The American plague : the untold story of yellow fever, the epidemic that shaped our history /

Despite the subtitle, the story of American yellow fever epidemics is not untold. Over the last 16 years, several books have appeared. Some cover the Philadelphia epidemic of 1793; among them are J. H. Powell's Bring Out Your Dead (CH, Mar'94, 31-3820) and J. Estes and B. Smith's A Melancholy Scene of Devastation (CH, Jul'98, 35-6263). Those addressing the Mississippi Valley epidemics of the 1870s include K. Bloom's The Mississippi Valley's Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 (CH, May'94, 31-4938), J. Ellis's Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South (CH, Nov'92, 30-1546), and M. Humphreys's Yellow Fever and the South (CH, Apr'93, 30-4434). Others deal with the Spanish-American War and the discovery of the mosquito vector; they include V. Cirillo's Bullets and Bacilli (CH, Sep'04, 42-0512) and F. Delaporte's The History of Yellow Fever (CH, Sep'91, 29-0341). The yellow fever epidemic did not shape US history to the degree that the 1918 influenza epidemic and current HIV/AIDS epidemic have. Crosby (independent scholar) argues persuasively that Memphis itself was the epidemic's biggest fatality. Immediately before 1878, the city was becoming a cosmopolitan powerhouse of the post-Civil War South. The diverse population and businesses that fed the boom fled the epidemic but never returned; without them, recovery and progress were unachievable for several decades. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers. T. P. Gariepy Stonehill College

In a summer of panic and death in 1878, more than half the population of Memphis, Tenn., fled the raging yellow fever epidemic, which finally waned when cooler weather set in. The disease had been transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which came in swarms on ships from the Caribbean or West Africa. This account has a narrower scope than James Dickerson's recent Yellow Fever, focusing on the Memphis tragedy, but journalist Crosby offers 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 rife with illness characterized by high fever, black vomit and hemorrhaging, treated by primitive methods. Crosby also relates arresting tales of heroism, such as how two nuns returned to the quarantined city from a vacation to nurse the victims. The author profiles scientists, some of whom died in their fight to identify the cause of this deadly disease. She also describes more recent outbreaks in Africa: yellow fever is making a frightening comeback despite the existence of a vaccine. Photos. Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers selection. (Nov. 7) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved