Read The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our Nation for Free Online Page A

threatened with law-suits if they detained a ship carrying perishable fruits. Many of those ships in 1878 came from Cuba, where the Ten Years’ War for independence was coming to an end and an epidemic of yellow fever had been raging since March. Refugees landed in New Orleans by the hundreds.
    The very day that the Souder arrived, another ship coming from Havana had declared five cases of fever on board. It was promptly taken into custody and would be held for nearly two weeks while it was thoroughly worked over with sulfur and carbolic acid. The harbor was filling with vessels bobbing in the water, the Yellow Jack flying high over their decks.
    The captain of the Souder wasn’t going to take any chances for delay; the last thing he needed was to be detained for a week or two at a quarantine outpost. A few of his men looked to be suffering from more than the average hangover, even complaining of fever. The captain met the quarantine physician on the gangway and offered up one feverish crewmember. The physician examined him, diagnosed it as malarial fever and sent him to the quarantine infirmary before examining the remaining crew. He recorded no other cases of fever. The physician did take notice of one other sailor looking sickly though; it was the ship’s purser John Clark. The men blamed his condition on a rum hangover and “neuralgia,” but Clark would later boast he “had beaten the quarantine officer.” The Emily B. Souder was detained for only a few hours before she was given a clean bill of health and steamed her way into New Orleans, mooring in a berth off Calliope Street.
    That night, John Clark’s health worsened. Feeling feverish and agitated with an intolerable headache, he took a room at a nearby boardinghouse on Claiborne where a mulatto nurse looked after him. As his temperature climbed, his pulse slowed, known as Faget’s sign. He felt intense heat all over his skin, but was unable to perspire. The fever attacked his organs, and his kidneys and intestines stopped functioning; high concentrations of uric acid collected in his kidneys, while he writhed from abdominal cramping.
    His entire body ached from dehydration, and he suffered from severe hypoglycemia.
    By Friday afternoon, Clark suddenly began to feel better and asked for food. A doctor who later described the scene wrote that the “fancy of food” always proved fatal. With the approach of evening, Clark again grew restless and his condition spiraled; the fever returned. He awoke twice in the night convulsing before finally slipping into delirium, his eyes glassy and empty. With the third convulsion, he died. It was shortly after 2:00 a.m. His dying liver had released a surge of bile, tinting the whites of his eyes and his skin saffron yellow. Upon later investigation, Clark was found to have been given treatments for yellow fever, though his death was officially recorded as malarial fever by the Board of Health.
    Clark’s body was removed, and he was quietly buried by 10:00 a.m. with no funeral and no public announcement of his death. Nearby streets were disinfected with carbolic acid, the smell lingering in the air well into the evening.
    On the same day that Clark was buried, the Souder ’s engineer, Thomas Elliott, fell feverish in a boarding room on Front and Girod streets; he died five days later in a nearby hotel. Rumor of another dead crewmember from the Souder caught the attention of two city physicians, and the body was sent to the dead house where an autopsy could be performed. The physicians described Elliott’s body as “bright canary color” and his stomach filled with dark, blood-like matter. Dr. Samuel Choppin, president of the Board of Health of Louisiana, visited the dead house to examine Elliott’s body. Choppin would later write: “These are all the usual appearances observed in the examination of a person dead of yellow fever, and we had no doubt that the man had been the subject of this disease.”
    It was the end