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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.3 (2002) 610-611



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Book Review

Rotting Face:
Smallpox and the American Indian


R. G. Robertson. Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Press, 2001. xvi + 329 pp. Ill. Uncorrected proofs. $24.95 (0-87004-419-2).

In late spring 1837, the crew of a Missouri River steamboat carried smallpox to the Indian trading posts of the upper Missouri, and spread contagion to the Mandans, Arikaras, Hidatsas, Assiniboin, Blackfeet, and other Plains tribes. It was one of the worst Native American smallpox epidemics in history. It is also the most notorious, because of graphic descriptions from traders, because of popular attention given those tribes by early writers and artists such as George Catlin, and because of the work of latter-day historians like Bernard DeVoto. The epidemic took the lives of perhaps 23,000 Indians on the northern Plains, including a quarter or more of the Blackfeet, half the Arikaras, half the Assiniboin, and more than nine-tenths of the Mandans.

R. G. Robertson, a Vietnam veteran and retired San Francisco businessman living in Idaho, has devoted Rotting Face to this epidemic and related topics such as the fur trade. The scope of his inquiry is broad. His descriptive skills are sparkling. His research and documentation are conscientious, and his judgment sober and judicious. In other respects, the results are mixed. It may not be fair to evaluate a book for general readers by scholarly standards, but patronize we must. Robertson holds individuals exclusively responsible for the epidemic, and spurns serious examination of social attitudes or federal public health policies. The book's organization is a chronological merry-go-round, because the author chose not to dally over the background, but to intersperse it throughout the narrative. Moreover, he does not know enough about the etiology of smallpox to write about it skillfully. Serious historical study of smallpox needs to include C. W. Dixon's authoritative medical text, Smallpox (1962), which was written when clinical observation of the disease was still possible, and late enough to take full advantage of twentieth-century medical research; Robertson did not consult this source, and it shows. [End Page 610]

The author believes—along with a disturbingly large number of good scholars—that American Indians were more susceptible than whites to lethal cases of smallpox, because they had no natural immunity, no "hereditary resistance" (p. 305). The trouble with this is that whites had no hereditary resistance to smallpox, either. In support of his position, Robertson presents an interesting illustration: Charles Larpenteur, the Indian trader at Fort Union during the 1837 epidemic, anxious to spare his Indian wife and other Indian women, read some instructions in a medical book and inoculated (variolated) them with smallpox, because he had no vaccine. Normally the incidence of death from variolation was low, but these women all died. The author concludes: "for Native Americans, inoculation posed a far greater risk than it did among other populations" (p. 305). C. W. Dixon offers a better explanation: if a severe case of smallpox follows after variolation, it is probably due to inoculation past the skin and into the circulation. When inoculation is only into the skin, the disease will be milder and mortality will be low. Q.E.D.

 



Richard H. Frost
Colgate University (emeritus)

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