The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our Nation

Table of Contents

“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

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Copyright © 2006 by Molly Caldwell Crosby

All rights reserved.

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PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley hardcover edition: November 2006
Berkley trade paperback edition: September 2007

ISBN: 978-0425217757 (paperback)

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: 978-1440620461

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

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

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. The kidneys stopped functioning, poisoning the body. Abdominal cramps began in the final days of illness as the patient vomited black blood brought on by internal hemorrhaging. The victim became a palate of hideous color: Red blood ran from the gums, eyes and nose. The tongue swelled, turning purple. Black vomit roiled. And the skin grew a deep gold, the whites of the eyes turning brilliant yellow.