The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our Nation (34 page)

For an accurate account of the weather on those two days, as well as for the remainder of 1878, I read the
U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Weather Bureau from the Memphis Station Records.
I would refer to that source again and again to determine if it rained, what the clouds looked like, if a light frost fell or what the temperature might be on a given day. The weather bureau reports are held at the University of Memphis as part of the Mississippi Valley Collection.

For information about Colton Greene and the Mystic Memphi, I again went to files held in the Memphis History Collection of the Memphis Library. In those files, I found biographical information—including a description of Greene looking like Stalin—and the small details that give personality to Greene—the card allowing him admittance to the Vatican and a copy of Greene’s Last Will and Testament. Likewise, I learned about the Mystic Memphi from those files, including a 1933 newspaper interview in which J. M. Semmes reminisced about the secret society that answered to the letters UEUQ.

I based my summary and description of Memphis history on three very good books written by Memphis historians: Gerald M. Capers’s
The Biography of a River Town, Memphis: Its Heroic Age
; Paul Coppock’s
Memphis Memoirs
; and Charles Crawford’s
Yesterday’s Memphis.
I also included material from Carole Ornelas-Struve and Joan Hassel’s
Memphis, 1800-1900, Volume III: Years of Courage
and William Sorrels’s
Memphis’ Greatest Debate; a Question of Water.
The quote about Memphis refusing to take the trouble to distinguish between prosperity and progress came from Sorrels’s book. A few of the specifics—like the fact that Memphis had 115 saloonkeepers—came from newspaper reports at the time.

Information about Charles C. Parsons is held in boxes as part of the Yellow Fever Collection of the Memphis Library. The boxes include letters that he wrote to his wife, as well as general opinions of Parsons. A fellow classmate from West Point described the sort of fanaticism evident on Parsons’s face. Men who served with him during the Civil War described his courage at the Battle of Perryville. There is even a letter from Jefferson Davis to Parsons. I found the sermon Parsons gave on the eve of the 1878 Mardi Gras in a scrapbook that belonged to George C. Harris, whose papers are also held in the Yellow Fever Collection at the Memphis Library. The sermon had been printed in the
Ledger
newspaper in February 1878, and Harris kept it for his scrapbook. Although I only included part of it, the full sermon can be found in the Harris papers.

Very few photos from that decade exist. In order to create a visual sense of downtown Memphis from a visitor’s point of view, I studied an 1870 map of Memphis drawn by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Commerce. The original map is held at the Library of Congress, though copies are in wide circulation. The Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis has vignettes of the Victorian houses along Adams Street—an area now known as Victorian Village—in the Eldon Roark Papers. I also studied architectural drawings of Memphis buildings. I was surprised to find that in addition to the wooden and brick buildings one would expect, Memphis had several grand structures designed by prominent architects. The columns of the Gayoso Hotel, the building-in-progress of the Customs House, the glass-covered Water Works, and an elaborate prison, among others, would offer a stunning view from the river. None of those buildings exist in Memphis today—only the gates of the prison are still standing near the entrance of Mud Island.

I relied on descriptions of the Greenlaw Opera House and the Exposition Building from articles in the West Tennessee Historical Society Papers, an excellent resource for details and specifics about any number of subjects relating to Memphis history.

Other sources consulted for descriptions of Memphis, photographs or illustrations were Robert A. Sigafoos’s
Cotton Row to Beale Street,
Beverly G. Bond and Janann Sherman’s
Memphis in Black and White,
Robert W. Dye’s
Images of America: Shelby County
and Ginny Parfitt’s
Memories of Memphis: A History of Postcards.

It was widely believed in 1878 that the yellow fever epidemic could be traced to the steamer
Emily B. Souder,
which sparked a number of cases in New Orleans. For a physical description of the
Emily B. Souder,
its history and to learn its fate, I looked up
American Lloyd’s Register of American and Foreign Shipping
(1865) and the
Record of American and Foreign Shipping
(1871)—originals of both documents have been scanned and are available on-line. During that time period, news of a ship’s landing and departure was also printed in the newspaper. As the
Souder
sailed out of New York, I found references to the ship in the
New York Times
and ultimately found the most fateful one: the
Souder
sank in December 1878.

