Yellow Jack: chaos in Memphis

Abstract

In the American deep south of the 1870s, yellow fever— often known by the friendlier moniker Yellow Jack— became as regular as the cotton harvest. Accustomed to malaria as a part of life simply to be endured, authorities were slow to react to this new disease, which spread from New Orleans up the Mississippi river every summer. In Fever season: the story of a terrifying epidemic and the people who saved a city, historian Jeanette Keith recounts the immense struggle of the inhabitants of Memphis (TN, USA) in the summer of 1878 as the city was devastated by an outbreak of yellow fever. More than half of Memphis’s 50 000 inhabitants fl ed the city, and, of those who remained, more than 5000 died. Using a rich collection of letters, newspapers, and diaries, Keith intertwines the lives of prominent fi gures and ordinary citizens who faced the chaos, against a backdrop of the social, racial, and political divisions left after the US Civil War. From descriptions of sickrooms spattered with black vomit to tales of starving babies found nursing from their dead mothers, the events are vividly portrayed. While the religious cried “plague” and medics blamed fi lthy streets and miasma, the discovery that the Aedes aegypti mosquito carried yellow fever was decades away. Just as now, the fever’s incurability meant patients’ best hope was to be skilfully nursed, creating martyrs among nuns, doctors, and brothel madams alike who remained or even came to Memphis to lend assistance. Keith relays the actions of individuals who attempted to control the epidemic, maintain order, and ease the suff ering of the sick, alongside those of people who deserted their families or looted homes. Tales of heroism and villainy emerge from the records, often from the least expected parties. Occasionally weighed down by the large number of characters and back stories, Fever season‘s wealth of detail nonetheless succeeds in creating a vivid image of the Memphis of 1878, its pre-existing problems, and the how tables were turned and fortunes changed by the epidemic. Keith’s suggestion early in the book that a new deadly and incurable disease could emerge and wreak similar havoc in the modern world is one that will weigh heavily on readers’ minds long after they have fi nished reading.