Yellow Fever and the South PDF

Rating: (3 reviews) Author: Margaret Humphreys ISBN : 9780801861963 New from $8.40 Format: PDF

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In the last half of the nineteenth century, yellow fever plagued the American South. It stalked the region's steaming cities, killing its victims with overwhelming hepatitis and hemorrhage. Margaret Humphreys explores the ways in which this tropical disease hampered commerce, frustrated the scientific community, and eventually galvanized local and federal authorities into forming public health boards. She pays particular attention to the various theories for containing the disease and the constant tension between state and federal officials over how public funds should be spent. Her research recovers the specific concerns of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South, broadening our understanding of the evolution of preventive medicine in the United States.

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• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1 edition (April 19, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801861969
• ISBN-13: 978-0801861963
• Product Dimensions: 0.6 x 5.9 x 8.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Yellow Fever and the South PDF

"Yellow Fever and the South" is not about the suffering and death from the repeated visits of this terrifying disease, although it is about the panic. The suffering and death can be found in other histories.

Humphreys, a medical doctor, wrote this dissertation for a history degree, and it traces the evolution of public health organization in the South from the Civil War to and a little beyond the last yellow fever epidemic in the United States in 1905.

It is full of surprises.

Yellow fever was not the greatest killer in the South. TB, typhoid, malaria, and the debilitations of pellagra, hunger, hookworm etc. killed more people. But those deaths were background and people took them as they came. Yellow fever visited sometimes every summer, sometimes not once in a decade.

When it did, though, it spread panic. Business was almost shut down. It is Humphreys' contention, no doubt correct, that it was the interruption of business, not suffering and death, that inspired or forced local and state governments to found departments of public health.

That was a sword that cut two ways. Since the true vector for the fever was unknown until 1901, cities would invoke quarantine against other cities, which may not have had the disease, for commercial advantage. In the countryside, "shotgun quarantines" of panicked citizens overrode the attempts -- when they were made -- to coordinate the official measures.

Because the southerners could not trust each other, by the 1890s they were ready to turn public health over to the national government. This from men who had, in many cases, carried arms for state's rights in the `60s!