For my account of the
Souder
’s trip to New Orleans, the deaths of John Clark and Thomas Elliott and the autopsies, I relied on two primary sources: “History of the Importation of Yellow Fever into the United States, 1693-1878,” presented by Dr. Samuel Choppin at the meeting of the American Public Health Association on November 21, 1878, and the “Report upon Yellow Fever in Louisiana in 1878,” by Dr. S. M. Bemiss in the
New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal
(1883). Information about the
John D. Porter
was also taken from Bemiss’s report and J. M. Keating’s account of the epidemic.

I found corroborating information from additional sources: Khaled Bloom’s
The Mississippi Valley’s Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878,
J. H. Ellis’s
Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South
and Jo Ann Carrigan’s
The Saffron Scourge.
It was in Choppin’s own report to the American Public Health Association that I found his statement about Thomas Elliot’s death: “These are all the usual appearances observed in the examination of a person dead of yellow fever, and we had no doubt that the man had been the subject of this disease.” Prior to that, Choppin had claimed that he had no idea the crewmembers of the
Souder
had yellow fever; he also denied that the subsequent yellow fever outbreak had anything to do with the
Souder
’s May arrival. Using Choppin’s own paper and details from the minutes of the Memphis Board of Health, held in the Memphis History Collection of the Memphis Library, I pieced together the timeline in which Choppin and New Orleans officials were first aware of yellow fever cases and when Memphis was officially notified two months later.

My account of the
Aedes aegypti
mosquito and its behavior was based on Spielman and D’Antonio’s
Mosquito
, Jerome Goddard’s
Physician’s Guide to Arthropods of Medical Importance
and Carlos Finlay’s studies of the mosquito.

Information about the prevalence of yellow fever in Cuba came from Henry Rose Carter’s book, and statistics about the marked virulence of the 1878 epidemic can be found in Jo Ann Carrigan’s book, as well as Humphreys’s and Bloom’s.

To construct what downtown Memphis would have felt like in 1878, I relied on a book written by the Reverend D. A. Quinn,
Heroes and Heroines of Memphis or Reminiscences of the Yellow Fever Epidemics.
The book, published in 1883, is part of the Yellow Fever Collection at the Memphis Library. In it, I found detailed descriptions of Court Square, the flowers blooming there, women pushing baby carriages, bootblacks, the milkman’s morning cry “Wide Awake!” and the newsboys shouting headlines.

For descriptions of the weather—namely the drought and heat—I used newspaper clippings from 1878 and the
U.S. Department of Agriculture Weather Bureau, Memphis Station Records
in the Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis. Details about the raw sewage and dead animals came from J. M. Keating’s
A History of Yellow Fever: The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878.
Keating was the editor of a local newspaper and survived the epidemic. A year later, he published the definitive book on the subject.

Information about medicine in the nineteenth century came from a variety of sources: W. F. Bynum’s
Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century,
Thomas J. Schlereth’s
Victorian America
and Paul Starr’s
The Social Transformation of American Medicine.
For more specific information about medical practices in Memphis, I relied on Patricia LaPointe’s book,
From Saddlebags to Science.
I found references to medications like Tutt’s pills or doctors specializing in “secret diseases” in 1878 newspaper clippings.

For further explanation on the contagionists versus noncontagionists and the local versus exotic origin of yellow fever, see Simon R. Bruesch’s article in the
Journal of the Tennessee Medical Association,
Margaret Humphreys’s
Yellow Fever and the South
and Margaret Warner’s “Hunting the Yellow Fever Germ” in the
Bulletin of Historical Medicine
(1985). Details about the history of quarantines was taken from Keating’s book. Details about the Quarantine Act came from John Ellis’s
Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South.

Information about “the war of the doctors” and the activities of the Memphis Board of Health during June, July and August, was found in the minutes recorded at their meetings, which are held in the Memphis History Collection of the Memphis Library. I also followed “the war of the doctors” in the Memphis
Appeal
and in a 1978-79 article in the
Journal of the Tennessee Medical Association
by Dr. Simon R. Bruesch, whose collection of materials is held at the Health Sciences Historical Collections of the University of Tennessee, Memphis.

