USA > Tennessee > Shelby County > Memphis > A history of the yellow fever : the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, in Memphis, Tenn., embracing a complete list of the dead, the names of the doctors and nurses employed, names of all who contributed money or means, and the names and history of the Howards, together with other data, and lists of the dead elsewhere > Part 12
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the bark Viscount Canning, Murphy, arrived in the lower bay on Monday, in ballast, from Rio Janeiro, having left that port on the first of February. There had been two deaths from fever, the last one on February 14th. Cap- tain Murphy visited the city on Tuesday, to see if the bark would be allowed to come up. The Board of Health took the matter under consideration, and in the meantime Captain Murphy was asked to return on board until some definite action was taken, for, although there might be no danger of contagion, vet, in the feverish condition of public sentiment, it was best to run no risk. The brig Louisa Price, from Port au Prince, arrived at New York City on the 7th of June, with several cases of yellow fever on board. The schooner Rein, from Hayti, arrived at the same place on the 10th, with some very severe cases. On the 17th, the schooner Hattie Hewes arrived at the same port, with some of the worst eases that had ever been known. The steamer Viagary, from Havana, arrived at New York on the 24th, with one case. On the same day. the schooner Cummings arrived at the same place from Para, having lost her captain and two seamen from yellow fever.
one in New Orleans, the other in Memphis-given in the closing pages of the first division of this book, and enforces the conclusion there stated that frost does not kill the germs; yet it is only just that Mr. Gamgee's opposing views be given, especially since the National Government has appropriated 8200,000 for the purpose of fully testing his freezing apparatus. He says that the "United States vessel Plymouth was uot thoroughly di-infected by the operation of natural frost, as alleged, while last winter in Boston. The report is that fire was kept up uninterruptedly in the captain's cabin. and moreover that the presence of water around the hull would preserve a temperature on the deeks below the water line sufficiently high to keep the germs alive. Mr. Gamgee insists that cold air must be forced into the lower holds of ships by artificial means to make the freezing process successful."
The Surgeon-General of the U. S. Navy has furnished the following facts in regard to the last outbreak of yellow fever on the United States steamer Plymouth : "On Nov. 7, 1878, four cases of yellow fever occurred on board the vessel while lying in the har- bor of Santa Cruz; these were removed to the hospital on shore, and the ship sailed to Norfolk. Three mild cases occurred during the voyage, and the Plymouth was ordered to Portsmouth, N. II., thence to Boston. At the latter port every thing was removed from the ship and all parts of the interior freely exposed to a temperature which fre- quently fell below zero, the exposure continuing for more than a month. During this time the water in the tanks, bilges, and in vessels placed in the store-rooms was frozen. One hundred pounds of sulphur was burned below decks, this fumigation continuing for two days, and the berth-decks, holds, and store-rooms were thoroughly whitewashed. On March 15th [1879] the ship sailed from Boston sonthward ; on the 19th, during a severe gale, the hatches had to be battened down:, and the berth-deck became very close and damp. On the 23d two men showed decided symptoms of yellow fever, and on the recommendation of the surgeon the vessel was headed northward. The sick men were isolated, and measures adopted for improving the hygienic condition of the vessel and crew. The surgeon reported that he believed the infection to be confined to the hull of the ship, especially to the unsound wood about the berth-deck, all the cases but one having occurred within a limited area ; and that, while the Plymouth is in good sanitary condition for service in temperate climates, should she he sent to a tropical station, probably no precautionary measures whatever would avail to prevent an outbreak of yellow fever."
THE EPIDEMIC IN MEMPHIS, 1878.
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THE EPIDEMIC IN MEMPHIS, IST8.
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I.
