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. His family joined a Baptist church. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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, Supportive newspapers, such as the
Call, the
Chronicle and the
Bulletin, echoed and elaborated on Gage's denials, attacking Kinyoun personally. One newspaper claimed, without any factual basis, that Kinyoun had released his laboratory monkeys into San Francisco. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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, ==Personal life==