The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [38]
The findings of these boards have been written into the pages of history in staggering statistics: “Yellow fever should be dealt with as an enemy which imperils life and cripples commerce and industry. To no other great nation of the earth is yellow fever so calamitous as to the United States of America. In a single season more than a hundred thousand of our people were stricken in their homes, and twenty thousand lives sacrificed by this preventable disease.”
The board declared that yellow fever made its first appearance in this hemisphere after the discovery of America by Columbus, and it had appeared in a long list of states: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida and Texas.
Racially, yellow fever decimated members of the white population.While blacks did contract the fever, more so in 1878 than in any other year, the number of deaths was drastically different based on skin color. During the 1878 epidemic in Memphis, the mortality among whites was 70 percent and among blacks 8 percent. In actual numbers, out of 14,000 blacks, 946 died; among 6,000 whites, over 4,000 perished. White Irish immigrants in particular suffered the most. Another unusual aspect of the 1878 epidemic surfaced in New Orleans. In the past, yellow fever had been kinder to children than to adults, often leading to a mild case and a lifelong immunity. That year, New Orleans statistics showed that nearly two-thirds of the deaths were children, the great majority under the age of five.
Most likely, the slave trade had provided a small measure of genetic immunity against the disease for blacks. Living in the South and surviving childhood bouts with the fever also offered immunity. Many of their encounters with yellow fever whether on plantations, in rural areas or in the poor sections of cities most likely went unreported. Whatever the cause of immunity, it had been fuel for racism for decades. White slave owners had argued for keeping slaves as a labor force since they seldom fell to the fevers that so plagued whites in the South.
In the months that followed the Board of Expert’s presentation, the argument over public health escalated, and distinct lines were drawn between the two public health giants, the North and the South and theories of how yellow fever spread. Every issue, on all sides, seemed driven by self-interest.
John Shaw Billings, with the U.S. Army Medical Corps, wanted control of the national board, so his American Public Health Association argued that yellow fever was a matter of sanitation, which of course, fell under their jurisdiction. Northern politicians who did not want to see quarantines impede commerce aligned themselves with Billings. If yellow fever was a sanitary matter, why would quarantines be necessary?
On the other side, John Woodworth, surgeon general of the Marine Hospital Service, also vied for control. He wanted strong quarantine powers, which would be controlled by his Marine Hospital Service. It was not the first time, and it would not be the last, that the Army Medical Corps and the Marine Hospital Service found themselves on opposing sides of a yellow fever argument.
The only ones making an honest case in this mire of politics, public insults and self-interest seemed to be the South. They just wanted the yellow fever epidemics to stop, and most southern health officials believed that Woodworth’s strong, federal quarantine—whatever the cost to commerce—was the way to do that. Memphis’s Casey Young who survived his case of yellow fever that fall argued that he “had fought for four years in trying to make the states greater than the Federal Government, and that effort had cost millions of lives, and this effort made . . . to establish the superiority of the state, if it resulted