To reach some of the causes inducing the awful havoc of the yellow fever epidemie in Memphis, during the months of August, September, October, and November, 1878, and the impoverished and helpless condition of her people, it will be necessary to review a part at least of the history of that city. By a mismanagement, the result of the ignorance of the city legislators and the indifference of the better classes of her people, during a few years, Memphis was reduced, in January, 1878, to bankruptcy. Her debt, floating and bonded, then amounted to more than 85,500,000. Her taxable wealth, which before the civil war was estimated at 828,000,000, was reduced 10 818,000,000, and of that 86,000,000 had been bought in by the State at tax sales, having been delinquent for years. The population had doubled, but the volume of trade was only a slight increase over that of 1860. Negroes, who, under the system of slavery, which prevailed up to the breaking out of the civil war, had been productive laborers in the cotton fields of the adjoining States, attracted by the excitement it affords, flocked to the city, where at least one-third of them were added to the ranks of the very poor, and either as petty thieves or worthless paupers, depredated upon the industrious few of their own color, but for the most part upon the thrifty whites. Thus the non-producers-those who consume without laboring and live without the least regard for the obligations of good citizenship -- were increased to the proportions of a small army. Be- sides this, taxation was high. Economy in public as in private affairs was un- known. The period between 1865 and 1873, it will be remembered, was one of extravagance throughout the Union. Municipalities were freely bleil for, in some cases, unnecessary public and semi-public improvements. Appropriations of' public monies were made in the most reckless way. There was no provision for the morrow, no consideration for the future. Promises to pay were lavishly issued. Wall Street was in many instances supplicated to take the bonds of solvent corporations at two-thirds of their face value. Capital was aggress- ive, predatory, and supreme. Nearly every county and town was busy issuing serip or bonds. It was a period of wanton waste that by the light of the intelligence usually characteristic of the American people is without excuse. Thousands of miles of railroad were built that have not and will not for years to come pay dividends. The life insurance mania was at its height. To ineur obligations without the means to meet them when pay-day came round seemed to be the order of the day. Extravagance raged as an
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epidemic. Swindlers and rogues were everywhere reveling in ill-gotten gains. The people were blind to their folly, and infatuated by the fictitious evidences of progress. The destructive demon of bankruptcy was hovering over the land preparing for his work. Memphis was no better than New York. Theft was not committed as was the case in the great metropolis, but ignorance and incapacity were working as great a wrong. Taxes were levied, but were not collected. The current expenses could not be met. Serip was resorted to. The city government went into the banking business, and scattered its promises to pay broadcast. There was at one time as much as $960,000 of it afloat. It was sold as low as twenty-three cents on the dollar. When the policemen, firemen, and other employés could not get par for it, they petitioned the General Council to have the difference made up to them. This was for some time done, but always by a fresh issue of scrip. The county, at the same time, under the government of commissioners, was engaged in the same method of slow but sure financial suicide. The press expostulated; it was not heeded. Those who controlled municipal affairs had no regard for public opinion. The property owners seemed to be, if they were not wholly, in- different. The merchants were too busy with their private affairs to pay any attention to those of the public, and the people generally were so absorbed in the work of rehabilitating their homes despoiled by the war as to be care- less of the recklessness of their representatives. They did not see, they would not see, that a crop of wholesale ruin was being sown in a soil all too pro- ductive. There were not wanting spasmodic attempts at "retrenchment and reform," but these occurred at rare intervals. The stream of ruin steadily increased in volume and violence until at last it reached a point where a halt was called to prevent utter and entire loss. When the debt had reached the enormous sum of 85,500,000, the State, as has been stated, had taken posses- sion of one-third of the realty for delinquent taxes, leaving only $12,000,000 worth to bear the burdens imposed for the support of the State, county, and city governments. The city, while this monument of folly was in course of construction, had passed through six epidemics-one of war, one of recon- struction, two of yellow fever (1867 and 1873), one of cholera, and one of small-pox. Up to 1878, for twenty years, Memphis had been the center of an extraordinary political agitation, of the passion and prejudice of the two sections, of the heat and strife of civil commotion, the uncharitableness of sectional animosity and the bitterness of party politics. In all that time there was not a single year of repose, of quiet, steady conservative endeavor, such as was before the war characteristic of the cities and towns of the South. The pub- lic pulse beat feverishly, and the very uncertainties of life became a provocation to wastefulness and extravagance. That under such circumstances Memphis survives to-day is a special wonder to all familiar with her wayward and untoward history. In any other country, and by any other people, she would long since have been abandoned and given over to decay and ruin. Having thus suffered, and living in a constant ferment of excitement, it is not to be wondered at that in August of 1878 the mere rumor of a possible epidemic of yellow fever precipitated a panic among the people. This was initiated
