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 40
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Jones, Mrs. Serena B. Jones, Hattie. Jackson. C., col. Knotf, Capt. L. Kohlhaas, Jos. Kohlhaas, Mrs.
Bondreaux, Joseph.
Boudreaux, Azelia. Boudreaux, Wel.
Bondreanx, Eulalie.
Forest. Cyprien.
Forest, Felicien.
Nagyin, Louise.
Fane-tine, Sister.
Nicholls, Madge.
Lewis, Mrs. Mary.
Barreaux. L.
Perrin, Adolph. Pichon. Alice.
Rogers, Emile.
Richard, Charles.
Richard, Marie.
Ragan, Ella. Ribet, J M.
Roth, Angelina.
Sevin, Mrs. Joseph.
Simnions, Jennie.
Schiffersteine, Marie.
Lewison, Mr.
Porter. Joseph. Plymede, Hugh.
Unknown woman. Walker, Win.
Hall, Wm.
Boehn, Angust. Bunton, Wm. Byrne, E. R.
266
A HISTORY OF THE YELLOW FEVER.
IX.
OTHER POINTS.
Philadelphia, Pa. Tate. Mark.
Dalton, Ca. Bohannon, Mrs. Hogan, Mary.
Dickson, Judge L. V.
New York. Lindley, Dr. N. A. -
Delaware Break- water.
Barrett, A.
Fernandina, I'la. One niate. I Que seaman.
X.
MEMPHIS RAILROAD COMPANIES.
Memphis and
Charleston R. R.
Allen, J. D.
Biggers. W. L.
Mississippi & Ten- nessee R. R.
Louisville & Nash- ville R. R ..
Lindenwood. F. Lane. H. B.
Carlson, Charley.
Burk. A. ...
Brown, Thomas.
Arnold. T. J.
Mcclanahan. Thos.
Grady. Thus.
BeJton, Thes. C.
Brew, Mike.
Matthews. A. J.
Grimes. Larry.
Lasou. John P.
Burrell. E:I.
Murray, Ed.
Gray, Walter.
Ach lall. Peter.
Deeler. J. HI.
Nuble. Robert.
Gamble, Frank.
Kirby. William.
Bugg. Phil.
Nicholson, J. G.
Gregg. J. C.
Kirby, Mrs. Wm.
Bronson, Charles.
Owen, HI.
Jackson, R. J.
Lewis. George E.
Bons. W. G. N.
Pickle. V.
Kelly. M
Hallows. Joseph.
Cully. R. R.
Pope. Emmet.
Kallaher. M.
Ilallows, Mi-s.
Crawford, N.
Perro. Joe.
Morau. M.
McNamara, John.
Curtis, C.
Rummagio. John
MeConhin. Frank. Merritt. G. R.
MeNamata, Mrs. Johu. Moore, G. W.
Chestor, Price.
Ritter. L. F.
Mitchell, Moses.
McCormick, M.
Connelly, J. B. W.
Rosen. F. J.
Moss, David.
Mister. Thomas.
Coleman. S.
Stewart, P. B.
Moffatt. John.
MeManns, Samuel
Daley, Patsey.
Schuler. Martin.
Nicholls, Wm.
North. Neison.
· Ernest. G. W.
Steel. W. H.
otto. A. G.
O'Neal, Jantes.
Finest. Mrs. G. W.
Smith. E.l.
Pearsall, .A.
()'Neal. Maurice.
Feather-tone, W. T.
Sheetz. H. C.
Paul. Major.
Petty. Joe.
Fmch. J. W.
Snatch. H. B.
Roberts, John.
Rateliff. s.
Citfin. D. T.
Trogne. W. IL.
Smith, F. J.
Ryan, Dennis.
fondwin. E. B.
Williams, E.
Thompson, Jerry.
Ryan :. Miss Mary,
. Garrett, Kenneth, Jr.
Winn, Charles.
XI.
TELEGRAPH OPERATORS WHO DIED IN MEMPHIS.
Allen, J. H. Connelly, John I.
