The quote about yellow fever striking the Atlantic and Gulf states with more force than the one that bombed Pearl Harbor was taken from J. L. Cloudsley-Thompson’s Insects and History.
The suggestion that yellow fever was the most dreaded epidemic disease for 200 years comes from Khaled Bloom’s The MississippiValley’s Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878. Other historians have given similar opinions, and a number of doctors serving during the Memphis epidemic, and later in Cuba, offered the same impression.
That yellow fever was directly linked to the slave trade can be traced as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. In her article, “Yellow Fever: Scourge of the South,” published in Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, Jo Ann Carrigan writes: “Some abolitionists suggested that yellow fever was not only the result of slavery, having been introduced by the African slave trade, but that the disease served as a penalty or punishment, afflicting those areas where the institution prevailed.” It was in Carrigan’s article where I found the statement that yellow fever ceased in the North about the same time that slavery was abolished there. Henry Rose Carter, a friend and colleague of Walter Reed, also traced the history of yellow fever to West Africa and was one of the first to suggest that it made its way to North America through the slave trade in his 1931 book, Yellow Fever: An Epidemiological and Historical Study of Its Place of Origin.
The theory that yellow fever seemed divinely directed is based on some of the beliefs at the time. It was not uncommon for people to attach greater meaning to epidemics of disease—it still happens today. Even the word plague implies punishment in biblical terms.
According to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, “the Village” in New York enjoyed a certain amount of seclusion until epidemics of yellow fever and cholera hit the city in 1799, 1803, 1805 and 1821. Temporary housing and businesses sprang up. The 1822 fever epidemic was an especially virulent one, and many New Yorker’s settled in “the Village” for good, finally adjoining it to New York City.
The fact that Napoleon lost 23,000 troops to yellow fever in Haiti and sold his Louisiana holdings to Thomas Jefferson, wanting to abandon conquests in this pestilent place, is taken from Desowitz’s book.
The reference to yellow fever as one of the country’s first forms of biological warfare comes from a Washington Post article by Jane Singer, “The Fiend in Gray,” about Dr. Louis Blackburn. I also used information from a 2002 article in The Canadian Journal of Diagnosis entitled “The Yellow Fever Plot: Germ Warfare during the Civil War.”
The impact of yellow fever on the Spanish-American War comes from a number of sources, including the Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Collection, held at the University of Virginia; G.J.A. O’Toole’s book The Spanish War and Hugh Thomas’s Cuba or The Pursuit of Freedom, as well as personal correspondence of the surgeon general, Theodore Roosevelt and William McKinley, among others.
The timeline of yellow fever in North America—its prevalence in the northeast and its long reign in the South—comes from Desowitz.
Theories about why the 1878 yellow fever epidemic proved so deadly have appeared in a variety of publications. Many historians have simply responded that we don’t know why it was such a deadly epidemic. In this book, I put forth the idea that it was the combination of an El Niño cycle, an increase in new immigration and transportation and the theory that the virus may have arrived on ships directly from Africa rather than making its way from endemic areas in South America.
Information about yellow fever and El Niño came from an article, “A Possible Connection between the 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in the Southern United States and the 1877-78 El Niño Episode,” published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 1999. The article includes a timeline of El Niño cycles during the nineteenth century; nearly all coincide with major outbreaks of yellow fever. The World Health Organization also considers El Niño weather cycles a factor in the spread of yellow fever (WHO report Yellow Fever, 1998).
The reference to hyacinth blooms in January comes from Bloom’s book, as well as personal observation. I know that Memphians began complaining about mosquitoes based on newspaper clippings from January 1878.
The theory that Memphis was poised for greatness before the 1878 epidemic is cited in several Memphis history books. It was second only to New Orleans in population. It had survived the Civil War with very little damage. Businesses proliferated. It was the largest inland cotton market. Even the fact that Jefferson Davis chose Memphis as his home after the Civil War seems to support that idea. Unfortunately, there were also circumstances that would make Memphis vulnerable to an epidemic: poor sanitation, no clean water supply and misguided politicians.
