“Fever Season”: Revelations of a plague year

From Salon-

“The panic is fearful today,” wrote an Episcopal nun from Memphis, Tenn., in the summer of 1878. “Eighty deaths reported and half the doctors refuse to report at all. We found one of our nurses lying on the floor in her patient’s room down with the fever, another is sickening. I really believe that Dr. Harris and I and the two negro nurses are the only well persons anywhere near here.”

With more than half the city’s population fled and most of those remaining stricken by the virus known as Yellow Jack, Bronze John and “the Stranger’s Disease” — yellow fever — Memphis resembled a post-apocalyptic landscape to rival that in any zombie film. At the peak of the epidemic, corpses lay in the streets as overburdened work crews struggled to convey them to mass graves. Looters rampaged through the posher homes in the only major urban center between St. Louis and New Orleans, guzzling their victims’ liquor and collapsing with the fever at the scene of their crimes. At one point, a single man remained of the staff at the Western Union telegraph office, which was the sole, fragile information conduit between the quarantined city and an outside world looking on in horror and pity.

As Jeanette Keith describes it in her new history of the 1878 plague, “Fever Season: The Story of a Terrifying Epidemic and the People Who Saved a City,” yellow fever’s grisly reign over Memphis that summer forged the city’s identity for generations to come. It was a saga that capsized conventional 19th-century American views of heroism. All but one of the city’s white Protestant ministers left the city.

More here-

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/07/fever_season_revelations_of_a_plague_year/singleton/