Goewey, H. M.
Gib-on. E. W. Hood, Thos. Henrickle, J. R.
: Hawkins, A. S. Keyes. M. J.
Mynatt, W. HI.
McDonald. J. W.
| Langford, C. R.
Walsh. Daniel.
I Thompson. Wm. Wiley. W. H.
Reding. W. M. Rousseau. Monroe.
Hannon, James.
Williams. Wallace.
shinkl . Robert.
JJohns. Conrad.
Kendall, Alfred.
Clowl. T S.
Kanovan. M.
Clark, W. A.
Cain. J. E.
Coe. Lafayette. Delaney. Wm.
Brrry. A.
Ander on, F.
McCormick. Istac.
Wehle, Stephen.
Wood. J. K. Wood, Mrs. J. K.
Kayhu. John.
Lawton. Eugene.
Carroll. Ed.
Riley. Mike.
Harris, Jordan.
Abingdon, Va. · Reilley, Wm. Sheetz, Wm.
, Warrington, Isaac H. ¡ Soven sailors.
.
QUARANTINE AND SANITATION.
(267) . 26)
269
A HISTORY OF THE YELLOW FEVER.
QUARANTINE AND SANITATION.
I.
QUARANTINE, from the Italian word quarantina (a space of forty days), a police regulation for the exclusion of contagious diseases from a city, state, or nation. This regulation prescribes the interdiction of communication with individuals, ships, steam-ships, steam-boats, railroad cars, and by cargoes of goods supposed or suspected of being tainted by certain diseases -- such as the cholera, black plague, or yellow fever-prevailing at the place where such passengers, vessels, or vehicles for intercommunication hail from at their time of sailing or depart- ure. All the civilized nations of the world have and enforce such regulations. The United States as well as the several States, and nearly all the cities in the Union of more than 20,000 people, and many of the smaller towns, have adopted, and, when necessary, enforce quarantine .* In Europe an international code, adopted in 1874. has taken the place of the barbarous system which grew out of the Mosaic. law, set forth at length in the Book of Leviticus, from the eleventh to the fifteenth chapters inclusive. Moses therein prescribes the most stringent precautionary measures to prevent the spread of disease. Leprosy is described in its various stages, and the leper is ordered to be set apart from the people without the camp for a certain number of days. The treatment for his
* In 1878 the cities and towns of Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee, situated on rivers and railroads, enforced quarantine by companies of ha-tily improvised police armed with double-barreled shot-guns; and Dowler, writing in 1853, says that in that year, . "as yellow fever appeared in New Orleans at an unusually early period of the season, and long before its invasion of other towns in the southern slope of the Mississippi Valley, the town authorities, in many cases, imposed quarantine laws for their own protection early in August, as Natchez, Baton Rouge, etc. No exemption, great mortality, neglect of the sick, and other evils followed, some of which grew directly out of quarantine itself, and were by no means creditable to humanity. While experience shows that quar- antine does not prevent yellow fever, it does prevent free intercourse with the sick, uurs- ing attendance, and the physical comfort-, by which alone the disease can be combated with the greatest success. Fortunately, however, humanity is usually stronger than quar- antine, in practice. Non-intercourse, seclusion, and abandonment, which quarantine directs or necessity implies, are too revolting to common sense to be practiced toward friends. neighbors, and relatives; and, consequently, in yellow fever, these not being carried out in practice, quarantine will always be violated, until morality and charity be extinguished." And yet some happy results may be cited for these restrictive measures. Several towns in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas owe their exemption from the yellow fever in 1878 to their shot-gun quarantines, and, so far, the spread of the plague in Russia this year has I en prevented by military cordons such as in 1831-2 prevented the spread of the cholera in the same country and in Palestine and Arabia.
