The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [37]
After weeks of investigation, no new medical information was available, and the country was no closer to solving the yellow fever mystery. Instead, the entire issue had been overshadowed by partisan politics and backbiting. Only one resolution seemed to please everyone, and that was the formation of a legislative committee, a joint committee represented by both the Senate and the House, to investigate the epidemic further. The Board of Experts would be led by Surgeon General John M. Woodworth, head of the Marine Hospital Service. Fifteen doctors were appointed to the board. Several came from New Orleans and other cities in the South, but also from New York, Philadelphia, Albany and Cincinnati. This was a disease, after all, that had at one time or another affected the whole of the country. Only one doctor had been chosen from Memphis, Tennessee: Dr. Robert Wood Mitchell.
Dear Sir:
I am authorized by the Committees of the Senate and House of Representatives on Epidemic Diseases to advise you that you have been elected a member of the Yellow Fever Commission of Experts, with compensation at the rate of “ten dollars per day and actual expenses while on duty.”
You are respectfully requested to attend a meeting of the Commission to be held in the city of Memphis, Tennessee, on Thursday morning the 26th instant.
Very respectfully,
John M. Woodworth
Washington City, Dec. 19th, 1878
It was December when Mitchell received his telegram, and he was undoubtedly aware of the quarantine debate in Washington, though in Memphis, politics seemed inconsequential to the shell-shocked city. With the dead buried barely a foot beneath the surface, the town still felt like a crypt. Families returned to find homes ransacked, city blocks burned and loved ones buried in the mass graves pockmarking the cemeteries. It seemed the smell of death would never leave Memphis.
Mitchell found little comfort in knowing that he had been right, that an early and efficient quarantine might have prevented over 5,000 deaths. His own Board of Health in Memphis, the one from which he resigned, had been hit severely. Two of its members had been stricken with fever, including the mayor, another board member buried his son, and Dr. John Erskine, Mitchell’s nemesis in the struggle, had himself perished of yellow fever. As an army surgeon, Mitchell was precise and objective; he applied his skill to repairing tattered bodies. As the leading obstetrician in Memphis, his work had turned toward delivering new lives. Mitchell’s experiences had done nothing to prepare him to watch, unable to help, as so many of the children he delivered, in addition to women and men, friends and colleagues, died.
The first proceedings of the Board of Experts would take place in December 1878, in Memphis, Tennessee. It was a pitifully appropriate setting. The board met on the day after Christmas at the Peabody Hotel at 3:00 p.m. and was there past 7:00 that night. It was resolved that board members would visit the towns most severely hit during the 1878 epidemic, collect blood and tissue samples, investigate weather phenomena and conduct a chemical analysis of the air. Just the idea of testing the air demonstrated the pervasive fear of this disease. In the minds of nineteenth-century scientists, it was as though some unknown, unseen entity traveled through air, climbing, claws extended, into a healthy human to leave a corpse behind.
Mitchell served on the committee to interrogate local doctors and specific cases, as well as quarantine measures. His committee would also keep accurate record of the number of yellow fever cases in 1878, dividing them among whites,