I found the dramatic statistic about the 1878 epidemic in Memphis taking more lives than the Chicago fire, San Francisco earthquake and Johnstown flood combined in the Memphis Avalanche as well as in Bloom’s book.
The quote that yellow fever is more calamitous to the United States of America above all other countries comes from the report of the Board of Experts, 1879, held at the Library of Congress.
Part II: Memphis, 1878 Carnival
The Edgar Allan Poe quote from “The Masque of the Red Death” is considered by some historians to be a reference to yellow fever. Poe was living during the time period when yellow fever plagued so many cities, and the red death may have alluded to the bleeding common from yellow fever, which is a hemorrhagic fever. The poem tells the story of a king who locks his people away in a castle to prevent disease. Celebrating his victory over epidemic, he throws a lavish masque, only to find that death has indeed made its way into the castle wearing a mask. I thought the allegory was a chilling and perfect introduction to Memphis and its Carnival in 1878.
The description of the Mardi Gras invitation from 1878 comes from visiting the Pink Palace Museum’s Memphis History exhibit. Though they only have a few invitations from the years that Mardi Gras took place, 1878 happens to be one of them. The museum also displays illustrations of the Mardi Gras parades from Harper’s. Remarks about the number of people who attended the parades, including the president of the United States, are from the Mardi Gras file held in the Memphis History Collection of the Memphis Library. The file contains various clippings, descriptions and newspaper illustrations. I also used an article entitled “History of the Memphis Cotton Carnival” in the West Tennessee Historical Society Papers. To recreate the 1878 parade, I read the February and March issues from 1878 of the Memphis Appeal (later to become the Commercial Appeal) and the Memphis Avalanche. The majority of the details that re-create the 1878 Mardi Gras for this book came from those sources. Not only did they give lengthy descriptions that today would seem trivial and heavy-handed, but in reading advertisements in the newspapers, I could piece together where shops were located on Main Street or Second Street, what sort of clothes people wore and the fact that caramels were sold at one store and kid gloves at another. The newspaper is also where I found the impressive fact that the fountain in Court Square flowed with champagne during 1878 Mardi Gras or such quaint details as the feathers escaping from ladies’ fans during the ball.
For an accurate account of the weather on those two days, as well as for the remainder of 1878, I read the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Weather Bureau from the Memphis Station Records. I would refer to that source again and again to determine if it rained, what the clouds looked like, if a light frost fell or what the temperature might be on a given day. The weather bureau reports are held at the University of Memphis as part of the Mississippi Valley Collection.
For information about Colton Greene and the Mystic Memphi, I again went to files held in the Memphis History Collection of the Memphis Library. In those files, I found biographical information—including a description of Greene looking like Stalin—and the small details that give personality to Greene—the card allowing him admittance to the Vatican and a copy of Greene’s Last Will and Testament. Likewise, I learned about the Mystic Mem
phi from those files, including a 1933 newspaper interview in which J. M. Semmes reminisced about the secret society that answered to the letters UEUQ.
I based my summary and description of Memphis history on three very good books written by Memphis historians: Gerald M. Capers’s The Biography of a River Town, Memphis: Its Heroic Age; Paul Coppock’s Memphis Memoirs; and Charles Crawford’s Yesterday’s Memphis. I also included material from Carole Ornelas-Struve and Joan Hassel’s Memphis, 1800-1900, Volume III: Years of Courage and William Sorrels’s Memphis’ Greatest Debate; a Question of Water. The quote about Memphis refusing to take the trouble to distinguish between prosperity and progress came from Sorrels’s book. A few of the specifics—like the fact that Memphis had 115 saloonkeepers—came from newspaper reports at the time.
