Steven Welch, a fifth-generation funeral director at San Francisco's Duggan's Funeral Service, joins Beth and Courtney to share what mortician life is like, both today and historically. He also dishes about the embalming job on Pope Francis, how HBO's "Six Feet Under" feels torn from the pages of his own family's life, and how cremation services leave room for funerary malfeasance.

Links:

Jessica Mitford, "The American Way of Death" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Way_of_Death

Valencia Street funeral home map, FoundSF: https://www.shapingsf.org/images/fall2021/Corridor to Colma 11x17_final smaller.pdf

Pope Francis' embalmed hands:

What do you know about the bubonic plague? Probably that it killed a lot of people, it broke out in the middle ages, and rats were somehow involved. . . but did you know we ACTUALLY HAD A PLAGUE OUTBREAK IN SAN FRANCISCO?

That's right, in 1900 the plague came to the city, and it wreaked havoc for 8 years. Join us for a journey through crowded tenements, racist blockades, wooden pallets full of fleas, quack medicine, corporate conspiracies, and finally, FINALLY some actual science.

The Great Mortality by John Kelly

Plague and Fire: Battling the Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu's Chinatown by James C. Mohr

The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco by Marilyn Chase

The Plague Comes to San Francisco @ Here Lies a Story

Plague at the Golden Gate American Experience

City of Plagues by Susan Craddock

If you got sick with a visible disease in 19th century San Francisco, you wouldn't be taken to a doctor or a hospital. You wouldn't be given chicken soup and penicillin. You'd be forcibly removed in a zinc-lined cop carriage to a set of nasty, claptrap, decrepit cottages in Potrero Hill known as the PESTHOUSE. And you guys thought Covid-19 quarantine was bad!

References

"Driven by Fear: Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco's House of Pestilence," Gunter Risse

"[The Origin of the Word Quarantine](https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-origin-of-the-word-quarantine/#:~:text=But to find the origin,to mid-14th century Europe.)," Science Friday

"City of Plagues," Susan Craddock

"The Pest House," HLAS [including a map of the location]

The David Rumsey Map Collection

The Chinese Exclusion Act

Visiting Hawaii's Tragic and Remote Leprosy Colony

"The Sick Rose," Richard Barnett

"And the Band Played On," Randy Shilts

Ward 86 at San Francisco General Hospital

An 1896 etching from the San Francisco Call of the San Francisco Pesthouse Annex