Yellow Fever & The South (Health and Medicine in American Society)

In the last half of the nineteenth century, the American South was plagued by yellow fever epidemics. This tropical disease stalked the South's steaming urban areas, killing its victims with overwhelming hepatitis and hemorrhage. Its toll was devastating: in the notorious 1878 epidemic alone, 20,000 people died in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys.

Margaret Humphreys tells the dramatic story of yellow fever in the urban South, and of the attempt of public health officials to contain it. Humphreys explores the ways in which yellow fever hampered commerce, frustrated the scientific community, and eventually galvanized local and federal authorities into forming public health boards. Discovering that the desire to nurture economic growth lay at the heart of the South's public health strategy, she shows how the disease's impact on trade forced pecunious state government's to spend money on public health. Yellow fever was also central to the growth of the U.S. Public Health Services. Humphreys pays particular attention to the various theories for stopping the disease and to the constant tension between state and federal officials over how public funds should be spent.

Humphreys recovers a lost dimension of public health history by treating the specific concerns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century South and broadens our understanding of the evolution of public health services in the United States.