting Chinatown on September 15th 1900 this is obviously a staged event of all these inspectors are walking towards the camera and then this man in the uniform is coming back across the screen going around to walk toward the cameraman as well we have no idea of who these people were but we know it was a health inspection team we know that the man in uniform has the uniform that looks exactly like a Marine Hospital Service uniform I’ve sat down at the Library of Congress and gone over the paper prints frame by frame and and tried to measure where the buttons are where the insignia on the cap is everything about the uniform is consistent with a Marine Hospital Service uniform so the question is could this be Kinyoun well we don't know there is probably no way to prove it I have scoured the newspapers for that day and several days thereafter there were like eight San Francisco newspapers so it’s a lot of work trying to find some mention in the newspaper of Fred Ackerman ... being in town, well we know he was in town I found evidence that he checked into a particular hotel so Ackerman was in town but who was this in the photograph in the movie who we don't really know but I think it's an interesting thing to speculate that it could be Kinyoun 'cause it's obviously a bearded man in a uniform that's consistent with the Marine Hospital Service uniform ten years later, so Kinyoun left ten years later Senator Robert Owen the first Cherokee Senator of the United States introduced a bill to create a national department ... help headed by a cabinet secretary very much along the lines of what Kinyoun had proposed by the way and in a March 24, 1910 speech on the senate floor recalled the events of San Francisco ten years earlier and defended Kinyoun and all the members of the Marine Hospital Service as Kinyoun was leaving the Marine Hospital Service to enter private life a ... the Congress passed two Acts one of which in both of these Acts were related to legislation that he Kinyoun had drafted the first one was an Act ... to it’s called the Biologics Control Act which eventually led to the FDA Kinyoun had been a passionate ... defender of the importance of standardizing the production of biologics and maintaining quality control with federal regulation and those, that Act passed July first 1902 and at the same time another act he had drafted which formalized the Hygienic Laboratory into an actual formal entity with three new divisions expanded powers and expanded personnel the first formal legislation creating what became the NIH so Kinyoun left and went to work for the Mulford Company with whom he'd worked this is one of two biologics companies either being Parke Davis that existed at the time and Kinyoun had worked with them while he was in the Marine Hospital Service to help them learn how to make safe biologicals now he went there for four years and did that with Mulford and then after four years he left and came back to Washington DC as a director of the bacteriology laboratory in the the DC health department we know very little about him during that time except that he was active in professional societies including the ones you see here he was a President of what became the ASM he was a Vice President of both the APA American Public Health Association and the organization that became the American Society of Tropical Medicine and he was clearly one of the leaders in public health around the country some interesting side lights about him personally just to give you a flavor of who he was as a man in 1889 they went back to Centre View Missouri and they dug up a body a hermetically sealed casket that had been buried for twenty nine years and as you can see this was the body of Mrs. Kinyoun, Lizzie Kinyoun’s mother who died shortly after Mrs. Kinyoun was born and so Lizzie Kinyoun had never seen her own mother and they got the body to be dug up so she could open the sealed casket and look on her mother's face for the only time in her life and ... apparently the the mother was as beautiful in death after twenty nine years as she was in life so the newspaper say kind of a strange story but Kinyoun was a strange guy Kinyoun also in San Francisco ... brought in two dogs from Asia which he named Nip and Chow which were Chow dogs at that time I guess I don't know much about dogs but if anybody does that there were virtually no Chow dogs in the the United States than it was a rare exotic breed and they were of course of great value but also the Chinese ... covered them as a banquet delicacies so he had to guard them very carefully and then in 1910 there was a front page story in the New York Times about another person not Kinyoun who cites Kinyoun’s theory about how you can tell a person's musical ability by looking at their ears there's no evidence that Kinyoun ever did say that himself except that that's what it said in the newspaper so what was Kinyoun’s vision for a national health organization? he had the a vision that was similar to what other men who came of age in the eighteen seventies had he saw in this era long before we had an HHS he saw a national sanitary organization that would be a combination of research service an outbreak investigation and biologics control essentially he envisioned the activities that are now in the NIH the CDC and the FDA and he was passionate about that and spoke about it and he again and again in his retirement years talked about how we need to have a national health agency in 1914 the war broke out and the United States entered it in 1917 by this time Kinyoun was fifty six years old and he had lymphosarcoma