The American Plague

Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Epigraph PART ONE - The American Plague PART TWO - Memphis, 1878 CHAPTER 1 - Carnival CHAPTER 2 - Bright Canary Yellow CHAPTER 3 - The Doctors CHAPTER 4 - A City of Corpses CHAPTER 5 - The Destroying Angel CHAPTER 6 - Greatly Exaggerated CHAPTER 7 - The Havana Commission CHAPTER 8 - Reparations PART THREE - Cuba, 1900 CHAPTER 9 - A Splendid Little War CHAPTER 10 - Siboney CHAPTER 11 - An Unlikely Hero CHAPTER 12 - A Meeting of Minds CHAPTER 13 - The Yellow Fever Commission CHAPTER 14 - Insects CHAPTER 15 - Vivisection CHAPTER 16 - Did the Mosquito Do It? CHAPTER 17 - Guinea Pig No. 1 CHAPTER 18 - Camp Lazear CHAPTER 19 - A New Century CHAPTER 20 - Blood CHAPTER 21 - The Etiology of Yellow Fever CHAPTER 22 - Retribution CHAPTER 23 - The Mosquito PART FOUR - United States, Present Day CHAPTER 24 - Epidemic CHAPTER 25 - A Return to Africa CHAPTER 26 - The Vaccine CHAPTER 27 - History Repeats Itself EPILOGUE Acknowledgements Notes Selected Bibliography “Engrossing . Crosby, a journalist, profiles the outbreak as it rips through Memphis, the city hardest hit. A first-rate medical detective drama . It is good to be reminded of the occasional nobility of the human spirit.” —The New York Times Book Review “A fascinating book about yellow fever, its unspeakable horrors and the uncommon valor that four doctors displayed in their quest to solve a devastating medical mystery.” —The Tennessean “A forceful narrative of a disease’s ravages and the quest to find its cause and cure. Crosby is particularly good at evoking the horrific conditions in Memphis, ‘a city of corpses’ and . also relates arresting tales of heroism.” —Publishers Weekly “Seamlessly blends history and science to tell us how yellow fever haunted the nation—and why, if we’re not extremely vigilant, it will haunt us again.” —Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder “Masterful . Crosby uses rich detail and a stunning cast of characters to bring to vivid life the devastating yellow fever epidemic of 1878.” —Candice Millard, author of The River of Doubt “Meticulous research and adroit storytelling . After a few chapters of The American Plague, I had to take an aspirin and lie down—and that is a tribute to the power of Molly Crosby’s memorable evocation of a terrible time.” —Robert M. Poole, author of Explorers House Most Berkley Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write: Special Markets, The Berkley Publishing Group, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Copyright © 2006 by Molly Caldwell Crosby All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc. PRINTING HISTORY Berkley hardcover edition: November 2006 Berkley trade paperback edition: September 2007 Berkley trade paperback ISBN: 978-0-425-21775-7 The Library of Congress has catalogued the Berkley hardcover edition as follows: Crosby, Molly Caldwell. The American plague : the untold story of yellow fever, the epidemic that shaped our history / Molly Caldwell Crosby. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN : 978-1-4406-2046-1 1. Yellow fever—History. 2. Yellow fever—Tennessee—Memphis—History. I. Title. RC211.T3C76 2006 614.5’41—dc22 2006050497 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 http://us.penguingroup.com Author’s Note This is a work of nonfiction: Any italicized or quoted statements are taken directly from letters, diaries, articles, books, or actual dialogue. The greatest challenge in writing this book was that the people involved, though truly heroic, were not famous. Even Walter Reed, best known of all the principal characters, has only a handful of biographies to his name, most of which are out of print. To write this story, I relied heavily on personal letters and diaries for character development; the rest was filled in with historical information from the time period and newspaper clippings. In Memphis, I pored through old photographs, newspapers and family papers to re-create the city in 1878. I visited numerous libraries for historical collections pertaining to this story, including the New York Academy of Medicine, which now houses Jesse Lazear’s original logbook—it was lost for fifty years before someone found it in a trash can and retrieved it. And I traveled to Havana, Cuba, to visit and photograph the original site of Walter Reed’s yellow fever experiments. I am greatly indebted to Philip S. Hench, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, whose personal hobby was acquiring and interpreting massive amounts of information on Walter Reed and his Yellow Fever Commission for a book. Hench died before he was able to write that book, and his collection is now held at the University of Virginia; mine is but one of many other books that have sprouted from his years of research and insight. The scope of this disease and its effect on this country is vast. It was a plague intrinsically tied to the worst and best in humanity, brought on by the mistreatment of others and conquered only by self less sacrifice. In this book, I hoped to give a poignant portrayal of yellow fever by narrowing the focus to one town, a Southern city that would rise from the ashes, and a handful of doctors, one of whom would rise in the ranks of our country’s history. Yet their stories are the stories of dozens of other places and thousands of other people. Nothing is an accident. Fever grows in the secret places of our hearts, planted there when one of us decided to sell one of us to another. —JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN,Fever PROLOGUE A House Boarded Shut The flies had been swarming around the house for days. As he walked the exterior, he tried to peer into the boarded windows where flies crawled through starbursts of broken glass. Shielding his eyes with cupped hands, he could not see anything through the black splinters of darkness but a gray, dim light. He had no name, at least not one that survived in the family records; he was an old slave who continued to live with the Angevine family as a servant long after he had been legally freed. The family owned a 4,000-acre farm outside of Grenada, Mississippi, where Mrs. Angevine had been born and raised before marrying a New York attorney and moving to Memphis. A graduate of Harvard Law, Mr. Angevine worked in the Memphis offices of Harris, McKissick and Turley. When the Civil War broke out, he fought for the South against his brothers fighting for the North. The family left Memphis and boarded themselves inside of the plantation house when the 1878 yellow fever epidemic struck. The measure may have seemed drastic to others, but Mr. Angevine understood the toll of yellow fever better than most; his wife had died of the fever the previous summer. As far as the servant could see, the front door was locked, and the flies seemed to have the only access to the house. He pried open the shutters and broke the glass, letting loose a plume of repugnant air. In the stale, dark rooms he saw the corpses of the Angevine family, many in advanced stages of decomposition. Even in the darkness, he could see their yellow skin, the color of unpolished brass. Mary Louisa, the eldest, had been the first to go, and five others had followed. Mr. Angevine lay dead among his children. No one can really imagine those final days in the fever-ridden house. The fever attacked each person in the Angevine family, one after the other, until none were well enough to help the others. It hit suddenly in the form of a piercing headache and painful sensitivity to light, like looking into a white sun. At that point, the patient could still hope that it was not yellow fever, maybe just a headache from the heat. But the pain worsened, crippling movement and burning the skin. The fever rose to 104, maybe 105 degrees, and bones felt as though they had been cracked.

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