An American Plague: Chapters 10-11

Poor people couldn’t flee to comfortable country homes like their wealthier neighbors, but at least they could escape the most squalid and plague-ridden sections of town.

If the foul smell of rotting coffee could cause health problems, they reasoned, why couldn’t foul-smelling water? Complaints about the water and its link to yellow fever increased with each new visitation, until action was finally taken in 1799.

In 1797 Rush’s opponents were joined by a new and highly virulent voice—that of journalist William Cobbett.

But the vote for the third election happened during the 1797 recurrence of yellow fever, when most well-to-do citizens had left the city.

Yet despite such a careful approach, Carey did go out of his way to vilify one segment of the population: the black volunteers.

“We have many unprovoked enemies,” they told the reader, “who begrudge us the liberty we enjoy, [who] are glad to hear of any complaint against our colour, be it just or unjust; in consequence of which we are more earnestly endeavoring all in our power, to warn, rebuke, and exhort our African friends, to keep conscience void of offense towards God and man..."

To counter such a simple response and put an official seal of approval on their analysis of the situation, they ended their book with the words of someone who was both unassailable and white: Matthew Clarkson.

“I with cheerfulness give this testimony of my approbation of their proceedings,” Clarkson wrote.

It would be banal to recall that phthiriasis is caused by lice, and that certain larvae of Diptera, such as the cestrids, may occasion the disease called myasis. This old pathogenic role, which has been taught to all the medical and veterinary generations of our time, is quite true.

It would be banal to recall that phthiriasis is caused by lice, and that certain larvae of Diptera, such as the cestrids, may occasion the disease called myasis. This old pathogenic role, which has been taught to all the medical and veterinary generations of our time, is quite true.

Let us suppose, then, that in the course of these wanderings one of them happens to fasten itself on an individual affected by a parasitic or bacterial disease, the agent of which lives in the blood. In sucking the blood it absorbs also the germs which are contained in it, and thus is infected. Should it then attack a healthy person there is danger that it will inoculate him with the disease.

The specter of yellow fever had incited a normally peaceful group of individuals to violence, and Staten Island officials did not want that mob to turn its fury on them.

In 1880 Dr. Carlos Finlay of Havana, Cuba, captured mosquitoes and let them ingest the blood of patients suffering from yellow fever. Then, in an experiment that would be considered highly unethical today, he allowed these mosquitoes to feed on healthy humans.

Of course, establishing the Aedes aegypti mosquito as the disease carrier, or vector, did not answer all the questions about yellow fever.

Because the old mosquito—and with it the disease—had been absent so long, hardly anyone had built up an immunity to yellow fever. As a result, hundreds of millions of people were now susceptible to getting yellow fever and other deadly diseases carried by Aedes aegypti.