of the neck but he finagled somehow to get back in uniform and got appointed as an Army Major he was a patriot all his life and he’d always been in in uniform he left the US Navy Reserves got into the Army as an expert epidemiologist and entered on active duty when his health deteriorated you see him in uniform here on the right in his army uniform when his health deteriorated he was assigned to the Army Medical Museum here in Washington DC in December, and then he died on active duty on Valentine's Day fourteen February 1919 here you see his draft of his Last Will and testament on the left and his letter to his wife Elizabeth asking that when he died he be buried with their daughter Bettie who had died of diphtheria so many years before here's the house he died in as it looked at the time better point this in the right direction and as it looks today and I would love to see that house someday it’s privately owned now and we haven't yet attempted to try to get into it ... but I suppose one could out of uniform and not on active duty I suppose one could knock on the door and ask the people who live there if they knew the history of the house so Kinyoun was buried with their daughter Bettie here's Bettie’s gravestone and when he died in 1919 his wife believing that someday he would be exonerated and that he would be acknowledged as a great man collected all his papers and memorabilia boxed them all up and they have sat in boxes now for over, for almost a hundred years or ninety something years where we have now located them in the possession of two of the great grandchildren Mrs. Kinyoun died in 1948 and she and her husband Joe Kinyoun and their daughter Bettie were united in the same gravesite here in Centre View Missouri Kinyoun and all the other, the names of Joseph Kinyoun and all the other men who died on active duty in World War I are buried in the cornerstone of the memorial on the mall and ... because he had been a DC employee a statue was erected a marble statue was erected and placed in city hall honoring all the men and women who had died in service who had been DC employees and died of service in World War I and here you see Kinyoun’s name and it took me awhile to find this because when I went down to city hall everyone assured me that no such thing existed but then I found a janitor who said oh you mean that old statute that’s sitting in that old stairwell over there maybe that’s the one so I went over and looked and sure enough there it was It’s hard to see but, Joseph J Major Joseph J Kinyoun is listed among them in nineteen ninety four when World War II started a liberty ship was commissioned named the Joseph James Kinyoun and this is not it, this is a similar one, there were several hundred similar ships constructed during the war this is one that looked exactly like it and ... it saw service in World War II so who was Joe Kinyoun by the way that code name his code name was Abutment and everybody had a code name in those days it was very hard to tell who a person was as a human being but I’ve speculated on some things here I won't read them all for you but he was clearly a big picture guy a behind the scenes kind a guy very hardworking, loyal patriotic not necessarily a mover and shaker not necessarily a leader of men but greatly greatly admired and beloved even by his fellow scientists it's interesting to listen to him talk and listen to the transcripts of his talking in national meetings he never speculated he never went beyond the data he always spoke from what the data showed and was very circumspect in everything he said scientifically but personally he was funny, witty he made jokes he wrote stories and poems and appeared to have been sort of an ebullient southern gentleman I think to some extent you can tell what people are like by the friends and colleagues they left behind here was three of his closest friends in the Marine Hospital Service Henry Rose Carter who helped Walter Reed figure out what to do to discover the cause of yellow fever Joszef Goldberger a Hungarian immigrant who came here and called himself Joe and eventually discovered the cause of pellagra he’s in other eras slightly later than Kinyoun’s time in the Marine Hospital Service and they were never working in the same city in the Marine Hospital Service but somehow they became friends and then Milton Rosenau now one of the great leaders of public health who succeeded Kinyoun as lab director and when I was studying preventive medicine and Jeff mentioned I have a board certification preventive medicine when I was studying for those boards in the 1970's Maxi Rosenau was the book that I read so that book which the first addition came out in 1913 it's still in print it’s still the Bible of preventive medicine two of the people he trained went on to be Surgeon Generals Hugh Cumming we saw a picture earlier and Thomas Parran it's interesting that Kinyoun met Parran near the end of Kinyoun’s life Parran was a medical student looking for something to do went down to the DC laboratory Kinyoun thought he was really promising and said why don’t you get into public health why don't you join the, what used to be the Marine Hospital Service by now it was called the Public Health Service he convinced Parran to go into public health and became one of the great surgeon generals the Surgeon General during the time of the Roosevelt administration when all the great social legislation was enacted and always credited Kinyoun as his mentor and the guy who got him into public health and then finally Walter Reed who had been just a regular old Army doctor for