Show notes
I had planned an episode on a different topic for this week, but in light of our current COVID-19 state of emergency, I decided to share some classic clips about Boston’s experiences with epidemics and public health. Speaking of public health, I hope you’re already practicing social distancing, staying at home as much as you can, limiting contact with strangers, and staying six feet away from other people whenever you can. During the 1918 “Spanish” flu, cities that practiced social distancing fared much better than those that didn’t, and in that case Boston was slow to close schools, churches, theaters, and other gathering places. I hope we’ll do better this time around. Along with the 1918 flu pandemic, we’ll be discussing an 1849 cholera epidemic that Boston fought with improved sanitation, and the 1721 smallpox season, when Cotton Mather controversially used traditional African inoculation techniques that he learned from Oneismus, who was enslaved in the Mather household. Please check out the transcript and full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/176/ And support the show on Patreon. Pandemic 1918 Find out more about our special guest Lori Lyn Price on her website. Our listeners share family memories of the 1918 flu. A collection of flu related materials from the Harvard Library. More about Boston’s experience with the disease from Influenza Archive. An article in the Journal of Public Health Reports tracks the spread of flu through US military bases. Warnings about our current preparedness for a similar flu. A 1982 article about the outbreak from Yankee Magazine. A possible origin of the virus in China. The annual report of the Boston Health Department following the flu. More city documents. Tent city hospitals in Newton and Lawrence. Commonwealth Pier in roughly 1919, and with a docked troopship. A WWI-era receiving ship at Charlestown The USS Constitution as a receiving ship in 1897 Boston in the Time of Cholera Boston forms a Board of Health Commissioners in response to the threat of a cholera epidemic in 1832 The Board of Health Commissioners gives terrible advice on how to avoid contracting cholera The 1849 Internal Health Department report on the cholera epidemic Map showing concentrations of cholera infections near Fort Hill, in the North End, and along the South Cove in 1849, highlighted below 1852 map that includes the location of Half Moon Court, detail shown below. 1852 map detail showing location of Half Moon Court 1869 map outlining how the city counsel would redraw the street grid to eliminate Half Moon Court and similar alleys. An 1849 editorial in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal that basically blames Irish immigrants for their own health problems. Dr. JH McCollum’s 1892 “Observations on Cholera” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal Report on the 1866 outbreak of cholera in Boston Ball, Laura. “Cholera and the Pump on Broad Street: The Life and Legacy of John Snow.” The History Teacher GF Pyle’s “The Diffusion of Cholera in the United States in the Nineteenth Century” Cholera hits Boston in 2011 A summary of how cholera completely decimated Boston, Indiana in 1849 Smallpox The beginnings of plant hybridization, Zirkle, Conway, 1895, quoting Cotton Mather The Inoculation Controversy in Boston: 1721-1722, John B. Blake The Fight Over Inoculation During the 1721 Boston Smallpox Epidemic, Matthew Niederhuber How an African slave helped Boston fight smallpox, Ted Widmer, Boston Globe The Story of Smallpox in Massachusetts, the 1932 Annual Oration of the Massachusetts Medical Society, By Samuel Bayard Woodward, M.D. John Adams describes his own smallpox inoculation in a letter to Abigail in 1764. A WBUR piece on the 1901 smallpox epidemic The Last Smallpox Epidemic in Boston and the Vaccination Controversy, 1901–1903, Michael R. Albert, M.D., Kristen G. Ostheimer, M.A., Joel G. Breman, M.D., D.T.P.H., New England Journal of Medicine The 100 Best Bostonians of All Time, according to Boston Magazine. Boston Book Club The new Netflix movie “Spenser Confidential” stars Mark Wahlberg as a disgraced Boston cop named Spenser. On the day he’s released from prison, his old nemesis, another cop, is murdered. The movie follows his attempt to clear his name, with the help of his aspiring-UFC-fighter roommate, his aging boxing coach, and his volatile ex wife who never met an R she didn’t want to drop. Turns out his nemesis was a dirty cop, embroiled in a drug trafficking scheme that also somehow involves condo developers who want to gentrify Southie, and Spenser and his crew are forced to take on both the cops and the mob to get to the truth. The movie is… not good. I’m pretty sure