The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [114]
Special thanks to Mark Crosby for his photographic talents. I owe a debt of gratitude to Mark for accompanying me to Cuba in search of forgotten places. The trip would not have been the same without him; the book would not have been the same without him.
I am greatly indebted to my agent, Ellen Geiger, who was willing to take a chance on an unknown author. More than simply believing in me, she persisted until this story found its rightful place. Without her loyalty and energy, this book would never have happened. I am also grateful to my editor, Natalee Rosenstein, for her confidence in me. She took a leap of faith, and I thank her for it.
I will be forever grateful to my husband and two daughters for their own sacrifices during this project. They were patient participants in a lengthy, involved and often-chaotic process. My daughter Morgen, a master of self-expression, reminds me daily of the gift of storytelling. I thank her for giving up some of her mother to this book. Keller, who was born midway through this project and learned to be lulled to sleep by the sound of typing, has been a quieter, but no less effective, source of inspiration and encouragement. Finally, my husband, Andrew, has been unfailing in his support of me since the day we met. I am forever indebted to him for believing in me—as a writer, as a wife, as a mother. Thank you.
Notes
The introductory quote is from John Edgar Wideman’s Fever, part of his collection first published by Henry Holt and Company in 1989.
Prologue: A House Boarded Shut
My account of the Angevine family and their deaths from yellow fever in 1878 is based on two primary sources. One is a letter written by Ray Isbell in 1978 to the Press-Scimitar newspaper. Lena Angevine Warner was the great-great-aunt of Isbell. Isbell recounted family stories of how an old slave investigated the house, breaking open a window, and found the corpses of the Angevine family in their various states of decomposition. The Isbell letter also described how the slave saved Lena, who was a child at the time. Isbell’s letter is part of the Eldon Roark Papers held in the Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis.
The second source is a letter written by Lena A. Warner in 1904. She tells of her father being robbed and choked while she was too ill to help. She also describes her experience as a nurse during the Spanish-American War. The Warner letter is held in the Lena Warner file of the Memphis Library, Memphis Historical Collection.
Biographical information about Lena Angevine Warner was collected from various newspaper sources, including a 1948 obituary from the Associated Press, a 1948 obituary in the Knoxville News Sentinel, a 1953 story in the Memphis Commercial Appeal and a 1994 article by Perre Magness in the Commercial Appeal. Biographical information is also available in Patricia LaPointe’s From Saddlebags to Science, E. Diane Greenhill’s From Diploma to Doctorate: 100 Years of Nursing and Paul Coppock’s Memphis Memoirs.
There were a number of discrepancies in the facts surrounding Lena Angevine Warner, especially involving her marriage and her role in the Walter Reed discoveries. One source wildly claimed that Lena Warner delivered a Cuban baby, passed her own kidney stones and performed a circumcision, a tonsillectomy and an amputation with a kitchen knife—all in one night. In this book, I adhered to the facts presented by Warner, her family or those who worked with her. When a fact could not be verified by another source, I said as much or left the material out of the book.
Part I: The American Plague
To recreate the path yellow fever followed out of Africa and across the Atlantic, I studied the virus’s behavior today. The process by which the mosquitoes lay eggs in the hollows of trees and how the virus was first transmitted from mosquitoes to monkeys to men entering the West African forests for