Fever Season PDF

Rating: Author: Jeanette Keith ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDF

Direct download links available PRETITLE Fever Season [Kindle Edition] POSTTITLE from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link While the American South had grown to expect a yellow fever breakout almost annually, the 1878 epidemic was without question the worst ever. Moving up the Mississippi River in the late summer, in the span of just a few months the fever killed more than eighteen thousand people. The city of Memphis, Tennessee, was particularly hard hit: Of the approximately twenty thousand who didn't flee the city, seventeen thousand contracted the fever, and more than five thousand died-the equivalent of a million New Yorkers dying in an epidemic today.Fever Season chronicles the drama in Memphis from the outbreak in August until the disease ran its course in late October. The story that Jeanette Keith uncovered is a profound-and never more relevant-account of how a catastrophe inspired reactions both heroic and cowardly. Some ministers, politicians, and police fled their constituents, while prostitutes and the poor risked their lives to nurse the sick. Using the vivid, anguished accounts and diaries of those who chose to stay and those who were left behind, Fever Season depicts the events of that summer and fall. In its pages we meet people of great courage and compassion, many of whom died for having those virtues. We also learn how a disaster can shape the future of a city.Direct download links available for PRETITLE Fever Season [Kindle Edition] POSTTITLE

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• File Size: 2629 KB
• Print Length: 268 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1608192229
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Press; 1 edition (October 2, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B009E0HXHK
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #345,087 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Fever Season PDF

It used to be that southern communities would expect attacks of yellow fever every summer; it was as natural as the rise in the temperatures. The fever would come, linger through the hot months, and go. Some people would die from it, and then it would be over. The attack of yellow fever that hit Memphis in 1878 was extreme in its numbers, killing around a tenth of the 50,000 citizens, with the number that low because most of the others had fled the city. We have new plagues, and we don't worry much in this country anymore about yellow fever, but the story of the Memphis attack makes for macabre and fascinating reading in _Fever Season: The Story of a Terrifying Epidemic and the People Who Saved a City_ (Bloomsbury Press) by historian Jeanette Keith. This is a classic plague tale, with participants unpredictably turning into heroes or cowards. The devastation fascinated newspaper readers across the nation at the time, but Keith might also be writing about readers of this very book: "The people who read of the plague summer in the daily papers were as fascinated by the vagaries of character as the firsthand observers in Memphis. It is almost comical how surprised they were - how surprised we all are - when the same things happened in Thucydides's Athens, Boccaccio's Florence, Defoe's London, and in every major epidemic, over and over again."

This is a study of yellow fever's effects on Memphis for one disastrous season. People in 1878 might have blamed filth or miasma for illnesses, but no one knew that yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes, and Memphis, with limited water supply, had thousands of household cisterns where the mosquitoes liked to lay eggs. When Memphis citizens knew the fever was coming, those who could fled, leaving a small minority in the grim city.