The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [119]
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