Wong Chut King lived in squalid conditions in the cellar of San Francisco's Globe Hotel. It was a rat-infested space in the city's Chinatown that he shared with as many as three roommates all taking turns sleeping on the same bed. When a painful lump appeared on Wong's groin, the 41-year-old laborer, fearing he'd contracted a venereal disease, consulted a local Chinese doctor. The doctor prescribed an herbal remedy, yet Wong's temperature continued to soar. He also became nauseous, diarrheic and delusional. Before Wong could be overtaken by the disease, the men sharing his cramped living quarters carried him to a nearby coffin shop. There he died, on the afternoon of March 6, 1900, as the city's first known victim of the bubonic plague.
In “Black Death at the Golden Gate,” David K. Randall gives a vivid, fast-paced and at times revolting history of the plague in San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century. The author describes in chilling detail how the disease can overwhelm the human body. He is also unsparing in describing the unsanitary conditions in the city's Chinatown, where large colonies of flea-laden rats scavenged for food.
Subtitled “The Race to Save America From the Bubonic Plague,” the book unfolds like a medical thriller. It starts in Honolulu, where, months before Wong's demise, officials there, in a disastrous effort to contain their own outbreak, resort to setting fire to the city's Chinese quarter. The author then takes us to San Francisco and the discovery by local crab fisherman of two bodies floating face-down in the bay. The bodies are found wearing uninflated life-preservers from the Nippon Maru, a ship suspected of carrying passengers from Asia infected with the plague. City health officials soon confirm that the corpses are plague-ridden.
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