they said that Walpole Prison was up in Revere, and the dog track at Wonderland is simultaneously in South Boston and deep in a primeval forest. The murdered dirty cop is supposed to have lived in a giant McMansion in Boston, which is too much to believe exists even in West Roxbury. About the best thing I can say about the film is that some of the aerial shots of Boston are really stunning. “Spenser Confidential” is loosely based on “Spenser for Hire,” which ran on ABC for three seasons in the late 1980s. I’ve never really gotten into the TV show, but I have always been a fan of the books they’re based on. Robert B Parker wrote 40 Spenser novels between 1973 and his death in 2010. They’re very consciously styled after the hard boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, with Spenser as an archetype of the jaded private eye with a heart of gold. Parker’s obituary in the Chronicle of Higher Education begins, Of the many crime writers who have tried on Raymond Chandler’s mantle, few wore it as easily as Robert B. Parker. Parker’s Spenser books form the centerpiece of a body of work that bears Chandler’s torch through the late 20th century and into the 21st, where it continues to light the main roads of the hard-boiled tradition. Spenser is written as a Korean War vet and former prize fighter, whose wisecracking banter is peppered through with obscure references from English and American literature, and who is more likely to be portrayed whipping up a gourmet meal than pounding back scotch. Below this, you’ll even see a recipe that I adapted from Early Autumn, the seventh novel, where Spenser’s unofficially adopted son Paul is introduced. After Spenser, his sidekick the inscrutable African American hitman Hawk, and the love of his life Susan Silverman, Boston is the most important character in the series of novels. Before I ever moved to Boston, I felt like I knew this city through the pages of Parker’s novels. From the Harbor Health Club where Hawk and Spenser worked the heavy bag, to Spenser’s shoddy office in the turret of a building at the corner of Mass Ave and Boylston that’s now a Bank of America, I slowly discovered the corners of the real Boston after moving here that I had imagined through Spenser’s eyes for years. Especially the first few novels are a kind of time capsule of bygone Boston. They were written in a time before gentrification, when the South End and the Fenway were still in the throes of urban blight. It was also the time of busing, when Boston’s racial divide was in the spotlight, and Spenser’s friendship with Hawk was seen as a radical move, even in fiction. Decades before the term “toxic masculinity” was coined, Parker’s Spenser wrestled with what it meant to be a man in modern times. The Chronicle continues, Parker taught full time for more than a decade, rising to the rank of full professor at Northeastern University. Although he left the classroom in 1979, when his Spenser novels gained marketplace traction, he never ceased to teach. His writing amounts to a decades-long primer on the meaning of “tough.” For Parker, tough was a stance, an ethos, a code, and a worldview, all at once. Through his characters, he acted as the crime genre’s professor of hard-boiled studies for nearly 40 years. Parker consciously dismantled the stereotype of the hard-boiled tough guy in all his books, and then reassembled it with only the parts he liked, creating detectives who update the image for more progressive times. The essential Parker tenet was that you must be tough, but also soft. The two must coexist, but tough comes first. It means, as Spenser puts it in Thin Air (1995), being able to “control feelings so you won’t be tripping over them while you’re trying to do something useful.” Soft, on the other hand, means that you have to know yourself fully. Spenser’s longtime partner, Susan Silverman, admits to him that “you let me see your emotions from time to time.” Parker’s tough-soft characters understand the value of home and hearth, and of children, even if they don’t have their own. In Early Autumn (1981), for example, Spenser becomes the guardian of a young child, a responsibility he accepts and takes seriously. Tough-soft is also tolerant. Parker made Spenser ostentatiously gender- and colorblind, working with and trusting a diverse cast of people, particularly gay tough guys, one of whom is a police officer who appears in a number of books. Above all, tough-soft must be principled. Spenser is so often willing to put financial motives aside that an observer marvels in Small Vices (1997) that having a paying client must be a “nice change of pace.” In short, Parker’s detective is a hard-boiled humanist. How well has this