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early in May, when the question of quarantine was agitated with a view to prevent a visitation of the disease then known to prevail in epidemie form in the West Indies. This agitation monopolized the public mind for several weeks, but was eventually disposed of by the General Council, which, although petitioned thereto by the whole body of merchants and business men, refused to permit its establishment. On this Dr. Mitchell, President of the Board of Health, resigned, and was succeeded by Dr. Saunders who, aided by a prompt suisseription of funds by the merchants,$ immediately set about improving the sanitary condition of the city, which was disgraceful in the extreme. Miles of Nicholson pavement were decaying and sending forth a poison that none in the city limits could avoid, and the soil was reeking with the offal and excreta of ten thousand families. There was no organized scavenger system, no means by which the ashes and garbage could, as it should be, daily carted away. The accumulations of forty years were decaying upon the surface; a bayou dividing the city, and which was the receptacle of the contents of privies and water-closets, was sluggish and without current, owing to the want of water and the fact that there had been searcely any rain for several weeks. Dead animals were decaying in many parts of it, and the pools which had formed at the abutments of the several bridges were stagnant and covered with a seum of putridity, emitting a deadly effluvia. The cellars of the houses in the leading thoroughfares were also alembics, in which were manufactured noxious gases which stole out and made the night air an almost killing poison. The streets were filthy, and every affliction that could aggravate a disease so cruel seemed to have been purposely prepared for it by the criminal negleet of the city government, who turned a deaf ear to the persistent appeals of the press. But they were not wholly to blame ; the charter, under which they acted, was so worded as to provide but little funds for sanitary relief. and no relief in case of the dreadful emergency of an epidemie, notwithstanding 1867 and 1873. Every interest was carefully guarded and provided for, save that of the health and lives of the people. They must either take care of themselves-that is, be prepared to abandon their homes when yellow fever or cholera made its appearance-or be ready to meet death. Ignorant of the laws of life. its framers denied to themselves and their fellow-citizens the advantages of a growing intelligence in regard to san- itary affairs. But even these were not much to be blamed : their ignorance of sanitation curses every eity in the land : for what municipality in the Union is to-day in a condition to resist epidemie disease if once it secures a foothold under the conditions necessary to its rapid propagation ? Perhaps Boston, no other could. Defective sewerage,t if nothing else, dominates all attempts at
# The city treasury was empty.
* Dr. T. P. Corbally. in an article on the " Brooklyn sewers," which appeared in the April (1879) number of the Sanitarian, takes the ground that "The system is radically wrong, and that the sewers. accepting them as they are, have been managed with a degree of negligence which becomes criminal in view of the danger which such negli- gence causes to the health and the lives of the people." To sustain this position. he adduces a great deal of proof, the best of which is contained in an extract, which he
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perfect sanitation, and the clamors of the gutter politicians are more effective than the warnings and appeals of skilled sanitarians. Seaboard cities have permanent pools of filth at every dock, and those inland pour into the rivers on the banks of which they are built a continuous stream of nameless nasti- ness that increases with the population. The quarters of the very poor are, for want of shitable provision or accommodation, as bad as those of many of the older cities of Europe. Instead of being an example. as we are in so many other respects for the world, ours, in sanitary matters, are, many of them, little better than the poorest cities of the least advanced nations of Europe. We have gas and water in our houses, but we have also water-closets, which are so many means of escape for the most subtle of all the life-destroy- ing gases .* After the experiences of 1873, it was hoped by the press that the citizens of Memphis, so far as they could. would compel a reform that would enhance the value of human life. Instead of that they permitted the passage of the new charter, which cheapened it by preferring remedies for