almost his whole Army career but in middle-age decided he wanted to come to Washington and learn how to become a scientist and he did that and when he came to Washington he met Kinyoun Kinyoun must of identified something in him cause he took him under his wing and mentored him and introduced him to Washington scientific society and they remain friends and confidantes you could see just to show you can’t read this obviously but there are personal letters that exist in the possession of the Kinyoun family that show that ... Walter Reed was a real confidante of Kinyoun and there's some remarkable things in there which I will have to save for another time but ... but Walter Reed admitted some of his foibles and his fears and things that he could never admit publicly to Kinyoun this is the chair and the desk that Kinyoun used when he worked at home this is a piece of furniture that he has and these are obviously modern photographs these possessions have been in the family there's endless amounts of buttons and ribbons and stuff that have been preserved these are uniformed insignias as most of the ones you looking at are from his Army uniform in the last two years of his life mementos from his trip to see Baron Kitasato in Japan in 1902 and the hutch and sideboard is not Kinyoun’s but all the china in it is stuff he collected when he was touring Asia in the early 1900's so i think I’m gonna stop now because we need to have time for questions there's a lot of people I’d like to thank including Vicky Harden and some of the folks you see here particularly I’d like to thank all the NIH folks at NLM the HMD staff has been great Paul and John and others at NLM, the office of history of course I know Barbara is here and ... Betty Murgolo and the interlibrary loan team at NIH library has been fantastic in finding every obscure thing that I come up with and many others and I also wanna acknowledge the help of Eva Ahren who is our Stetton scholar I mentioned and I hope that maybe some of you will get a chance to meet her ... afterwards so I think that's all I want to say now oh I do want to thank this is one of Kinyoun’s great-grandchildren Joe Kinyoun Houts you see him on the left and another great granddaughter Patricia Reeves who have kept all these possessions in their family archives for all these years and we hope will someday donate them to the ... National Institutes of Health, some organization but will leave it to the rest of us to fight over what that is but Joe will be here in a few weeks and anybody who would like to meet Joe we can arrange that he's very keen to come here to NIH and see what his great-grandfather started so thank you all for listening to me and if there this time left I’ll be happy to answer any questions thank you well that's a that's a good question and I could give a long answer but will give the short answer one of the reasons, I started doing this on my own just for the heck of it because I was interested in it on my own private time but at some point my boss Dr. Fauci got interested in it I convinced him, it took me twice to convince him and one of the things that I do with Dr. Fauci is that he and I write papers together and of course I draft them and then he goes over them and he got interested in writing a paper about Kinyoun and so I promised him I would get that ready for him, so the immediate thing is write write a little scientific paper for a medical journal with Dr. Fauci but i think the materials I’ve collected over the last few years fill up I think thirty binders that are about three inch binders over three over two thousand documents and there are many more that we know about I forget to mention these little smiley faces you saw on all the photos are places where we think that archival materials either exist or might exist that we have not yet seen like the Roosevelt archives so I said to Ava that I think we already have enough material to to make a significant biography and that I’m hoping that we can convince her to stay long enough to do that and we'll see but ... whatever whoever does it and however it gets done it's my intention that everything I’ve collected be part, and be here with everybody at NIH it's it's open to everybody and I hope we can get started to learn a little bit more about our founding father because after all I think when we learn about who Joe Kinyoun was we’re really going to be learning about ourselves and it's ... I think it's time we start doing that...Mike ... well they didn't ... purify it, I can’t tell you technically how it happened but it was not unique there was a lot of impurities that had to do with that with the technique for making the antiserums and they were made from horse serums and various they went through various processes and probably you know some contamination got in some dirty contamination got in I don't think it's known but the history of the contamination of this lot in 1901 is known there have been histories written about it I've never seen it said where the contamination came in but we could try to track that down if you're interested oh I’m sorry Mike yeah that's just a great story and of course I’m following this progress of this closely I’m wondering if you could speak about evidence about Kinyoun’s political religious, social, intellectual milieu so what circles did he move in and did he attach his work to any other kinds of... that’s a good question let me just rather than give a comprehensive question let me mention a few things that might give you a flavor of who he was ...he appears to be very progressive I don't know how we voted