For a description of Dr. Robert Wood Mitchell, I looked to the Simon Rulin Bruesch Collection. I based my descriptions of John Erskine on the Erskine file in the Memphis History Room of the Memphis Library, as well as Bruesch’s article.

The quote about privies and the general state of water in Memphis during that time period was taken from Sorrels’s book, held in the Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis.

“Memphis is about the healthiest city on the continent at present” was printed in the Memphis
Appeal,
June 22, 1878.

“Is it not better to expend a few thousand as a safeguard than lose millions . . . besides the thousands of valued lives that will have passed away” appeared in the Memphis
Appeal,
July 4, 1878.

The amount of money—$8,000—secured at the July 6 meeting of the Board of Health to clean up the city was reported in the Memphis
Appeal,
July 6, 1878.

“Should an epidemic reach Memphis . . . those who opposed the establishment of a quarantine will be held responsible” was printed in the Memphis
Appeal,
July 11, 1878.

Mitchell’s letter of resignation from the Memphis Board of Health appeared in the
Appeal,
July 11, 1878.

“The yellow fever scare is about over in Memphis” was printed in the Memphis
Appeal,
July 30, 1878.

The details of Dr. John Erskine boarding the
John D. Porter
for inspection appeared in the Memphis
Appeal,
July 30, 1878.

Information about the strange occurrences in July of 1878— the streetlights exploding, the Edison speaking phonograph, the rattlesnake, the cocktails and the eclipse—were all taken from the Memphis
Appeal
and
Avalanche
newspapers.

The description of the constellation Ophiuchus was based on information in
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Imhotep, the man on whom the constellation is based, was called by Sir William Osler “the first figure of a physician to stand out clearly from the mists of antiquity.” It is said that the medical sign of two serpents coiled around a staff is based on Imhotep.

The timeline of the first yellow fever cases and the description of the mass exodus out of Memphis were taken from Keating’s book. Additional information about William Warren was found in 1878 copies of the newspapers. Descriptions of the Pinch District were taken from files by the same name held in the Mississippi Valley Collection of the University of Memphis and the Memphis Historical Collection at the Library of Memphis. And specifics about Bionda’s snack house in the Pinch were found in Thomas Baker’s article “The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 in Memphis, Tennessee” in the
Bulletin of the History of Medicine,
1968.

The
New York Times
editorial about New York’s filthy tenement houses appeared in John Ellis’s
Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South.

The quote about the tales circulated by sensationalists was from the
Appeal,
August 4, 1878.

The estimated number of people left in Memphis during the epidemic and the number stricken is based on Keating’s book. According to Keating, 19,600 remained, and 17,600 had yellow fever. According to Baker’s article, 25,000 people had fled the city— over half of the population—in the four days after Bionda’s death. “For the sake of humanity, men became inhuman” was taken from Keating’s book.

The story of the Memphians released from the trains in Milan for provisions appeared in an
Evening Appeal
clipping found in the Yellow Fever Collection at the Memphis Library.

The description of the Citizen’s Relief Committee and their actions was based on Bloom’s book, reports in the local newspapers and the Charles G. Fisher Papers at the University of Memphis. Information about the Howard Association was taken from Bruesch’s article.

The Board of Health’s declaration of a yellow fever epidemic on August 23 was taken from the board’s minutes.

Descriptions of the city during the epidemic came from a number of sources: Keating’s firsthand account of the epidemic in his book; Reverend D. A. Quinn’s book
Heroes and Heroines of Memphis or Reminiscences of the Yellow Fever Epidemics;
and Dr. J. P. Dromgoogle’s
Yellow Fever Heroes, Honors, and Horrors of 1878.
All three books are part of the Yellow Fever Collection at the Memphis Library. I also consulted the George C. Harris papers at the Memphis Library, Charles G. Fisher papers at the University of Memphis and the accounts of the nuns at St. Mary’s. A number of the descriptions came from the accounts of the epidemic in the
Appeal
and the
Avalanche.