When the 1916 Normal College (EMU) football season was cut short in October, it wasn’t due to injuries, or lack of funds, or academic suspensions.
It was smallpox.
The outbreak on campus made news as far away as Connecticut.
The November 3, 1916 Toronto World said, “Coach Mitchell and four members of the Ypsilanti Normal College football eleven were stricken with smallpox yesterday . . . The illness of the athletes was diagnosed last night . . . Ypsilanti Normal played the University of Detroit last Saturday. Reports from Detroit today said that none of the university’s players were ill.”
Headlines at home played down the danger.
“Smallpox Need Cause No Alarm,” read an October 31, 1916 headline in the Daily Ypsilantian-Press. The article said, “That the extent of smallpox in the city is confined to six cases, none of which is severe, and that all possible precautions have been taken to prevent the spread of the disease throughout the city was assured the public today . . .”
The article continued, “Five of the six cases are isolated in the Health Cottage at the Normal, which has been placed at the disposal of the smallpox patients.” The Health Cottage was the campus clinic.
Normal College president McKenny called a special assembly of the students, said the paper. He told them to get vaccinated immediately and show proof of vaccination before leaving for Thanksgiving break. He urged calm.
Students expressed “a good deal of indignation,” said the paper, at having to pay for shots.
Many didn’t get them. The November 9 Daily Ypsilantian-Press reported that 300 students had yet to be vaccinated, and that the number of smallpox cases was rising.
Soon Ann Arborites were being told to stay out of Ypsi, and Normal College students from Ann Arbor were sent home. “Posters enjoining the University [of Michigan] students from making their weekend exodus to Ypsilanti this weekend are being plastered up around the Ann Arbor area,” said the November 14 Daily Ypsilantian-Press. U-M students would be suspended, said the paper, if they ventured to Ypsi.
By mid-November, the number of cases had risen to 27. Homes were quarantined. Normal College President McKenny moved out of his own home so that it could be converted into a “detention home for undiagnosed cases of disease,” said the November 14 Press. The Health Cottage was full.
The community was afraid. “Complaints stating that occupants in quarantined houses were seen upon the porch were received last week and when questioned today as to how far the quarantine limited the actions of such persons, Dr. Westfall said that their presence upon the porch was well within their rights, but that they should not leave the porch.”
Neither quarantines nor smallpox were new to Ypsilanti. In 1882, the city passed “An Ordinance Relative to the Prevention of Small-Pox.”
Part of it said, “It shall be the duty of the keeper of any hotel, tavern, boarding or public house, or the owner or occupant of any private residence, wherein any person may be sick with the small-pox or other infectious disease, to close said public house or private residence, and keep it closed as against all lodgers, customers and persons desiring to visit the same, [until] all danger of communicating the disease from the said house or residence, or from any of the inmates thereof, shall have passed.”
The ordinance gave an exception only to doctors and clergymen. When these ministers to the body and to the soul visited quarantined homes to give hope against death, they risked their own.
The ordinance helped. In 1889, city physician William Pattison gave a report to city council that was printed in the May 17, 1889 Ypsilanti Commercial. After noting that there had been 27 cases of scarlet fever that year, Pattison said, “Small pox, which has prevailed more or less over the state, has not appeared in our midst.”
Other communities were less fortunate. The February 15, 1889 Ypsilanti Commercial reported that in nearby Azalia, Michigan, “the small pox has so far abated that two of the houses will be renovated this week, there being no new cases in the last two weeks.”
The Commercial that day also urged readers to get vaccinated. “[G]o and have your family physician scratch your arm, apply the little wafer-like, bony point that contains that horrid stuff, that in one week’s time with nearly every one that tried it, causes them to say, “Oh, my arm, don’t touch it” and “I ache so hard and fast in one moment that I hardly know myself.”
In 1916, the city held its breath. Vaccinations and quarantines began to have a good effect. The crisis slowly passed and by spring the city was out of danger. However, the experience left an impact on Normal College students.
Their 1917 yearbook, the Aurora, mentions the experience. The football page says, “[Our] game with the University of Detroit was the last game of the season, for the epidemic of smallpox which broke out at the school compelled Coach Mitchell to cancel the better part of the schedule.”
In typical college fashion, students made light of the terrifying disease. One entire page of the 1917 Aurora yearbook displays a smallpox cartoon.
The cartoon includes a depiction of a bedridden patient who is cheering, with the legend, “That grand and glorious feelin’—when Doc decides it’s only typhoid.”
The cartoon also includes a rendering of the Health Cottage, where many students endured the disease. The cottage is shown blazing with light at night, with musical notes and song lyrics streaming from its windows as residents whoop it up.
This seeming flippancy belies the admirable grit and courage summoned by scared students stricken with the disease.
After staring Death in the eye, and staring him down, the students of 1917, with their cartoon, put thumb to nose and wiggled their fingers.
This article first appeared in the Ypsilanti Courier