politically of course at the time the two major parties Democrats and Republicans were stood for very different things that they stand for now but clearly he was a progressive he was very interested in public health and social issues he spoke on social issues a lot he and Lizzie Kinyoun went to the Temple Baptist Church on Nebraska Avenue and he was also a Mason almost all the males in his family were Masons and again at the time the Masons were still I mean things have changed a lot in Masonry since then but the Masons have been very progressive when they were at their peak in the 1700's and we're still regarded as being progressive in the late 1800's as well so I think maybe to answer your question he hung around in progressive forward-thinking modern circles of men he also became a member of the Cosmos Club and dined with and ... was frequently at social events with US Presidents and Vice Presidents with future Presidents like Taft and Woodrow Wilson with Alexander Graham Bell I think and various other you know, various other leading men of the time and but I think he was not a more of a social person he he comes across as being kind of a down-home southern guy who you probably didn't even though he was in uniform all his life he probably liked to relax in an informal way he was kind of a good 'ole boy from the South and grew up in the far west and and these are preliminary ideas about him I can’t say much more than that and it’s just a speculation so let's leave it at that but I think if he’d were here today I think that most of us would find him a pretty likable interesting guy .. just wanted to comment briefly the horse in that was used in Saint Louis to harvest the vaccine by the municipal health department was of course the source of the tetanus and it oh you think it was in the horse serum itself it was the horse oh yeah ok and that that also spoke to the ... poor manufacturing controls which ... was sort of the heart of the 1902 law was all about and I also wanted to mention when when he was in Germany in the 1890’s he wrote back to Surgeon General Wyman and had mentioned the need to have some sort of controls here because once the... diphtheria toxin became producible it was pretty much ... free market here there was very little control right yeah unlike the case in Germany .. so clearly his contributions to the regulatory aspects of what became NIH is no doubt about that a little bit of difference there though as far as influence on what became FDA of course that function of controlling biologicals eventually seventy years later was transferred to FDA but FDA’s sort of founding legislation had started long before the 1870's and you know unlike the 1902 Act which was ... debated for about and a matter of weeks by Congress FDA’s founding law actually was took about twenty five years so ... but but clearly his role in starting you know clear regulatory effort in in this country with with medicinal products is is undisputed well thank you for that talk I just i just wanted to say I didn't, I didn't I had to in cutting corners here I didn't mean to imply that Joe Kinyoun himself created the NIH and the FDA in both cases with the FDA and the NIH there was lots of legislation that was going along at the time I think it's fair to say that he was a prime mover behind the ideas but during his time in service but not the only one by any means but certainly one of the prime movers I want to comment on your comment about Germany you're you're right ... the idea is that Kinyoun’s sort of obsession with the need to maintain standards impurity and biologicals he himself directly attributed to a situation that happened in Germany when he was there in 1894 Koch was having a ... An argument with depression ministry of health about the very same thing and Koch sat him down and said you know it's really important that we get control over these biologicals and of course Kinyoun knowing that back in the United States with all this patent stuff all the way out there there's you know it's a terrible situation far worse than it was in Germany back in the states so Kinyoun apparently got religion right then in Berlin and when he came back, he carried forward that idea of Koch’s that we've got to get serious about maintaining standardization of ... reagents and biologicals and quality control over them which he envisioned best done by the government although you know states and local health departments started making biologicals right away as well as private companies I think by the time he was vindicated everybody sort of you know it's you have your fifteen minutes of fame and he was out of the limelight ... and I think if you if you go to the web today and and google Kinyoun you'll find all sorts of conspiracy theorist pages that's that say Kinyoun the terrorist and Kinyoun the vicious racist and all these things I think you know but I think the evidence for that is pretty slim but you know it's very hard to tell about a person's character by reading what’s in the news and Ava and I have talked about this as historians the need to be very careful and look at the record and not try to either criticize Kinyoun or defend him as being a saint he was probably just a pretty normal human being with strengths and weaknesses but the I think the record out there now today if you if you've used Google or go on the web there's a lot of stuff about Kinyoun being a really evil guy and I think almost certainly that's not true but neither can we say he was a saint he just seems to be a normal guy caught in the events of the time thank you all... Thanks Jeff

