The yellow fever epidemic of 1878, in Memphis, Tenn. : Embracing a complete list of the dead, the names of the doctors and nurses employed, names of all who contributed money or means, and the names and history of the Howards, together with other data, and lists of the dead elsewhere / By J.M. Keating.

  • Keating, John McLeod, 1830-1906
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The yellow fever epidemic of 1878, in Memphis, Tenn. : Embracing a complete list of the dead, the names of the doctors and nurses employed, names of all who contributed money or means, and the names and history of the Howards, together with other data, and lists of the dead elsewhere / By J.M. Keating. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    yellow fever is often epidemic, at Mauritius it is u'.ikiiown. The ground is not tenable, therefore, that has been t.iken by some of the most eminent English practitioners in the West Indies, as well as prominent men, in this country, that the yellow fever may be occasioned through the agency of a tropical sun, independent of any other cause. Dr. Bryson, who has studied this question, thinks that yellow fever is not a distinct disease, but only an exaggerated bilious fever, and quotes the celebrated case of the ship Bann, where there was no fever when they left — the first case was nothing but malarial fever. The cases after this assumed the type of yellow fever, which became so bad that they were compelled to abandon the cruise and go to As- cension Island for relief. He also quotes the Leclair case; and he accounts for these cases, that the disease, owing to local cause, changed its type. Dr. Fenner says that, in regard to yellow fever in New Orleans, the fevers there are intermittent, remittent, and continued, alternating in type, and running into each other. In summer and autumn they have a decided tendency to crisis by hemorrhage; this makes yellow fever. Dr. Hanson has observed that often malignant intermittent fevers precede the outbreaks of yellow fever epidemics.* The cause of miasmatic diseases is a specific excitant of disease, known as miasm, which propagates outside of, and is disconnected from, a pre- viously diseased organism. But this disease does not occur, like marsh fevers, at regular periods; it occurs where there is the least malaria; it avoids the country, with its marshes, and seeks the city. In Charleston the people flee to tlie marsh lands in order to avoid the disease. Others contend it is owing to decomposing animal or vegetable matter; in other words, to an unsanitary condition of our large cities. Under such circumstances the disease could be produced at will, but we find that sanitary measures, in the ordinary accepta- tion of the term, have no power to arrest an epidemic wave. Besides these migrations of yellow fever have not occurred when the most unsanitary con- ditions would tempt it. During the whole of the war of the Revolution, and of the late war, when the military and naval operations on our coast, and the communication with the West Indies, were greater than at any other time; when, during the Revolution, large bodies of troops were accumulated in the Antilles and landed in our country direct from there, and every circumstance seemed combined that could generate and propagate disease, still during that time yellow fever was a disease entirely unknown, and unknown at points where it previously and has since prevailed with terrific force. When we state that yellow fever will attack the healthy villages equally with the dirty alleys of cities, the jialace with the hovel, do not understand that a person placed un- der superior hygienic conditions is as liable to receive disease and that he will not recover from it sooner than one otherwise placed. From the earliest cul- tivation of medical science, certain states or conditions of the atmosphere have been recognized as powerfully influencing the production of the cause of disease. Hippocrates and Galen attributed to change in the air, though the This was the cause in Memphis in 1873 and ]878. In the first named year cholera and small-pox also prevailed.