Information about Charles C. Parsons is held in boxes as part of the Yellow Fever Collection of the Memphis Library. The boxes include letters that he wrote to his wife, as well as general opinions of Parsons. A fellow classmate from West Point described the sort of fanaticism evident on Parsons’s face. Men who served with him during the Civil War described his courage at the Battle of Perryville. There is even a letter from Jefferson Davis to Parsons. I found the sermon Parsons gave on the eve of the 1878 Mardi Gras in a scrapbook that belonged to George C. Harris, whose papers are also held in the Yellow Fever Collection at the Memphis Library. The sermon had been printed in the Ledger newspaper in February 1878, and Harris kept it for his scrapbook. Although I only included part of it, the full sermon can be found in the Harris papers.
Very few photos from that decade exist. In order to create a visual sense of downtown Memphis from a visitor’s point of view, I studied an 1870 map of Memphis drawn by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Commerce. The original map is held at the Library of Congress, though copies are in wide circulation. The Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis has vignettes of the Victorian houses along Adams Street—an area now known as Victorian Village—in the Eldon Roark Papers. I also studied architectural drawings of Memphis buildings. I was surprised to find that in addition to the wooden and brick buildings one would expect, Memphis had several grand structures designed by prominent architects. The columns of the Gayoso Hotel, the building-in-progress of the Customs House, the glass-covered Water Works, and an elaborate prison, among others, would offer a stunning view from the river. None of those buildings exist in Memphis today—only the gates of the prison are still standing near the entrance of Mud Island.
I relied on descriptions of the Greenlaw Opera House and the Exposition Building from articles in the West Tennessee Historical Society Papers, an excellent resource for details and specifics about any number of subjects relating to Memphis history.
Other sources consulted for descriptions of Memphis, photographs or illustrations were Robert A. Sigafoos’s Cotton Row to Beale Street, Beverly G. Bond and Janann Sherman’s Memphis in Black and White, Robert W. Dye’s Images of America: Shelby County and Ginny Parfitt’s Memories of Memphis: A History of Postcards.
Bright Canary Yellow
It was widely believed in 1878 that the yellow fever epidemic could be traced to the steamer Emily B. Souder, which sparked a number of cases in New Orleans. For a physical description of the Emily B. Souder, its history and to learn its fate, I looked up American Lloyd’s Register of American and Foreign Shipping (1865) and the Record of American and Foreign Shipping (1871)—originals of both documents have been scanned and are available on-line. During that time period, news of a ship’s landing and departure was also printed in the newspaper. As the Souder sailed out of New York, I found references to the ship in the New York Times and ultimately found the most fateful one: the Souder sank in December 1878.
For my account of the Souder’s trip to New Orleans, the deaths of John Clark and Thomas Elliott and the autopsies, I relied on two primary sources: “History of the Importation of Yellow Fever into the United States, 1693-1878,” presented by Dr. Samuel Choppin at the meeting of the American Public Health Association on November 21, 1878, and the “Report upon Yellow Fever in Louisiana in 1878,” by Dr. S. M. Bemiss in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal (1883). Information about the John D. Porter was also taken from Bemiss’s report and J. M. Keating’s account of the epidemic.
I found corroborating information from additional sources: Khaled Bloom’s The Mississippi Valley’s Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878, J. H. Ellis’s Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South and Jo Ann Carrigan’s The Saffron Scourge. It was in Choppin’s own report to the American Public Health Association that I found his statement about Thomas Elliot’s death: “These are all the usual appearances observed in the examination of a person dead of yellow fever, and we had no doubt that the man had been the subject of this disease.” Prior to that, Choppin had claimed that he had no idea the crewmembers of the Souder had yellow fever; he also denied that the subsequent yellow fever outbreak had anything to do with the Souder’s May arrival. Using Choppin’s own paper and details from the minutes of the Memphis Board of Health, held in the Memphis History Collection of the Memphis Library, I pieced together the timeline in which Choppin and New Orleans officials were first aware of yellow fever cases and when Memphis was officially notified two months later.
My account of the Aedes aegypti mosquito and its behavior was based on Spielman and D’Antonio’s Mosquito, Jerome Goddard’s Physician’s Guide to Arthropods of Medical Importance and Carlos Finlay’s studies of the mosquito.