treatment held up, now almost 50 years after Spenser was first written? Try some of these early Spenser novels on for size, and see for yourself! (You can read more about any of them on this wiki, which I occasionally contributed to in the early 2000s) The Godwulf Manuscript: This first novel introduces us to Spenser, though the character is not yet fully formed. It will always have a special place in my heart as a Northeastern alum, because Parker so clearly describes the confusing warren of offices in the Holmes/Meserve/Nightingale/Lake complex, where his own office would have been when he taught there. God Save the Child: This second entry in the series introduces several main characters, including Susan Silverman. With her companionship, Spenser becomes a complete character. Mortal Stakes: This was the first Spenser novel I ever read. I was probably in eighth grade when my father started laughing so hard he had to set his book down and walk away. I picked it up and read a passage where Spenser reacts to a martial arts master showing off his skills by pulling out his .38 and shooting a heavy bag (similar vibe to Indiana Jones shooting that swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark). I was instantly hooked. Promised Land: With the introduction of Hawk near the end of this novel, the central cast is basically complete. If you’re not hooked by now, you never will be. Spenser’s Pineapple Pork Chops “I went to the kitchen and investigated. There were some pork chops. I looked into the cupboard. There was rice. I found some pignolia nuts and some canned pineapple, and some garlic and a can of mandarin oranges. I checked the refrigerator again. There was some all-purpose cream. Heavy would have been better, but one makes do… I cut the eyes out of the pork chops and trimmed them. I threw the rest away. … I pounded the pork medallions with the back of a butcher knife. I put a little oil into the skillet and heated it and put the pork in to brown. I drank the rest of my Schlitz and opened another can. When the meat was browned, I added a garlic clove. When that had softened, I added some juice from the pineapple and covered the pan. I made rice with chicken broth and pignolia nuts, thyme, parsley, and a bay leaf and cooked it in the oven. After about five minutes, I took the top off the frying pan, let the pineapple juice cook down, added some cream, and let that cook down a little. Then I put in some pineapple chunks and a few mandarin orange segments, shut off the heat, and covered the pan to keep it warm.” (Early Autumn, by Robert B Parker) Ingredients 4 cups long grain white rice 1 bay leaf 1/2 tsp dried thyme 1/2 tsp parsley flakes 1 quart chicken stock 20 oz can of pineapple chunks in pineapple juice, drained, 1 1/4 cup of juice reserved 16 oz can of mandarin orange segments in light syrup, drained 2 cloves of garlic, halved, de-stemmed, and smashed with the flat of your chef’s knife 1/4 cup heavy cream 1 tbsp butter 4 center cut pork chops, tenderized and sprinkled with salt and freshly ground pepper on both sides 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil Preparation Rice Add rice, bay leaf, thyme, and parsley flakes to your ricemaker. Add chicken stock to the level specified by the directions of your ricemaker, topping off with water as necessary. Set for White Rice. Pork Chop and Sauce When the rice is finishing, start on your pork chops Heat oil over medium-high heat in a large, heavy bottomed pan. Brown the pork chops two at a time, about 2-3 minutes per side, until golden brown on both sides, then transfer to a plate. Add the garlic to the pan, turn the heat down to medium-low, and sauté for a minute or two, until soft and golden, but not scorched, then remove the garlic. Return heat to high, add the reserved pineapple juice, and scrape the bottom of the pan vigorously with a wooden spoon to loosen any brown bits stuck to the bottom. Add 3 pineapple chunks and 3 mandarin segments and smush them with your wooden spoon. In a few minutes, reduce heat to low, and cook until the juice is reduced to a thick syrup, about 5 minutes. Check pork for doneness, return to pan for a few minutes if needed, and pour any accumulated juices into the pan. With the heat at its lowest setting, add 1/4 cup heavy cream and 1 tbsp butter and swirl in gently. Add 3/4 cup pineapple chunks and 1/4 cup mandarin segments and warm gently over very low heat, without boiling. Turn off heat and serve, with a dollop of rice, a pork chop, and a scoop of sauce per plate. Upcoming Event Upcoming events in the Boston area are CANCELLED, and if you know of any that aren’t, they certainly should be!
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