1853 yellow fever epidemic

Gulf Coast and Caribbean disease outbreak File:65030340R page 261 1853 Sanitary map of New Orleans.png "Barton's Sanitary Map of New Orleans" from Report of the Sanitary Commission of New Orleans on the epidemic yellow fever of 1853 (U.S. National Library of Medicine) Gulf Coast, Caribbean 10,000+ 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,Campbell Heather 1999-03-01 The Yellow Pestilence: A Comparative Study of the 1853 Yellow Fever Epidemic in New Orleans and the Galveston, Texas Scourge of 1867 https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ethj/vol37/iss1/8 East Texas Historical Journal 37 1 0424-1444 around 8% of the total population.Iker Molly 2018-04-26 Hard Times in the Big Easy: The Medical, Social, and Political Effects of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853 in New Orleans https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/vocesnovae/vol4/iss1/7 Voces Novae 4 1 Many of the dead in New Orleans were recent Irish immigrants living in difficult conditions and without any acquired immunity.Brennan Patrick 2011 Getting Out of the Crescent City: Irish Immigration and the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23074685 Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 52 2 189–205 23074685 0024-6816 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."Olivarius Kathryn https://books.google.com/books?id=SzhjEAAAQBAJ&q=1853+%22yellow+fever%22 Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom Harvard University Press 2022 978-0-674-27607-9 en The epidemic was an international news story. A newspaper in Cambridge, England, published this evocative description of the scene in the Crescent City:1853-09-10 Yellow fever 1853 6 Cambridge Weekly News https://www.newspapers.com/article/cambridge-weekly-news-yellow-fever-1853/130897697/ 2023-08-30 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. One of the most popular treatments in New Orleans was by Marie Laveau, whose practice of voodoo and/or the healing arts with yellow fever was so esteemed that "a committee of citizens was appointed to wait upon her, and beg her to lend her aid to the feversmitten, numbers of whom she saved."Downes Kathleen 2015-12-18 Contagious Deadly Sins: Yellow Fever in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans Literature https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2065 University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations In addition to death toll in New Orleans: 1,100 people died in the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama.Glassbrook Daryn 2021-07-28 The History of Yellow Fever in Mobile https://mobilebaymag.com/the-history-of-yellow-fever-in-mobile/ 2023-08-30 Mobile Bay Magazine en-US A volunteer public-health service in the Mobile area called the Can't Get Away Club provided healthcare to the afflicted.Stephens Deanne L. 2019 Can't Get Away Club https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/cant-get-away-club/ 2023-08-30 Encyclopedia of Alabama en-US Josiah C. Nott had predicted a severe outbreak "simply from the fact that I had never known the disease early in the season to attack Vera Cruz, West India Islands and New Orleans" without it being a season of severe disease.Amazing letter from 1854 reporting on the Yellow fever epidemic in Mobile, Alabama – Alabama Pioneers https://www.alabamapioneers.com/yellow-fever-mobile-alabama/ 2023-08-30 www.alabamapioneers.com Navigating inland, yellow jack (as it was sometimes called) came to the town of Natchez, Mississippi in July 1853, killing 5% of the population (over 300 residents).Sadler Elizabeth A. May 2013 YELLOW PLAGUE: YELLOW FEVER IN NATCHEZ 1853-1855 https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/gb19f8878 California State University Northridge In September a local newspaper reported, "Everybody has left town that could, and but very few are left. Business is at a dead standstill. However, two dry goods stores were open on Main St. yesterday; most of the merchants have sought temporary locations in the countryside or neighboring villages. A greater panic never occurred before from a similar cause among any people. Our streets look desolate indeed, you may walk an hour sometimes and not meet a dozen persons." Correspondence indicates that slave trader C.M. Rutherford and trader-turned-planter Rice C. Ballard intended to file an insurance claim on a 23-year-old slave named Charles Craig, who had been killed by yellow fever.Slave Traders and Planters in the Expanding South: Entrepreneurial Strategies, Business Networks, and Western Migration in the Atlantic World, 1787-1859 Tomoko Yagyu 2006 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/210596695.pdf  pages 342–343 Yellow fever killed over 500 in Galveston, Texas, in 1853.Teston Jacy Meek Mason Yellow Fever in Galveston, Texas - "Those Remaining Died on the Island like Sheep" https://easttexashistory.org/items/show/251 2023-08-30 East Texas History en-US It arrived in Pensacola in July on the steamer Vixen and by October had killed 260.Pearce George F. 1978 Torment of Pestilence: Yellow Fever Epidemics in Pensacola https://www.jstor.org/stable/30150330 The Florida Historical Quarterly 56 4 448–472 30150330 0015-4113 There are many 1853 yellow fever victims in the Old Town Key West Cemetery.Welcome to the Historic Cemetery in Old Town Key West John Parce Real Estate Key West https://parcerealestatekeywest.com/post/welcome-to-the-historic-cemetery-in-old-town-key-west 2023-08-30 parcerealestatekeywest.com The fever was at Port Royal, Jamaica in April through June, killing 10 and then vanished;The Monthly Journal of Medical Science October 1853 8 46 Some Observations on the Epidemic Yellow Fever as It Appeared in Port Royal, Jamaica, from December 1852 to June 1853; and on the Relation It Bears to the Periodic Fevers of the West Indies; and Also, Some Account of the Treatment Adopted John Watson en 283–292 5879180 and in September it landed in Bermuda.1853-09-29 From Bermada--Frightful Ravages of Yellow Fever. en-US The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1853/09/29/archives/from-bermadafrightful-ravages-of-yellow-fever.html 2023-08-30 0362-4331 Multiple books were written by contemporary doctors and public health officials about the epidemic; the New Orleans city directory of 1854 included a long essay on the series of major epidemics suffered by the city since before the Louisiana Purchase.2018-02-01 The City Directory https://www.myneworleans.com/the-city-directory/ 2023-08-30 New Orleans magazine en-US The fall preceding the 1853 outbreak there were a small number of cases in the Caribbean; the Jamaican cases were documented, in part, in The Lancet by a surgeon of the Royal Navy.Cummins William J. May 28, 1853 The Yellow Fever in the West Indies https://books.google.com/books?id=hAY1sGgm9DIC&pg=PA488 The Lancet 61 1552 488-490 10.1016/S0140-6736(02)73491-0 0140-6736 none Google Books yes See also History of yellow fever List of notable disease outbreaks in the United States Lower Mississippi Valley yellow fever epidemic of 1878 1853 in the United States References Further reading Carrigan Jo Ann 1959 Yellow Fever in New Orleans, 1853: Abstractions and Realities https://www.jstor.org/stable/2954767 The Journal of Southern History 25 3 339–355 10.2307/2954767 2954767 0022-4642 subscription McKiven H. M. December 2007 The Political Construction of a Natural Disaster: The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853 Journal of American History en 94 3 734–742 10.2307/25095134 25095134 0021-8723 free   Category:1853 in the United States Category:1853 disasters Category:1853 in health Category:19th-century disease outbreaks Category:Disease outbreaks in the United States Category:History of Mobile, Alabama Category:History of New Orleans Category:Yellow fever epidemics Category:Yellow fever in the United States