A Palate of Hideous Colors
Molly Caldwell Crosby’s meticulous account of the 1872 Memphis epidemic provides a cautionary tale of plagues to come
by Michael Ray Taylor
Whenever public health officials look to the past to imagine the possible ravages of a bird flu epidemic in our future, they usually bring up the great influenza pandemic of 1918. Less familiar but equally devastating was the yellow fever outbreak of the summer of 1872. In the Mississippi valley, the disease, which had come out of Africa with the slave trade and taken root in the humid South, killed more people than the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake and the Johnstown flood combined.
The outbreak’s epicenter: Memphis.
Molly Caldwell Crosby’s account of that plague goes beyond detailing the tragedy of a Southern city. At its best, it recalls Isaac’s Storm, Erik Larsen’s book about the 1900 Galveston hurricane, in its ability to evoke individuals, neighborhoods and governments wholly unprepared for the onset of nature’s wrath. At its bloodiest, it rivals The Hot Zone, Richard Preston’s account of the horrors of Ebola, for its ability to provide a sheer, festering gross-out. “The victim became a palate of hideous color,” Crosby writes of the final stages of yellow fever. “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.”
But, Crosby explains, the Memphis yellow fever epidemic was more than a bloody and terrifying event. It was also a trigger. It launched the first American public health organization, the National Board of Health, and, indirectly, the career of a young doctor named Walter Reed.
As people died, Washington debated—foreshadowing the problems modern government faces when trying to make sense of sudden, total disaster. When city officials telegraphed Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes with urgent pleas for federal assistance, he dismissed the outbreak in a personal letter as “greatly exaggerated by the panic-stricken people.” As Hayes wrote those words, as many as 5,000 inhabitants were already dead or dying.
By focusing on the collision of human suffering and the slow reaction of large government agencies attempting to fight it, Crosby is able to highlight the ethically murky ground that public health catastrophes create for those who battle disease. That ground was at its murkiest in Cuba, where Walter Reed and two other doctors ventured to study the disease 20 years after the Memphis outbreak. The Spanish-American war killed 365 American troops in battle and over 2500 by yellow fever. Washington was desperate for a cure, and Reed received permission for what was then the highly controversial act of performing autopsies on dead soldiers.
In one of the most bizarre, creepy and unquestionably beneficial experiments ever conducted, Reed locked three volunteers into one room of a fetid field hut filled with the bloody clothes and excrement of recently deceased fever victims, while three more volunteers were locked in another room filled with hungry mosquitoes that had fed on the sick. The volunteers with the mosquitos contracted yellow fever, while the others stayed healthy (physically, if not, perhaps, mentally), proving once and for all the method of viral transmission.
First time author Crosby, who lives in Memphis and holds a graduate degree in nonfiction writing from Johns Hopkins University, writes with confidence and precision, although her book never rises to the heights of suspense created by Preston, nor does it reveal the depth of character Larsen manages to convey. Crosby may be at her best in taking complex scientific ideas and rendering them in interesting, easy-to-understand ways. She writes, for example, that “in the blood, yellow fever looks something like a fuzzy snowflake, but is actually round with 20 smooth sides that protect the virus’s single strand of RNA at the center.”
Crosby’s portrayal of Reed and his almost inhuman fever to fight the disease makes him a sometimes difficult hero, yet by far the book’s most interesting character. (To be fair to Crosby, it is hard to get attached to most of the other characters, as they tend to die off quickly.) But if the seeds of debate in modern medical ethics and emergency health planning are planted in the book’s Cuba section, they grow to fruition in the book’s final segment, which deals with recent yellow fever outbreaks and infections, including a 2002 case from Texas. As with The Hot Zone, the book leaves readers wondering if the next Memphis-sized outbreak is not so much if, but when.
Comments (0)