The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History |...

The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History | Molly Caldwell Crosby | Walter Reed: American Hero

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The American Plagu...

	The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History Molly Caldwell Crosby Berkley Hardcover, 2006 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 27 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

yellow fever book review

Thhis is an excellent book on the Historyof Yellow Fever. I recommendit to anyone interested in the History of Medicine and Diseases.

Walter Reed: American Hero

Yellow fever, the West African slave trade's gift to the New World, rips through vulnerable populations like a hot knife through butter. In 1801, Napoleon brought 25,000 troops to put down a Haitian slave revolt; 23,000 died from the fever. (That's why he was in such a rush to ditch the Louisiana Territory, and Jefferson knew a bargain when he saw one.) In 1878, the mosquito-borne virus arrived in Memphis TN, and people started dropping like flies. Molly Caldwell Crosby does a great job describing the city's atmosphere before the fever and its descent into hell as Yellow Jack claims more and more victims.

There were heroic efforts by caregivers who didn't understand the disease but who nonetheless tended to the dead and dying. Crosby describes doctors, and nuns, who knew they'd eventually catch the fever but who worked as hard as they could, for as long as they could, to comfort the sick. Inspiring and scary! Yellow fever isn't the kind of fever that lets you lapse into delirium after a day of discomfort. It's a hemorrhagic fever, which means you bleed from body parts you didn't even know you had. The Brits called it "Black Vomit" because internal bleeding causes the sufferer to vomit blood.

Crosby then focuses on the ultimately successful efforts of Walter Reed and company, military doctors who set up camp in Cuba and doggedly pursued the cause of the disease. Some of these men deliberately infected themselves with the virus in order to prove that mosquito exposure was to blame, and that mosquito control would rein in the disease. Because of Reed and his team, and at least in the Western Hemisphere, we have managed to subdue the Fever.

Reed's campaign goes to show that the many of the greatest military victories occur not on the battlefield but in hospitals.

This is a well-written and interesting book, although I wish some of the chapters went into a bit more detail. Yellow fever isn't quite gone; in some parts of the world, it's still doing its dirty work. To understand this battle-hardened public enemy, read this book.

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Guinea Pig #1

The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever
Þ By Molly Caldwell Crosby

This book starts as the history of a disease, but ends up being a book about people. Yellow Fever, carried by mosquitoes which entered the Western Hemisphere from ships carrying slaves, struck the city of Memphis with a vengeance in the late 19th century. The 1878 yellow fever epidemic cost 20,000 lives and $200 million in economic damages. The toll on human life in Memphis alone surpassed the Chicago fire, San Francisco earthquake, and Johnstown Flood combined.."

Ironically, the disease claimed more white victims than blacks, and more children than adults. Perhaps blacks developed some immunity to yellow fever. At any rate, the Federal government's response to the Memphis epidemic, much like FEMA's lame response to Katrina, was riddled with racism and politics.

President Rutherford B. Hayes will likely not be remembered for much¡K he was an ineffectual leader at best. But his administration did accomplish the creation of a National Board of Health, later to become the US Public Health Service. But it would take years¡Kand the efforts of courageous doctors like Walter Reed and Dr. Jesse Lazear, who infected himself with the virus and died a martyr to science, to isolate the cause and propose controls for the contagion. Along the way, the Spanish American War and the Caribbean, particularly Cuba, would be central to the story.

Molly Caldwell Crosby has done an excellent job with original sources including previously untapped journals and letters to tell this remarkable tale. Like other accounts of Influenza by John Barry (The Great Influenza) and the Black Death by John Kelly (The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death), her book belongs in any library of medical history.

****

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6

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