Ramsey County History – Summer 2003: “Fear a Powerful Motivator—A Harvest of Victims: The Twin Cities and St. Paul’s Traumatic Small Pox Epidemic of 1924”

Fear a Powerful Motivator—A Harvest of Victims: The Twin Cities and St. Paul’s Traumatic Small Pox Epidemic of 1924
Author: Paul D. Nelson

The Twin Cites most traumatic encounter with smallpox took place in 1924–25. There were two different variations of smallpox, and, at the time, the local health departments’ only tools to fight this deadly disease were education, persuasion, and quarantine. There was a pattern of infection in Minneapolis but not in St. Paul, and charts included in the article show this. St. Paul hired many physicians for inoculation duty. Minneapolis officials, however, kept claiming that there was no problem in their city. Some businesses, such as Schoch’s Grocery Store, required employees to get vaccinated. Several sidebars explain smallpox and provide the names and addresses of all the St. Paul residents the epidemic killed.
PDF of Nelson article