18
270
A HISTORY OF THE YELLOW FEVER.
recovery is given, and instructions how he is to purify himself; and even after purification, and when he has been allowed to return to the camp, how long he is to remain apart from the people. He also gives instructions as to the cleansing of the leper's clothes, and, finally, as to the burning of them ; and also the burning of his house where the case is of a malignant type. In modern times we first hear of quarantine in connection with the Eastern Empire, for its protection from the plague; and in Venice, where, in 1127, it was enforced against merchants and others arriving from the Levant, where leprosy and the plague then prevailed. A house for persons thus detained was estab- lished on a small island some distance from the city where they were held as in a prison for the full term of forty days. This was known as the House of St. Lazarus-hence the term lazaretto, which was afterward given to all the quaran- tine houses of refuge in Europe, some of which, almost as forbidding as the black-hole of Calcutta, were continued to our own time. The regulations thus established, which also required the production of bills of health, clean or foul as the case might be, remained in force for many years, -Florence and a few of the cities of England copying them as early as 1348. But it was not until the code of Viscount Bernabo was promulgated and enforced on the 17th of January, 1374, that quarantine was permanently established. This was based, as will be seen, upon the law of Moses. He ordered that every plague patient should be taken out of the city into the fields, there to die or recover. The persons who attended upon a plague patient were required to remain apart for ten days before they again associated with any one. The priests were directed to examine the diseased, and point out to special commissioners the persons infected, under penalty of being burned alive. The goods of any one import- ing the plague were confiscated. Finally, none except those appointed for the purpose were to attend upon a person affected with the plague, on penalty of death and confiscation of goods. In 1388 he forbade the admission of peo- ple from infected places into the Venetian dominions, on pain of death. These rigorous and severe rules were copied by all the commercial cities of the Medi- terrancan, and the consequence was that for a time they were closed to naviga- tors. In 1448, the Venetian Senate enacted quarantine laws which required all ships and individuals arriving from places suspected of being infected with contagious diseases to undergo a term of' probation before entering port and discharging cargo. In 1453 the first lazaretto, or pest-house, was permanently organized on the island of Sardinia. Another, erected in 1468, was called the new luzaretto, and was the place whence those who were cured of the plague were sent to spend the prescribed probation of forty days. A board or council of health was about this time established, which, in 1504, was invested with the powers of life and death. In 1603 the municipal ordinances enforcing quarantine which, up to that time, had prevailed in England, gave way to a specific code adopted by the privy council of James I., on the 30th of July of that year. This code required persons living in infected houses, whether in town or country, to be shut up for six weeks under penalty of being "punished as vagabonds by whipping," and provided that " any person going abroad with the disease upon him shall be deemed guilty
271
A HISTORY OF THE YELLOW FEVER.
of felony."* In 1636, bills of health were first made obligatory in England. They have been enforced in Italy ever since 1527. They were then, as they are now, passports for vessels given by the magistrate of the port from which a vessel sails, or by the consul or commercial agent residing there who repre- sents the nation whose flag a vessel sails under. They were distinguished as clean or foul, according to the condition of the place where they were given.