Information about the prevalence of yellow fever in Cuba came from Henry Rose Carter’s book, and statistics about the marked virulence of the 1878 epidemic can be found in Jo Ann Carrigan’s book, as well as Humphreys’s and Bloom’s.
The Doctors
To construct what downtown Memphis would have felt like in 1878, I relied on a book written by the Reverend D. A. Quinn, Heroes and Heroines of Memphis or Reminiscences of the Yellow Fever Epidemics. The book, published in 1883, is part of the Yellow Fever Collection at the Memphis Library. In it, I found detailed descriptions of Court Square, the flowers blooming there, women pushing baby carriages, bootblacks, the milkman’s morning cry “Wide Awake!” and the newsboys shouting headlines.
For descriptions of the weather—namely the drought and heat—I used newspaper clippings from 1878 and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Weather Bureau, Memphis Station Records in the Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis. Details about the raw sewage and dead animals came from J. M. Keating’s A History of Yellow Fever: The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878. Keating was the editor of a local newspaper and survived the epidemic. A year later, he published the definitive book on the subject.
Information about medicine in the nineteenth century came from a variety of sources: W. F. Bynum’s Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century, Thomas J. Schlereth’s Victorian America and Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine. For more specific information about medical practices in Memphis, I relied on Patricia LaPointe’s book, From Saddlebags to Science. I found references to medications like Tutt’s pills or doctors specializing in “secret diseases” in 1878 newspaper clippings.
For further explanation on the contagionists versus noncontagionists and the local versus exotic origin of yellow fever, see Simon R. Bruesch’s article in the Journal of the Tennessee Medical Association, Margaret Humphreys’s Yellow Fever and the South and Margaret Warner’s “Hunting the Yellow Fever Germ” in the Bulletin of Historical Medicine (1985). Details about the history of quarantines was taken from Keating’s book. Details about the Quarantine Act came from John Ellis’s Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South.
Information about “the war of the doctors” and the activities of the Memphis Board of Health during June, July and August, was found in the minutes recorded at their meetings, which are held in the Memphis History Collection of the Memphis Library. I also followed “the war of the doctors” in the Memphis Ap
peal and in a 1978-79 article in the Journal of the Tennessee Medical Association by Dr. Simon R. Bruesch, whose collection of materials is held at the Health Sciences Historical Collections of the University of Tennessee, Memphis.
For a description of Dr. Robert Wood Mitchell, I looked to the Simon Rulin Bruesch Collection. I based my descriptions of John Erskine on the Erskine file in the Memphis History Room of the Memphis Library, as well as Bruesch’s article.
The quote about privies and the general state of water in Memphis during that time period was taken from Sorrels’s book, held in the Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis.
“Memphis is about the healthiest city on the continent at present” was printed in the Memphis Appeal, June 22, 1878.
“Is it not better to expend a few thousand as a safeguard than lose millions . . . besides the thousands of valued lives that will have passed away” appeared in the Memphis Appeal, July 4, 1878.
The amount of money—$8,000—secured at the July 6 meeting of the Board of Health to clean up the city was reported in the Memphis Appeal, July 6, 1878.
“Should an epidemic reach Memphis . . . those who opposed the establishment of a quarantine will be held responsible” was printed in the Memphis Appeal, July 11, 1878.
Mitchell’s letter of resignation from the Memphis Board of Health appeared in the Appeal, July 11, 1878.
“The yellow fever scare is about over in Memphis” was printed in the Memphis Appeal, July 30, 1878.
The details of Dr. John Erskine boarding the John D. Porter for inspection appeared in the Memphis Appeal, July 30, 1878.
Information about the strange occurrences in July of 1878— the streetlights exploding, the Edison speaking phonograph, the rattlesnake, the cocktails and the eclipse—were all taken from the Memphis Appeal and Avalanche newspapers.
The American Plague Page 26