Biography

Early life

Joseph James "Joe" Kinyoun was born November 25, 1860, in East Bend, North Carolina, the oldest of five children born to Elizabeth Ann Conrad and John Hendricks Kinyoun. His family settled in Post Oak, Missouri in 1866 after his house burned down during the Civil War. At the age of 16, he studied medicine with his father, John Hendricks Kinyoun, who was a general practitioner.[3] His family joined a Baptist church.[4]

Kinyoun was educated at St. Louis Medical College and graduated from Bellevue Medical College in 1882 with an M.D. degree. He did postdoctoral studies in pathology and bacteriology at the Carnegie Laboratory,[2] where he became the first bacteriology student and studied cholera. Then he was a visiting scientist in Europe under Robert Koch. He was awarded a Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1896.

Career

Hygienic Laboratory (1887–1896)

On October 4, 1886, Kinyoun began his career in the Marine Hospital Service at Staten Island Quarantine Station as an assistant surgeon, taking over the direction of the Laboratory of Hygiene in 1887.[5] When the Surgeon General moved the laboratory from Staten Island to Washington, DC in 1891, he placed 26-year-old Kinyoun in charge of the nation's first federal bacteriology laboratory. His code name during his MHS career was Abutment.

As the director of the Hygienic Laboratory, he researched on a plethora of different infectious diseases and their respective etiology and vaccine treatment while urging necessary hospital protocols and regulations for isolation of infected patients.[6] Cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, and plague were the four main epidemic diseases that the laboratory investigated.

San Francisco Quarantine station (1899–1901)

A bubonic plague epidemic that had raged through India and East Asia for nearly fifty years had reached the Hawaiian Islands in 1899. Kinyoun had warned in 1895 that the plague would eventually reach the United States and had begun researching the plague in 1896.[7]

In 1899, Surgeon General Walter Wyman transferred Kinyoun to the San Francisco Quarantine station as head of the Marine Hospital Service for the port, with a promotion to the rank of surgeon (equivalent to lieutenant commander) on August 5.[8] San Francisco, which received ship traffic from Hawaii and a number of other ports where the plague was endemic, was likely to be a key battleground against the spread of the plague.

The federal MHS had an uneasy relationship with state authorities in California, who had clashed with its past enforcement efforts. Wyman ordered Kinyoun to pay no attention to California quarantine officials, which ultimately put Kinyoun at odds with California Governor Henry Tifft Gage during the San Francisco plague of 1900–1904.[7]

A Japanese ship, the S.S. Nippon Maru, arriving in San Francisco Bay in June 1899, had two plague deaths at sea, and there were two more cases of stowaways found dead in the bay, with postmortem cultures proving they had the plague.[9] Similar incidents occurred in other ports: in New York in November 1899, the British ship J.W. Taylor brought three cases of plague from Brazil, but the cases were confined to the ship.[9] The Japanese freighter S.S. Nanyo Maru arrived in Port Townsend, Washington on January 30, 1900, with 3 deaths out of 17 cases of confirmed plague.[9]

In this atmosphere of grave danger, in January 1900, Kinyoun ordered all ships coming to San Francisco from China, Japan, Australia, and Hawaii to fly yellow flags to warn of possible plague on board.[10] Many entrepreneurs and sailing men felt that this was bad for business, and unfair to ships that were free of plague. City promoters were confident that plague could not take hold, and they were unhappy with what they saw as Kinyoun's high-handed abuse of authority.

In January 1900, the four-masted steamship S.S. Australia laid anchor in the Port of San Francisco.[10] The ship sailed between Honolulu and San Francisco regularly. Cargo from Honolulu unloaded at a dock near the outfall of Chinatown's sewers may have allowed rats carrying the plague to leave the ship and transmit the infection. However, it is difficult to trace the infection to a single vessel.[11]

Wherever it came from, the disease was soon established in the cramped Chinese ghetto neighborhood; a sudden increase in dead rats was observed as local rats became infected.[10] Rumors of the plague's presence abounded in the city, quickly gaining the notice of authorities from MHS stationed on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, including Chief Kinyoun.[12][13][14]

On February 7, 1900, Wong Chut King, the owner of a lumber yard, died in his bed after suffering for four weeks. In the morning, the body was taken to a Chinese undertaker, where it was examined by San Francisco police surgeon Frank P. Wilson on March 6, 1900. Wilson called for A.P. O'Brien, a city health department official, after finding suspiciously swollen lymph glands. Wilson and O'Brien then summoned Wilfred H. Kellogg, San Francisco's city bacteriologist, and the three men performed an autopsy as night closed. Looking through his microscope, Kellogg thought he saw plague bacilli.[10][15] Late at night, Kellogg ran the suspicious samples of lymph fluid to Angel Island to be tested on animals in Kinyoun's better-equipped laboratory - an operation that would take at least four days.[16]

On March 11, Kinyoun's lab presented its results. Two guinea pigs and one rat died after being exposed to samples from the first victim, proving the plague was indeed in Chinatown.[17][18] On March 13, another lab animal, a monkey who was exposed to the plague, died. All the dead animals tested positive for the plague bacteria.[19]

A political cartoon published in a Chinese-language daily paper in June 1900; epidemiologist Joseph J. Kinyoun being injected in the head with Waldemar Haffkine's experimental plague vaccine. Two other doctors appear to be developing buboes on their heads from the oversized inoculations. Federal judge William W. Morrow looks on.

