“Our Local Board of Health Asserts that No Epidemic of Any Kind Exists in San Antonio”: State vs. Local Expertise in the 1903 Yellow Fever Quarantine

This editorial cartoon appeared on November 19, 1903, in the San Antonio Daily Light following the lifting of the yellow fever quarantine. The image depicts the triumph of the anti-quarantine advocates, led by the Light, over the San Antonio Daily Express (commonly referred to as The Old Lady by the Light), a perceived supporter of the yellow fever diagnosis and the quarantine.

On Saturday, October 17, 1903, thousands gathered as Texas Governor Samuel W. T. Lanham formally opened San Antonio’s annual International Exposition Fair. Since its inception, the fair had proven to be a significant event for the city, as it attracted thousands of visitors. San Antonio officials and merchants expected 1903’s attendance to exceed that of the previous year despite the outbreak of yellow fever, also referred to as “the black vomit,” along the Texas border with Mexico. San Antonio leaders had, after all, implemented sanitary precautions, such as covering water barrels with screens and instituting a quarantine against infected towns. Additionally, the local Board of Health had declared rumors of yellow fever in San Antonio to be untrue. Therefore, it took San Antonians by surprise when Governor Lanham, a few days after the opening of the fair, signed a state quarantine proclamation against their city.¹

The proclamation set up clashes among state and local officials that would extend throughout the fall of 1903. While some, including Texas state health officer George R. Tabor, believed a quarantine to be the most effective way to prevent the spread of yellow fever beyond San Antonio, others, such as local doctor Amos Graves Sr., contested the diagnosis of yellow fever altogether. The quarantine’s imposition during the International Exposition Fair threatened the vision of San Antonio put forward by the city’s boosters: a health destination where tourists and health-seekers go to escape disease and illness. It was not supposed to be a place where visitors might encounter deadly epidemics. City boosters saw the quarantine as both a reputational and economic disaster.

Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, Texas officials used quarantines to contain yellow fever, smallpox, dysentery, and other epidemics. In 1850, Galveston became the first municipality to institute quarantine regulations following a series of yellow fever outbreaks. A few years later, the Texas legislature enacted the Quarantine Act of 1856, which empowered municipal governments and county courts to impose quarantines when medically necessary. Towns enacted quarantines against one another as a preventative measure. In 1870 the legislature authorized the governor to institute coastal quarantines and establish quarantine stations. Then on April 10, 1879, prompted by yellow fever and smallpox outbreaks in adjoining U.S. states and Mexico, the legislature created the Texas Quarantine Department, renamed the Texas Department of Public Health and Vital Statistics in 1903. The governor headed the agency, the purpose of which was to contain epidemics.²

Additionally, the law granted the governor the power to appoint a state health officer who was “from previous practice familiar with yellow fever, and there-by as competent as possible of discriminating it and other diseases and pledged to the importance of both quarantine and sanitation.”³ This act, which initially provided the state the authority to declare quarantines on the coast and borders, laid the foundation for state-imposed quarantines on inland Texas communities. It also intimated that a diagnosis of yellow fever automatically resulted in quarantine, thus establishing in the public’s perception an inseparable connection between the two. This prevailing view would force anti-quarantine San Antonians to challenge the 1903 yellow fever cases in their city as misdiagnosis.⁴

Throughout the nineteenth century, physicians championed different theories as to the origin, cause, and mode of transmission of yellow fever. In the late-nineteenth century, supporters of the prevailing germ theory argued that a germ, perhaps in the local environment, fostered the disease, which could be transmitted through things such as clothing. The...