qnotes from the Report of the Engineer to the Board of Health of Brooklyn, as follow -: . " During storms, when the sewers are in a measure gorged, and the increased flow within them is backed into the house-drain-, the rush of water with so great a fall through the leader will render its use as a ventilator for the drain entirely out of the question, and the gases in the drains will be forced somewhere into the house. Its failure as a ventilator occurs during the very time when it is most needed, by reason of the increased pressure having been brought upon all the traps communicating with the drain." Again, "The inhabitants are clamorons to be free from foul sewerage in their cellars, and to be saved the expense of cleaning them whenever they are flooded. The property has been assessed for the construction of these sewers, and successive Health Boards have compelled the owners to connect their houses with these elongated cess-pool="-cess-pools that make life as cheap on the average in Brooklyn as in New Orleans, which, as Dr. Holt, of that city, claims, rests upon a dung-heap. And New York, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh. Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, and, no doubt. San Francisco, are quite as bad. The sewerage systems of these, and nearly all our cities, are nothing better than so many "elongated cess-pools," from which the ga-es escape "somewhere in the houses," resulting in typhoid fever, small-pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, eroup, and meningitis, which carry off so many persons as to bring the average of deaths up to, in some cases above, that of New Orleans. From this death- dealing poison there is only one escape, and that is by the destruction by fire of exereta. ashes, and debri- and offal of every description. Fire is the purifier. In every ward of every city in the country, and in every town, furnaces for this purpose should be erected. Water-closets should be done away with, and the sewers should alone be used for carrying off the surface water of the streets and the waste water of the houses; and from them large ventilating pipes should lead into the sanitary inrnaces, so that any lurking or latent poisons might be drawn off by the draught created by the fire. into which it would pass to be consumed. Sewer-gas is to-day killing more persons every year than the yellow fever in its worst periods of epidemic, and so long as water-closets are allowed to exist it will continue to kill, just as, until a better sanitary system obtains in the southern cities, visitations of yellow fever may be expected.
Among the many disorders which may arise from the effinvia of drains and sewers. two additional ones have been recently mentioned in the English journals for the first time, viz., abscess of the cervical glands, and a tendency on the part of ulcerated surfaces to become sluggish and to yield to no ordinary management. Sometimes these ulver; take on a diphtheriteid appearance.
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every thing else but the public safety. A few thousand dollars were set apart for that purpose, scarcely enough for a month of effective sanitary work. An efficient Board of Health thus found its hands tied. It could do next to nothing, and confronted by an ignorance so obtuse and besotted as to reject all instruction, its members became disheartened. In this condition the rumors of yellow fever fell upon the public ear full of evil portent, and the hope of the people fell to zero. Apprehensions thus awakened were quickened alnost beyond control by the publication, in the morning papers of the 26th of July, of the fact that the yellow fever had made its appearance in New Orleans and threat- ened to become epidemie. The tardiness with which this information reached the doomed city was not due to any want of diligence on the part of the State or city health authorities. Dr. Maury, of the State Board, wrote to Dr. Chopin, of the New Orleans Board, on the 21st of May, asking for information. He received a courteous reply that he (Maury) would receive official information regularly, and that he (Chopin) would not conceal any thing from the public. He stated additionally that the Borussa, from Liverpool, via Havana, was then quarantined below the city with six cases of yellow fever on board. Dr. Chopin was evidently on the qui vire. But notwithstanding his vigilance, the steamer Sudder passed up to the city wharf on the 23d. The purser of that vessel, who had evaded quarantine, sickened and died of yellow fever. In him it is assorted that the epidemic had its origin, and from him it spread. Dr. Manry continued to receive the New Orleans weekly health reports, according to the health officer's promise, but no cases of yellow fever were found in them ; nor was any warning of even the existence of the disease conveyed until the 26th of July, when the newspapers of the country published Dr. Chopin's letter to Dr. Woodworth, Supervising Surgeon of Marine Hospitals at Wash- ington, although it is well known that cases occurred before, and were re- ported about the 13th of July, and that the malady had been making havoc in the neighborhood of the refuge of the purser