* This brutal code was supplemented and made more cruel in 1665, when the plague having continued to recur, houses were required to be closed an additional month after all the family were dead or recovered ; and a guard was placed in front day and night to keep out visitors, and a large red eross, with the words, "Lord have mercy upon us!" painted on the door. Defoe, in his history of the plague in London, in 1665, shows that the horrors of quarantine were worse than the plague itself. " A whole family was shut up and locked in because the maid-servant was taken sick; these people obtained no liberty to stir, neither for aid nor exercise for forty days; want of air, fear, anger, vex- ation, and all the other griefs attending such an injurious treatment cast the mistress of the family into a fever, and visitors came into the house and said it was plague, though the physician said it was not. However, the family were obliged to begin their quaran- tine anew, on the report of the visitor or examiner, though their former quarantine wanted but a few days of being finished. This oppressed thein so with anger and grief and, as before, straitened them also so much as to room and for want of free air, that most of the family fell sick-one of one distemper, one of another, chiefly scorbntic ail- ments-one of a violent colic-until, after several prolongations of their confinement, some or other of those that came in with the visitors to inspect the persons that were ill, in hopes of releasing them, brought the distemper along with them, and infected the whole house ; and all or most of them died, not of the plague as really upon them before, but of the plague that those people brought them who should have been careful to have protected them from it. And this was a thing which frequently happened, and was indeed one of the worst consequences of shutting up houses.' Watchmen were sta- tioned at the doors of the sick to prevent escape, and the passer-by shuddered when he looked up and saw the fatal mark of isolation on the door." . "This merciless imprison- ment," says Dr. A. N. Bell, the sanitarian, "was pursued with a heartless obduracy, en- gendered by the belief that it was the only means of averting death to those who inflicted it." Defoe also records the noble deeds of some of the health officers, and some country people who constantly sought out the suffering, and procured and carried them food; and such persons "very seldom got any harm from it," and were therefore deemed to have been miraculously preserved, while hundreds and thousands of those who fled died in their flight. "They had the taint of the disease in their vitals, and after their spirits were so diseased they could never escape it." Thus prevailed the quarantine epidemic of Viscount Bernabo, with its attendant symptoms of terror, starvation, and suicidal mania, "until," in the words of Defoe, "it was impossible to beat any thing into their heads; they gave way to the impetnosity of their temper, full of onteries and lamenta- tions when taken sick : and madly careless of themselves, foolhardy and obstinate while they were well." France. Holland, Spain, Portugal, indeed all the commercial States and seaports of Europe, followed the example of Venice; and plague reigned. Quaran- tine4, which took no cognizance of municipal or domestic filth were not only powerless, but were promotive of the diseases against which they were enforced. Insomuch that at the beginning of the eighteenth century M. Aubert Roche estimated that for the three centuries next preceding the general establishment of lazarettos, there were 105 epidem- ies ; for the three centuries next after, 143. The more effectual suppression of the plagne since the beginning of the eighteenth century he rightly attributed to the general progres- of civilization under the auspices of public hygiene.
272
A HISTORY OF THE YELLOW FEVER.
A foul bill is delivered in a port where cholera, the black plague, or yellow fever exist; a clean bill where none of these exist. At first forty days was exactingly enforced, but now the extent of the probation is determined by the health hill, at the option of the quarantine authorities. In 1700, after the yellow fever visitation of 1699, in Philadelphia, the General Assembly of the colony of Pennsylvania, enacted the first quarantine law in this country, in- posing a fine of one hundred pounds upon every unhealthy vessel that landed. In 1701, a health law providing for quarantime was enacted in Massachusetts. In 1710, the English Parliament passed an act establishing quarantine throughout the kingdom, in preparation for the plague which then prevailed along the shores of the Baltic. In a few years after, another act was passed " to enable His Majesty more effectually to prohibit commerce, for the space of one year, with any country that is or shall he infected with the plague." In France no regular system was instituted until after the great plague in Mar- seilles, in 1720-21. A general system was then adopted, and made applicable to all the French ports on the Mediterranean for the exclusion and seque-tra- tion of all vessels and persons from infected places, and where plague prevailed of all infected houses and their occupants, under extremely rigid restrictions and heavy penalties .* In 1720, while plague was prevailing at Marseilles, the celebrated Dr. Richard Mead was requested by the English government to furnish necessary regulations for the occasion. He advised a continuance of the forty days' lazaretto system of Bernabo, the separation of the sick from the well, and the sinking of infected goods and vessel- in the sea. In 1721, it was further enacted by Parliament that infected persons escaping from quar- antine, and well persons not liable to quarantine, but who, having entered, escaped therefrom, should suffer death.i The inhumanity of these acts soon
" " But," as Dr. A. N. Bell, in his article on quarantine, says, "on a return of the disease to Marseilles some time after, the restrictions having proven to be exceedingly vexations. the Chamber of Commerce opposed their further execution as being unnecessarily oppressive. without any corresponding benefit, and prejudicial to the commercial world. This oppo- sition of the merchants was soon after followed by special administration under officers known as Intendents of Health, who, after certain sanitary precautions, admitted vessels to pratique from infected places. The independence of Marseilles and Toulon of the general ordinances was, at the first, severely criticised by the other ports, and much discontent ere- ated. Marseille, especially was accused of inviting plague. But her independent sanitary administration gained ground. By a succession of royal edicts she was sustained in her efforts to render quarantine less oppressive to commerce, and confirmed in her independ- ence."
