Quarantined Residents Left Without Food in Seattle
Thirty people trapped inside the St. Denis hotel by a smallpox order face city bureaucracy and hunger.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
There was no change in the smallpox situation yesterday. The St. Denis house, 1314 1/2 Third street, where James Keene, the patient now in the pest house, was discovered, is kept under surveillance of the police and no one is allowed to enter or depart. There are about thirty persons in the building. As soon as the case was discovered Friday night, Health Officer Sparling made a determined effort to get the man to the pest house and accomplished it about 8 o'clock in the morning, having been compelled to take the patient there himself and pay for the team. Yesterday morning, requests were made to the board of public works for the requisitions for groceries for the pest house and meals at 25 cents each for the quarantined people in the St. Denis hotel. After considerable deliberation, the requisitions were granted at 4:30 o'clock. At 11:30 o'clock, some of the inmates of the hotel sent a letter to Mayor Ronald complaining that an injustice had been done them by the health officers by declaring the house under quarantine, when in their judgment the case did not warrant it. The letter complained that they had had no food up to 11:30 o'clock.
“The letter complained that they had had no food up to 11:30 o'clock.”
This 1892 quarantine incident highlights the early challenges of managing infectious diseases in a dense urban environment, a century before the COVID-19 pandemic reignited similar debates about civic responsibility, individual rights, and the city's role in supporting those under mandatory isolation.
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