and mate of the death- freighted Sudder. But slow as the sad news was in reaching Memphis, it came all too fast. So soon as it was verified, the health officer, Dr. John Erskine, noti- fied the city authorities, who, at last, but only when the whole population was worked up to a point of dread, in some cases bordering on insanity, gave consent to the establishment of the quarantine which they had refused to provide for only a few days before. The doctor, a noble example of official zeal, profes- sional enthusiasm, and manly independence, at onee perfected arrangements, and quarantine stations were established on the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, at Germantown, some twelve miles from the city, on the Mississippi and Ten- nessee Railroad, at Whitehaven Station, eight miles from the city, and on the river at the lower or southern point of President's Island. It was believed that this would prove effectual, especially as the railroad and steamboat officials had promised to second it by a rigid surveillance over passengers and baggage ; and the people on the lines mentioned, and all along the river, for their personal safety, talked of or had already taken measures to enforce, in each case, local quarantine, by a deci led exhibit of power in the form of a hastily formed mili- tia or police force. These measures and assurances had some effect with most
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of the people of the city, but there were a few who, in a purely idle spirit, some of them because they had nothing else to do, went about expressing their own fears, and with an assumption of wisdom which neither their experience, habits. or education would warrant, predicted the direst consequences to the city. The uneasy feeling thus kept alive by the shiftless and thriftless gossips of the street, was aggravated by the announcement, on the 2d of August, of a case of yellow fever at the City Hospital-a steamboatman, who died at quarantine on the 31 -- and by the dispatches from New Orleans, which every day gave an increased number of cases, and a mortality that, in proportion, was much larger than had before been known in that city. On the 9th of August, rumors prevailed that- the fever had made its appearance in Grenada, Miss., the southern terminus of the Mississippi and Tennessee Railroad. Inquiry by telegraph, made on the 10th by citizens of Memphis, brought the most positive contradictions. But on the very day these were published in the newspapers there came a most anxious call for nurses and physicians. This appeal was responded to by the Howard Association, Butler P. Anderson and W. J. Smith volunteering their services. The-e gentlemen left the city on the afternoon train and reached Grenada that night. On Monday, Anderson telegraphed to the Appeal that yellow fever, of the same type as that which cost Memphis 2,000 lives in 1878. prevailed epidemically, that twenty new cases had developed during the twenty- four hours since his arrival, and there was then a total of one hundred cases, none of which had so far yielded to treatment. The publication of these facts, and others from other sources of information, on the 13th of August, had the effect of exciting the people of the city to the last degree of alarm. Business was neglected. Men met in groups and discussed the news, and the probability of Memphis being attacked, little dreaming that already the fever had made a lodgment in the city, and had taken its second victim,
#The parent Association was organized twenty-five years ago (1853) in New Orleans, when it and other cities of the South were so cruelly afflicted with the fever, and such horror and panic were excited that husbands deserted their wives, parents their children, and the ties of common humanity seemed shattered. Napoleon B. Kneass, now of Phil- adelphia, but formerly a merchant of New Orleans, says that the organization originated in his store, among his clerks, especially two of them, whose mother was from San Do- mingo, and had seen much of the epidemic. They went about the city, hunted up new cases, and furnished the sufferers with medicines prepared by her and found effective in ITayti. From these clerks, as a nneleus, the Association was formed. Young men of wealth joined it, and the name of Howard was adopted, in honor of the renowned English philan- thropist. They obtained medicines, nurses, and physicians, and established agencies in all the towns and cities that had been, or were likely to be, infected, binding themselves to act together at every reappearance of the pestilence. This body increased rapidly in numbers and means, and before the civil war it was one of the richest benevolent socie- ties in the country. That bitter contest left most of its members poor, and the Associa- tion has been crippled in its power to do good. Until recently they never asked for aid, bnt any contributions to the cause were received, and distributed according to existing need. They divide the town or city into districts, to each of which members are assigned. and, when the disease reveals itself, each case is immediately reported to headquarters. The visiting committee at once investigates the matter. physicians and nurses are em- ployed, and every thing is done that can be done to relieve the patient.
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