The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our Nation by Molly Caldwell Crosby Read Free Book Online Page A

inches of water, while the walls wept polluted mud. The Nicholson paving continued to decay, and the city’s water, though routed through the pumping station, came from the Wolf River. Even milk, under no inspection, was diluted with river water, and it was reported that one person found a minnow in his milk jug. The biggest problem was that of raw sewage and privies. Like all other densely populated cities, there was no effective way to remove waste. Citizens in downtown Memphis carted and dumped their privies into the river, and over half of the city’s privies were located fifty feet or less from drinking wells. One authority would call privies the “most annoying problem connected with urbanization.”
    Nonetheless, as yellow fever season loomed, one newspaper column read, “Memphis is about the healthiest city on the continent at present,” and another bragged, “We need not fear in Memphis. We were never in as good a condition from a sanitary point of view . . . Nothing in our atmosphere invites that dread disease.” In the greater scheme of things, from political neglect to public apathy, the city of Memphis was due a tragedy, though no one seemed ready to acknowledge it.
     
 
The war on disease was a two-front campaign. Despite all their efforts, the Board of Health had failed in their campaign to clean the filthy city. They turned now to the issue of quarantine.
    Quarantine had been a regular measure for preventing disease as early as the biblical lepers, but it was most widely used beginningwith the bubonic plague in fourteenth-century Venice. Ships were forced to spend weeks anchored outside of a city until the crew showed no signs of disease among them. Vessels and their cargo were initially intended to spend thirty days— trentina —in the harbor, but that later changed to forty days— quarantina. Quarantines continued to rule maritime travel well into the nineteenth century, finding even greater cause with the trafficking of human cargo. European ships often spent weeks moored off the coast of Africa before crossing the Atlantic. Fever was so prevalent among the crews that one island, São Tomé, was known as the Dutchman’s graveyard. And the tale of the Flying Dutchman is thought to be the story of a yellow-fever-infected ship repeatedly denied port until all on board perished of the fever, and the ship was forced to sail endlessly, manned by a ghost crew, delivering detriment to other seafaring vessels.
    Quarantines were not limited to maritime trade, however. In America, trains and paddleboats could also be quarantined to prevent smallpox, plague and fevers. Even returning soldiers were quarantined in camps. And once a city was known to harbor infectious disease, the town itself could become quarantined from the rest of the nation. Fleeing citizens were denied entry into healthy cities. Even Alexander Hamilton came down with yellow fever and was refused entry into New York City. He found refuge in the country until he recovered.
    By the mid-nineteenth century, merchants and businessmen were becoming frustrated by the practice of quarantine, which proved more effective in preventing the delivery of goods than disease. Port towns in particular had become lax in their quarantine measures, yielding to commerce. On April 29, 1878, Congress had finally passed the Quarantine Act granting the Marine Hospital Service quarantine rights along port cities. If local governments could not be depended upon to enforce quarantine, the military could. The law, however, was a weak one and would take several months to go into effect. For the Mississippi Valley and beyond, the delay would prove to be disastrous.
     
 
In what would become known as the “war of the doctors,” the leading medical minds in Memphis debated quarantine. Dr. Robert Wood Mitchell was forty-seven years old, his white goatee brushing against a stiff, detachable collar and black bowtie. Mitchell had served as a division surgeon in the