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
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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![of the town covered with a rank growth of matured weeds, which were falling down and rotting rapidly under the influence of repeated rains and a high temperature; numbers of carcasses of dead hogs and dogs were found decaying in various parts of the town; privies were unpoliced; and, to aggra- vate this multitude of evils, a city government that, whenever it was addressed upon the subject of a sanitary police, insisted upon establishing quarantine against some 2)lace that it imagined had yellow fever. And, as if intent to precipitate us into an epidemic, at this juncture this government passed an ordinance requiring the hogs, our only scavengers, to be removed from the streets, thus leaving the offal from our kitchens to add its noisome effluvia to the mass already on hand. The result is not difficult to imagine. While the city government continued from time to time to adopt quarantine ordinances, the health of the town grew gradually worse, the number of cases increased, and the attacks were more A'iolent, frequently terminating on the seventh or ninth day. By the 7th of October every member of the faculty was busy, and, by the 18th, yellow fever was announced, and the usual de- moralization of the whole population set in. Calvert was prepared for the yellow fever in 1873 by the prevalence, during July and August, of malarial fever of an obstinate and unyielding character. While in this condition a young man named Hughes arrived from Shreveport, who was taken down with the yellow fever a few nights after his arrival, and in a few days died. Dr. Coleman, who attended him, made an attempt to have his bedding burned and the room fumigated, but the bedding, instead of being burned, was thrown upon the roof of a little house almost at the foot of Main Street, and left there three weeks in the sun. The prevailing wind blowing u]) the street, the whole town soon became impregnated with the poison. Dr. McCraven insists that the yellow fever which prevailed epidemically in Houston in 1848 originated there; that the city was badly drained and filthy, and there was not much rain during the latter part of summer, making it remarkably dry. He be- lieves that no one had a second attack, as did Dr. Stone, of New Orleans; and he believes that animal filth is the food of the yellow fever, and that it will not spread in a clean city. Dr. Bennett Dowler declares that, from 1796 to 1853, it is almost certain that several cases of yellow fever have occurred every year in New Orleans, often only four or five. Baron de Ca- rondelet, in 1801, recommended that the stagnant waters of the city be drained into Canal Carondelet: he regarded them the cause of much mortality from fatal fevers, amoifg which he included yellow fever. Dr. Cartright and Dr. Merrill (lately of Memphis) state that, in their opinion, the epidemic of 1823 originated in Natchez, and was not imported. In 1853, according to Dowler, the heavy frosts at the close of October and beginning of No- vember did not appear to have any marked influence upon the epidemic. He also says that about the 25th of October—and until frost apjjcared for a few nights at many of the interior towns of Louisiana, but which did not in a marked degree arrest the march of the epidemic—warm weather, how- ever, soon returned, but this did not revive the epidemic in places where it had declined,—as in New Orleans and many other places, where the return](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21354017_0048.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