San Francisco authorities initially responded by declaring a quarantine that would have prevented persons of Asian descent from leaving the affected areas, but relaxed the restriction when a Chinese cultural association, claiming that the MHS was violating their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment,[20][7] obtained a temporary restraining order blocking the quarantine order from federal District Judge William W. Morrow.[7] Residents of San Francisco's Chinatown, resentful of being singled out for blame for the plague by authorities, resisted efforts to inspect their homes.

California Governor Henry Gage, a close ally of the Southern Pacific Railroad and other business interests, joined in the fight. Governor Gage publicly denied the existence of any pestilential outbreak in San Francisco, fearing that any word of the bubonic plague's presence would deeply damage the city's and state's economy.[21] Supportive newspapers, such as the Call, the Chronicle and the Bulletin, echoed and elaborated on Gage's denials,[22] attacking Kinyoun personally.

One newspaper claimed, without any factual basis, that Kinyoun had released his laboratory monkeys into San Francisco.[7] Death threats were made against him, requiring him to travel with bodyguards under an assumed name.[23]

In October 1900, Kinyoun was the subject of a political cartoon about his being kicked out of his federal position.

The clash between Gage and federal authorities intensified. U.S. Surgeon General Walter Wyman instructed Kinyoun to place Chinatown under a second quarantine, as well as blocking all East Asians from entering state borders. Wyman also instructed Kinyoun to inoculate all persons of Asian heritage in Chinatown, using an experimental vaccine developed by Waldemar Haffkine, one known to have severe side effects.[24]

Kinyoun privately argued against the harshest public health measures, warning Wyman that a quarantine might be unconstitutional, and urged California to concentrate its plague control efforts on killing rats rather than imposing quarantine and isolation, but nonetheless carried out Wyman's orders.[7] On May 15, Kinyoun, with Board of Health support, declared an epidemic. The local press claimed that the epidemic was a hoax that Kinyoun had invented to increase his agency's funding.[7]

Gage responded to the declaration by urging California's other elected officials, as well as party leaders and delegates to the Republican National Convention, to put pressure on President William McKinley to reverse the MHS's plague eradication measures and to remove Kinyoun from his position.[25] Behind the scenes, Gage sent a special commission to Washington, D.C., consisting of Southern Pacific, newspaper and shipping lawyers, to negotiate a settlement with the MHS, whereby the federal government would remove Kinyoun from San Francisco with the promise that the state would secretly cooperate with the MHS in stamping out the plague epidemic.[26] Wyman agreed to this proposal, forever damaging his relationship with Kinyoun, who was reassigned to Detroit immediately after the meeting.[7]

Before Kinyoun left for Detroit in May 1901 he had to face one final tribulation: the claim by a deaf-mute fisherman who claimed that Kinyoun, who had vaccinated him, had ordered riflemen to shoot him.[7] Kinyoun initially attempted to avoid arrest by hiding out at an Army post, but turned himself in. He was ultimately exonerated when testimony showed that soldiers pursuing an escaped prisoner had fired warning shots at the fisherman, who was suspected of aiding the escapee, and that Kinyoun had actually intervened to defend him.[7]

Despite the secret agreement for Kinyoun's removal, Gage went back on his promise of assisting federal authorities and continued to obstruct their study and quarantine efforts.[21][27]

Between 1901 and 1902, the plague outbreak continued to worsen. In a 1901 address to both houses of the California State Legislature, Gage accused federal authorities, particularly Kinyoun, of injecting plague bacteria into cadavers.[26] In response to what he said to be massive scaremongering by the MHS, Gage pushed a censorship bill to gag any media reports of plague infection. The bill failed in the California State Legislature, yet other laws to gag reports amongst the medical community were enacted and $100,000 was allocated to a public campaign led by Gage to deny the plague's existence.[21] In his final speech to the California State Legislature in early January 1903, Gage blamed the federal government, in particular, Kinyoun, the MHS, and the San Francisco Board of Health for damaging the state's economy.[21][26]

Later career

Although his colleagues in the MHS and the medical community supported him and urged him not to retire, Kinyoun believed he had no alternative and resigned on May 1, 1902.[23] Two months later, Congress expanded the MHS, renaming it the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service (later the Public Health Service), and formalized and expanded the Hygienic Laboratory into three new divisions with numerous additional personnel. Kinyoun had drafted this statute. Kinyoun had also been an active supporter of a bill to establish federal regulation of biological products such as serums and vaccines. Congress passed that bill the same day as Kinyoun's bill to expand the MHS.