t An evidence of the extremes to which quarantinists, in modern times, are forced to go to maintain their theory is furnished by the late Dr. Townsend, who was a consistent, honest. and able quarantinist, and who says, in his book on the yellow fever in New York, as it appeared in 1822, that all intercourse with the West Indies (and why not with New Or- leans ? should be prohibited for five months in every year, beginning with June, in order to prevent the importation of yellow fever. He says, that "unless an unbroken line of lazarettos be established along the whole coast. to guard against the pestilence, we can not ever hope to be entirely secare. What will avail the most efficient system of quarantine laws, established here and there in a few cities on the coast, if all the intermediate towns, with which a constant intercourse is going on, freely admit vessels? etc."
273
A HISTORY OF THE YELLOW FEVER.
after caused their repeal. But in 1728 another was passed, limited to three years, declaring any person escaping or violating quarantine guilty of felony, and forfeiting ship and goods. This act was revived, and, with but slight mod- itication, kept in force until 1753, when the system was improved by adding floating lazarettos, for the purpose of unloading and aerating merchandise, at a distance from the shore in Standish Creek, instead of requiring an almost in- terminable detention of vessels off the Scilly Islands, as previously practiced. The first port physician in what is now the United States was appointed by the council of Philadelphia, in 1720. The first actual enforcement of quarantine laws in the American colonies took place at Philadelphia, in 1728, from which time on the various ports in the other colonies gradually adopted the same system with various degrees of severity, and captains and owners were forced to observe them from fear of heavy penalties. In 1738, pilots were ordered not to bring a vessel with passengers nearer the city than one mile, until she had been boarded and examined by a physician appointed for that purpose. In 1743, a regular quarantine establishment was built on Fisher's (now State) Island, at the junction of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. In 1758. New York enacted her first quarantine laws. In 1776, Pennsylvania fixed a peu- alty of one hundred pounds for bringing a passenger vessel, or one from a sickly port, nearer to Philadelphia than Mud Island, or Fort Mifflin, without a permit from a health officer. A fine of one hundred pounds was also exacted for concealing a sick passenger. In 1780, in England, the number of quaran- tine stations was increased to thirteen; seven in England, four in Scotland, and two in Jersey and Guernsey. . These regulations remained unchanged un- til a comparatively recent period. The Congress of the United States passed an act in 1799, "respecting quarantine and health laws," which still stands upon the statute books. In 1817, New Orleans first enforced quarantine. In 1818 the law was repealed, but was re-enacted in 1819. In 1821,* it was strengthened
# Dowler, in the fourth, twelfth, and fourteenth chapters of his pamphlet, treating of the yellow fever as to the quarantine established and enforced in New Orleans in 1521, says : " The quarantine laws passed by the Legislature in February, 1821, creating a Board of Health, with the most plenary powers, legislative, judicial, executive, pecuniary, and san- itary, modeled after codes the most rigid, and enforced by the heaviest penalties, were car- ried into effect in March of the same year. The quarantine ground established at the Eng- lish Turn, including incidental expenses, cost over twenty-two thousand dollars. The year proved salubrious-a result attributed to the strict quarantine. The Governor, in January, 1822, congratulated the Legislature upon the good fortune of New Orleans, as being ' the healthiest city' in the Union. But, at the close of August, the yellow fever appeared; it augmented throughout September, but did not reach its culminating point until October-the month of greatest mortality-having amounted to 665, exceeding the preceding month by eighty-three. Governor Robertson's next message breathed sorrow and despair. " It is," says he, " an idle waste of time for me to inquire into the canses, origin, and nature of this dreadful malady. The State resorted to quarantine, under the expectation that it would add to the chances of escape from this dreadful visitation. If this hope be fallacious, if no good effect has been produced, if even a procrastination of its appearance has not resulted from this measure, then should it be abandoned, and our commerce be relieved from the expense and inconvenience which it occasions." The Legislature declared that the city was perfectly healthy until the month of September,
274
A HISTORY OF THE YELLOW FEVER.
