The American Plague

The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History Hardcover – November 7, 2006

Author: Visit Amazon's Molly Caldwell Crosby Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0425212025 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History – November 7, 2006
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• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Hardcover; 1 edition (November 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425212025
• ISBN-13: 978-0425212028
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #385,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

This is the first book by a young author from Memphis, Tennessee, and while not without shortcomings, it's a better start than most. Crosby describes some key moments in our fight against this nasty disease, starting with a general overview, moving to the ghastly epidemic that devastated Memphis, then to the scene of the critical triumph in Cuba, and finally to the contemporary world and the potential that yellow fever has for a breakout. Along the way she conveys a good sense of what her home town was like in the 1870s, as well as the hardships faced by the medical staff and volunteers in Cuba. The book is as much a peek into life in some highly stressed places as a medical story.

Crosby's random jumping from scene to scene, however, creates a sense of disjointedness that detracts from the book's interest. One gets the impression that what she really wanted to write was a book about "Memphis," not one about yellow fever. This is entirely fine, and choosing to focus on Memphis as plague city certainly establishes a niche for her product. But how does it connect to the scene in Cuba where the seeds of the fever's defeat are first sown? There have been far more comprehensive treatments of Walter Reed's operation there, and Crosby contributes nothing new and notable, nor does she tie Reed's work strongly back to the subject that is obviously her passion. Quite possibly she felt obliged to include this material simply to make the text long enough to interest a publisher; it's not hard to imagine that her researches had pretty thoroughly mined out the information available on Memphis during the plague years, and it wasn't enough for a stand-alone book.

For as long as we have had illnesses, we have tried to understand them; the earliest of understandings was that some angry deity was sending down punishment for some sort of transgression. It's an explanation that still satisfies many people. Yellow fever could be seen as vengeance direct from God. It was a disease spawned in Africa, and Europeans involved in the slave trade were especially stricken. There is no reason that a yellow fever epidemic has never infested Asia, except that there was no African slave trade there. It infested all of the American colonies, but when the Atlantic slave trade was abolished in the northern states, it went away, continuing in the southern ones. Gods were not involved in the illness, however, or at least their involvement is less direct than the virus that causes the dreadful symptoms and death, or the mosquito that carries the virus. In _The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic That Shaped Our History_ (Berkley), Molly Caldwell Crosby details the ravages of the epidemics, the process by which the disease was brought under some control, and the fears that it might again become a player on the world's pathology stage.

Crosby lives in Memphis, and the first part of her book tells of the epidemic there of 1878. The passages describing the disease within the city's neighborhoods are a combination of Faulkner and Poe. The disease sounds dreadful. The disease had come to Memphis from Havana, borne by the steamer _Emily B. Souder_ up the Mississippi, and starting in July 1878, Memphis residents began dropping; it is a dismal and scary tale. The second half of Crosby's book tells the more familiar story of the eventual understanding of how the disease worked.

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