After leaving government service, Kinyoun went to work for H. K. Mulford Company in Glenolden, Pennsylvania (now part of Merck & Co.),[23] then as a professor of bacteriology and pathology at George Washington University[2] before becoming a bacteriologist for the District of Columbia Health Department, a position he held until his death. He also worked with colleagues at the MHS and other agencies on a variety of public health problems, especially water quality, bacillary dysentery, and hookworm disease in poor Southern children.[23] His interest in disease prevention led him to advocate reforms on public health issues as basic sanitation and hygiene, tuberculosis control, water safety, meat safety, bread quality, and milk sanitation.[23]

Kinyoun was active in many national professional societies, serving as Vice President of the American Society of Tropical Medicine [and Hygiene] during its first full year in 1904 and as First Vice President of the American Public Health Association in 1906. In 1909, Kinyoun served as president of the American Society for Microbiology, which he had helped form more than a decade earlier; he devoted his presidential address to the future of immunology and the still-novel concept of natural and acquired immunity.[23] He took part in many other professional societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of American Physicians.

In 1915, he developed the Kinyoun stain, a procedure used to stain acid-fast bacteria. It was a variation of a method developed by Robert Koch in 1882.[28]

Kinyoun's microscope

He developed a safer, more reliable, and widely used smallpox vaccination technique, the "Kinyoun method," which featured rapid rolling of the needle parallel to the skin surface,[23] and "Kinyoun portable bed disinfectors" for bedding, clothing, dressings, and for killing lice.[29]

Personal life

James and Susan Elizabeth "Lizzie" Perry married in 1883. His wife was active in groups such as the Committee of Women of the National Tuberculosis Congress and the Women’s Committee of the Council of National Defense during the First World War.[23]

The couple had at least five children: Bettie Kinyoun; Joseph Perry Kinyoun; Alice Kinyoun Houts; Conrad Kinyoun; and John Nathan Kinyoun. After his first child, Bettie died at the age of 3 from contracting diphtheria, he poured himself into his work and even set up a public diphtheria laboratory at Georgetown Medical School.

In 1917, Kinyoun joined the Army as an expert epidemiologist assigned to North and South Carolina assigned to investigate statewide typhoid epidemics.[29] During his service he was diagnosed with lymphosarcoma. Joseph Kinyoun died on February 14, 1919, in Washington, DC. A collection of his papers is held at the National Library of Medicine.[30]

Recognition

In 1899, Kinyoun was decorated "in recognition of scientific services," by Venezuela as an Officer of the Order of the Liberator.[31]

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' Joseph J. Kinyoun Memorial Lecture is named in his honor.

