The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [115]
Scientists generally agree that yellow fever originated in West Africa in any number of countries—where it still exists today in its purest genetic form. I chose to focus on Nigeria because that country is currently considered the hotbed of yellow fever. Descriptions of Nigeria, its plant life, topography, trade and weather, including the southwest monsoon, are based on a series of country studies published by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress and are available on-line or in hard copy.
I based my description of viruses in general, as well as the specifics of the yellow fever virus, on the book Epidemic!, which was edited by Rob De Salle and published for the American Museum of Natural History. I also relied on virus descriptions from John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza and Gina Kolata’s Flu. Both books do an excellent job of taking a complex subject and presenting it in comprehensible terms. For the specifics of the yellow fever virus, I studied information provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. For descriptions of the way the yellow fever virus reacts to a human cell, I relied on material from the National Institutes of Health. All of the technical information aside, personification of the virus—the idea that the virus itself is evolving, thinking, trying to conquer—is obviously a creative technique of my own making. There is no scientific evidence to suggest such.
For information about the slave trade—the Middle Passage— I based my descriptions on Madeleine Burnside and Rosemarie Robotham’s book Spirits of the Passage. Their book not only provides general statistics about the trade but also illustrations and firsthand accounts that include some of the more disturbing details like the fact that Europeans might taste the sweat of slaves as a test for disease or that sharks trailed slave ships waiting for bodies to be thrown overboard.
The idea that yellow fever altered the history of the United States is not a new idea; after all, the virus’s moniker “the American plague” says it all. Margaret Humphreys, in her book Yellow Fever and the South, writes, “Tuberculosis, smallpox, or typhoid might well kill as many or more every year yet fail to stir the public from apathy . . . Yellow fever was a disease whose presence often created mass panic, a response that brought commercial interactions to a standstill.” To support my argument that it shaped our country’s history, I compiled statistics from a wealth of sources.
Basic statistics about the number of countries and states stricken with yellow fever, as well as the number of people afflicted, were taken from the Conclusions of the Board of Experts authorized by congress to investigate the yellow fever epidemic of 1878. The report was written in 1879 and is available in the Rare Book Collection of the Library of Congress. The report also estimates the cost of the 1878 epidemic as $200 million, which today would be calculated as over $350 million. The reason why yellow fever has never afflicted Asia despite the right climate and the right mosquito is a mystery. Robert S. Desowitz, a professor of tropical medicine and author of Who Gave Pinta to the Santa Maria, suggests that it may be due to the fact that the African slave trade never extended to that part of the world.
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