and was continued five years, during which two epidemics occurred; and in other years it prevailed in sporadic forms. In 1825 quarantine was abandoned and
the Board of Health said until the close of August, when the Lynch family, having ar- rived from Pensacola, communicated the disease to the inhabitants of Bienville Street, and thence to the inhabitants of the whole city. This same Board of Health, the previ- outs year, in an official manifesto, dated September 4th, gave a very different account of the origin of this epidemic, charging the disease to the sun, the weather, and fatigue, and never so much as hinting that the poor Lynches had introduced contagion into the city, which latter, saving five yellow fever deaths, " never was more healthy." The Board tes- tified to the " strictness of the measures " (quarantine then existing; to check its progress. "This document," says the inexorable Dowler, " is a melancholy proof of the incon- sistent and contradictory opinions and actions of men unwilling to relinquish power, who resort to the sun, etc., to account for the origin of the fever ; then fly to contagion : now misleading the publie, by stating that there are but five cases having the usual symptoms. and then saying that their strict measures will check its progress, thereby jeopardiding the lives of a whole city, upon the supposition of the contagiousness of the disease. What ean be more criminal in a Board of Health, whether its members believe in the conta- gious or local origin of the yellow fever, than the suppression of truth, except it be the promulgation of falsehood ? Seclusion in the one case, if contagion be true, amt dight in the other, if the fever be of local origin, might have saved hundreds of lives, if adopted early enough." The late Dr. Townsend, of New York, a consistent contagionist, in a work on yellow fever, published in 1823, avers that facts known in that city . show that the disease actually prevailed in New Orleans at least a month anterior to this meet- ing of the Board of Health." He says, "that from information derived from various sources, which may be fully relied on, yellow fever broke out in New Orleans as early as the beginning of or middle of July." " While the facts, arguments, and quarantine op- erations were still fresh," says Dowler again, " the public felt convinced of the evil of this system of yellow fever prevention, and determined to petition the Legislature to abolish the quarantine laws. Accordingly, on the 23d of January, 1823, a large public meeting took place, in which it was moved and carried, ' that the late epidemie had te-ted the total inefficiency of the quarantine laws and regulations; we consider them not only use- less, but in the highest degree oppressive and injurious to the commerce of this city, arol that application ought to be made to the Legislature for the purpose of having them an- nulled.' A memorial was addressed to the Legislature accordingly for that purpose. The quarantine had been tried for three years, and yet two epidemies had occurred. The contagionists began to waver, and the joint committee of both houses of the Legisla- ture, disagreeing on quarantine, were discharged from the consideration of the same on the last day of November, 1824. Experience, which is ever opposed to false theory. con- vinced the public that quarantine was not only useless, but supremely mischievous, in a city so exclusively commercial, that a free, untrammeled trade, with freedom of ingress, «gress, and progress is not only simply useful, but a social necessity, involving the ques- tion of subsistence or starvation. Accordingly, on the 10th of February, 1825, the Leg- islature repealed the quarantine laws which it had enacted just four years previou-ly: at the same time the quarantine grounds were ordered to be sold. During the eight years that followed, without quarantine, the yellow fever diminished. It never equaled this which took place under the strict quarantine of 1822, when, according to some authorities. 2,000 died of that malady, although the records, which I have examined, show only ses. a number sufficiently appalling in the comparatively small population then resident in the city, especially during the hot season; the whole reported mortality for the three months, endling with October, being 1,362. The ratio of mortality in the Charity H. s- pital was enormmis-out of 340 admissions, 239 deaths, and only ninety-eight care- t.ok place. The maximum mortality upon one day rose to SD-of yellow fever to tu."
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