See also

References

  1. ^ "Birth of the Hygienic Laboratory". Origins of the National Institutes of Health. U.S. National Library of Medicine. May 8, 1987.
  2. ^ a b c Bing, Richard J. (2010). "The National Institutes of Health and Joseph J. Kinyoun" (PDF). Heart News and Views. Vol. 17, no. 3. International Society for Heart Research. p. 7.
  3. ^ "Kinyoun, John H. (1825-1903), Account Books, 1859-1898 (C3863)" (PDF). The State Historical Society of Missouri.
  4. ^ Joseph K. Houts, Jr (15 October 2021). Joseph James Kinyoun: Discoverer of Bubonic Plague in America and Father of the National Institutes of Health. ISBN 9781476682907.
  5. ^ Luiggi, Cristina (2011-05-28). "One-Man NIH, 1887". The Scientist.
  6. ^ Morens, David M.; Fauci, Anthony S. (2012-08-31). "The Forgotten Forefather: Joseph James Kinyoun and the Founding of the National Institutes of Health". mBio. 3 (4): e00139–12. doi:10.1128/mBio.00139-12. ISSN 2150-7511. PMC 3388889. PMID 22736540.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Morens, David M.; Harden, Victoria A.; Houts, Joseph Kinyoun; Fauci, Anthony S. "The Year of the Rat". Dr. Joseph Kinyoun The Indispensable Forgotten Man. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Retrieved March 25, 2023.
  8. ^ "Changes in the U. S. Marine-Hospital Service for the week ended August 10, 1899". The Philadelphia Medical Journal. 4 (8): 333. August 19, 1899. Retrieved September 10, 2023.
  9. ^ a b c Link, Vernon B. (1955). "A History of Plague in the United States of America" (PDF). Public Health Monograph. 26: 1–11. PMID 14371919. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-12-21.
  10. ^ a b c d Chase, Marilyn (2004). The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco. Random House Digital. pp. 13–28. ISBN 978-0375757082.
  11. ^ Markel 2005, p. 224 Archived 2016-05-11 at the Wayback Machine
  12. ^ "On The Plague in San Francisco". Journal of the American Medical Association. 36 (15): 1042. April 13, 1901. doi:10.1001/jama.1901.52470150038003. Archived from the original on May 7, 2016. Retrieved December 26, 2015.
  13. ^ "The Plague, American Medicine, and the Philadelphia Medical Journal.". Occidental Medical Times. 15: 171–179. 1901. Archived from the original on 2016-06-09. Retrieved 2015-12-26.
  14. ^ Marine Hospital Service, United States; Public Health Service, United States (1901). "Bubonic Plague at San Francisco, Cal". Annual Report of the Supervising Surgeon General of the Marine Hospital Service of the United States for the Fiscal Year 1901. U.S. Government Printing Office: 491.
  15. ^ Kellogg, Wilfred H. (1900). "The Bubonic Plague in San Francisco". Journal of the American Medical Association. 34 (20): 1235–1237. doi:10.1001/jama.1900.24610200021001g.
  16. ^ Shah 2001, p. 120
  17. ^ Markel, Howard (2005). When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America And the Fears They Have Unleashed. Random House Digital. ISBN 978-0375726026.
  18. ^ Montgomery, Douglass W. (1900). "The Plague in San Francisco". The Journal of the American Medical Association. 35 (2): 86–89. doi:10.1001/jama.1900.24620280022001f.
  19. ^ Gassaway, James M. (March 14, 1900). "A case of plague in San Francisco, Cal". Public Health Reports. 15 (11): 577–578. JSTOR 41455049.
  20. ^ Echenberg, Myron (2007). Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague: 1894-1901. Sacramento: New York University Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-2232-9.
  21. ^ a b c d Chase 2003, pp. 70, 72, 79–81, 85, 115, 119–122
  22. ^ Power, J. Gerard (April 1995). "Media Dependency, Bubonic Plague, and the Social Construction of the Chinese Other". Journal of Communication Inquiry. 19 (1): 89–110. doi:10.1177/019685999501900106. S2CID 145556040.
  23. ^ a b c d e f g h Morens, David M.; Harden, Victoria A.; Houts, Joseph Kinyoun; Fauci, Anthony S. "Life After the MHS". Dr. Joseph Kinyoun The Indispensable Forgotten Man. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Retrieved March 25, 2023.
  24. ^ Trauner, Joan B. (Spring 1978). "The Chinese as Medical Scapegoats in San Francisco, 1870–1905". California History. 57 (1): 70–87. doi:10.2307/25157817. JSTOR 25157817.
  25. ^ Risse, Guenter (March 14, 2012). Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco's Chinatown. Maryland: The Johns Hopkins Press. ISBN 978-1-4214-0510-0.
  26. ^ a b c "Public Health Politics and the San Francisco Plague Epidemic of 1900–1904" (PDF). Mark Skubik, San Jose State University. 2002. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved August 19, 2007.
  27. ^ California State Board of Health (1901), Report of the Special Health Commissioners Appointed by the Governor to Confer with the Federal Authorities at Washington Respecting the Alleged Existence of Bubonic Plague in California (1 ed.), Sacramento: Superintendent State Printing, archived from the original on 2016-05-04, retrieved 2015-12-26
  28. ^ Kinyoun JJ. 1915. A note on Uhlenhuths method for sputum examination, for tubercle bacilli. Am. J. Public Health 5:867–870.
  29. ^ a b Morens, David M.; Harden, Victoria A.; Houts, Joseph Kinyoun; Fauci, Anthony S. "End of an Era". Dr. Joseph Kinyoun The Indispensable Forgotten Man. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Retrieved March 25, 2023.
  30. ^ "Joseph J. Kinyoun Papers 1899-1939". National Library of Medicine.
  31. ^ "409: An act to authorize Joseph J. Kinyoun, passed assistant surgeon of the Marine-Hospital Service, to accept a medal from the President of the Republic of Venezuela". The Statutes at Large of the United States of America, from March 1897 to March 1899. Vol. 30. Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office. 1899. p. 1549. Retrieved September 10, 2023.

External links

Government offices
New office Director of the Hygienic Laboratory
1887 – 1899
Succeeded by
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