Science and Medicine

1853 yellow fever epidemic

The 1853 yellow fever epidemic of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean islands resulted in thousands of fatalities. Over 9,000 people died of yellow fever in New Orleans alone, around 8% of the total population. Many of the dead in New Orleans were recent Irish immigrants living in difficult conditions and without any acquired immunity. There was a stark racial disparity in mortality rates: "7.4% of whites who contracted yellow fever died, while only 0.2% of blacks perished from the disease." As historian Kathryn Olivarius observed in Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, "For enslaved blacks, the story was different. Immunity protected them from yellow fever, but as embodied capital, they saw the social and monetary value of their acclimation accrued to their white owners." The epidemic was an international news story. A newspaper in Cambridge, England, published this evocative description of the scene in the Crescent City: The most deplorable havoc is being made in New Orleans by the yellow fever. Thousands have been carried off by its ravages, and every day adds 200 more to the ghastly record. The dead are buried in trenches by chain gangs of negroes, hired at a guinea an hour. The New Orleans Crescent, after describing the horrible system of burial adopted adds, "The stoical negroes, too, who are hired at 5 dollars per hour to assist in the work of interment, stagger under the stifling fumes, and can only be kept at their work by deep and continuous potations of the fire 'water.'...And thus, what with the songs and the obscene jests of the gravediggers, the buzzing of the flies, the sing-song cries of the huxter-women vending their confections, the hoarse oaths of the men who drive the dead carts, the merry whistle of the boys, and the stifling reek from the scores of blackened corpses, the day wears apace, the work of sepulture is done, and night draws the curtain." In the meantime, amusements, regattas, balls, &c. are proceeding as usual, as if no such appalling pestilence were in the doomed city.

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸1870 Barcelona yellow fever epidemic
• ▸Bonaparte Crossing the Alps
• ▸Biosecurity

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