Local heroes organized relief, and the nation responded generously. The middle 150 pages feature the usual relentless parade of gruesome suffering, noble sacrifice and bad behavior (volunteers poured in most died Catholic priests remained and died most Protestant clergy fled). Disaster historians work best describing the background and the consequences but struggle to make the events themselves stand out, and Keith is no exception.

Within weeks, 30,000 of the city’s 50,000 citizens fled, most of the rest fell ill, and 5,000 died. Despite ineffectual quarantine efforts, the first Memphis case appeared in August. Everyone worried when yellow fever reached New Orleans in early summer and proceeded slowly northward. Taxing hardworking citizens to provide free government services (e.g., sewers, garbage collection, clean water) provoked as much outrage then as today, and Memphis’ city government remaining stubbornly opposed. Until scientists discovered the cause in 1900, doctors blamed poisonous emanations from rotting trash, filth and sewage, all of which Memphis possessed in abundance.

A regular feature of Southern life, yellow fever epidemics began in spring (when mosquitoes became active) and vanished with the first frost. Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War, 2003, etc.) mines these rich sources to produce an extremely detailed, predictably macabre account. The story of the devastation caused by the yellow fever epidemic in Memphis in 1878, which blighted the city for a generation.īenefiting from an era when newspapers flourished and everyone wrote letters, Keith (History/Bloomsburg Univ.

Fever Season by Jeanette Keith