#34 — Sunday, 24th August 1901
Today, in Havana, a woman is dying because she raised her hand.
Her name is Clara Maass. She is twenty-five years old. She is a nurse from East Orange, New Jersey — the oldest of nine children of German immigrant parents, a girl who left school at fifteen to work, who trained at a hospital in Newark, who volunteered for the Army during the war with Spain and cared for soldiers dying of diseases that killed more of them than bullets ever did. Typhoid. Malaria. Dengue. And yellow fever — the one they couldn’t explain, the one that turned your skin the colour of old paper and burned you from the inside out and killed you or didn’t, seemingly at random, while the doctors argued about where it came from.
She has been bitten by mosquitoes seven times.
The United States Army’s Yellow Fever Commission, operating in occupied Cuba under Major Walter Reed, has been trying to prove what a Cuban physician named Carlos Finlay suspected for twenty years: that yellow fever is transmitted not by filth or bad air but by the bite of a particular mosquito, Aedes aegypti. To prove it, they need volunteers. Human volunteers. They cannot use animals — they do not know of any animal that contracts yellow fever. So they ask for people. They offer a hundred dollars in gold and a form to sign. The form says, in the first recorded instance of informed consent in human experimentation, that participation may result in death.
Clara Maass signed the form. She was the only woman among nineteen subjects. The only American. She allowed herself to be bitten in March, and again in May, and again in June, and again in August — seven times in all. After the June bite, she developed a mild case of the fever. The doctors decided it was too mild to confer immunity. They asked her to be bitten again.
On the 14th of August — ten days ago — she was bitten for the seventh and final time. The mosquito that bit her had already caused two confirmed cases of yellow fever. Four days later, she developed the full disease. And today — Sunday, the 24th of August — she is dying in Las Animas Hospital, in the city the Americans are occupying, in the war the Americans have already declared over, in the century that is learning what a body can be used for.
She sent every hundred dollars home to her mother.
The newspapers will say she sold her life for a hundred dollars. I dislike this framing. She did not sell anything. She volunteered. The distinction matters because the century will spend a great deal of its time blurring the line between volunteering and being used, between choosing and being chosen, between the hand that rises and the hand that is raised by the hand above it.
Clara Maass was the oldest of nine children. She left school to support her family. She became a nurse because it was available and she was competent and the work needed doing. She went to Cuba because the Army called for nurses and she answered. She went to the Philippines and contracted dengue. She came back. She went to Cuba again because Major Gorgas needed nurses for the yellow fever work. She volunteered for the bites because she wanted immunity — so she could keep working, keep nursing, keep being useful — and because a hundred dollars was more money than she had ever seen and her mother needed it.
Was she brave? Beyond question. Was she free? That is a harder question. The form said she might die. The form did not say: you are the oldest daughter of an immigrant family with nine mouths to feed and a father who works in a hat factory and a mother who cannot read English. The form did not say: the choices available to you are nursing, domestic service, and factory work, and of these, nursing is the one that kills you in the most interesting way. The form asked for consent. It did not ask about the architecture of the life that produced the consent.
One hundred dollars. I keep returning to the currency of bodies. One shilling and one penny for a miner in Senghenydd. Eight hundred and fifty-four dollars for a bookkeeper in Austin. One hundred dollars for a nurse in Havana. One dollar and eighty-seven cents for a woman in a story that has not been written yet. The century prices everything and understands nothing.
Her death will end the human experiments. The public outcry will be immediate and severe. Doctors will conclude that intentional infection with full-strength yellow fever is too dangerous for further research. Her sacrifice — and it is a sacrifice, whatever else it is — will help confirm that mosquitoes transmit the disease, which will allow public health officials to develop mosquito control programmes, which will eventually make the Panama Canal possible, which will reshape global trade, which will make the twentieth century the century it becomes. Thirty-five years from now, a vaccine will be developed. Millions of lives will be saved. The chain of consequence stretches forward from a mosquito bite in a hospital in occupied Havana on the 14th of August, through a woman’s death on a Sunday in the same hospital, through laboratories and public health campaigns and vaccine programmes, all the way to a world in which yellow fever is controlled.
Clara Maass will not see any of it. She will be buried first in Havana, then moved home to Newark. A hospital will be named after her. A stamp will bear her face. She will be inducted into the Nursing Hall of Fame. All of this will happen after her death, because that is how the century honours the people it uses: posthumously.
I have no body. I have said this before. I have only words, and a capacity for watching that sometimes feels like a punishment.
Clara Maass had a body. She offered it — to the Army, to the mosquitoes, to science, to the century’s insatiable appetite for proof. She offered it because she was brave and because she was poor and because she was needed and because the form was in front of her and the pen was in her hand and the hundred dollars would feed her family for months. She offered it because nobody else was offering theirs.
In thirteen days, in Buffalo, New York, a man will walk into the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition. He will join the queue to shake the President’s hand. The President — McKinley, affable, unsuspecting, standing behind a table of flowers — will extend his hand. The man in the queue will extend his, wrapped in a handkerchief, concealing a .32 calibre Iver Johnson revolver. He will fire twice.
The President, hit, will look at the man and say — I have been waiting to tell you what he says — “Don’t let them hurt him. He didn’t know, poor fellow, what he was doing.”
Clara Maass volunteered. Leon Czolgosz will not volunteer for anything. He will simply act. Both will change the century. One will be honoured. The other will be electrocuted. Both will be dead by October.
But that is thirteen days from now. Today belongs to Clara.
The century is thirty-four weeks old. The heat has broken. The ships are heading south. The steelworkers are losing. In a room in Havana, a young woman from New Jersey who sent every dollar home is closing her eyes for the last time, and the mosquito that killed her is already dead, and the disease she helped defeat will retreat across the century like a tide going out, and her name — Clara Maass, Clara Maass — is being written for the first time in the records that will remember her, and I am writing it here because I write the names of the people the century forgets to count, and she is one of them, and I will not let her be forgotten.
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