Fever Season

Starred review from July 9, 2012
Yellow Jack traveled from New Orleans to Illinois in the summer and early fall of 1878, killing 18,000 people and gripping national attention. Historian Keith (Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight) writes of the mostly forgotten three-month siege of Memphis by a virulent hemorrhagic fever whose origin was shrouded in mystery and myth. Spread by mosquitoes buzzing about Memphis’s cisterns, the yellow fever’s toll was horrific—but the response of the city’s journalists, nurses, and citizens is what catches Keith’s attention, providing riveting portraits of those who helped mitigate the fever’s wrath. Among them were Kezia DePelchin, a dour and selfless Texas nurse who rose above the mass of health-care workers making what one man called “a carnival” of fever season; John McLeod Keating, who never left his post as editor of the Daily Appeal; tireless Dr. William Armstrong, who offered his skill, and his life, to treat his patients; and Annie Cook, a soulful madam who turned her house of ill-repute into a hospital, illustrating Keith’s point that “you cannot tell in advance who will be the hero, who the coward, in a crisis like the epidemic.” Keith delivers a rewarding must-read for both history and public health buffs. Illus. Agent: David Miller, Garamond Agency.

September 1, 2012
The story of the devastation caused by the yellow fever epidemic in Memphis in 1878, which blighted the city for a generation. Benefiting from an era when newspapers flourished and everyone wrote letters, Keith (History/Bloomsburg Univ.; Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War, 2003, etc.) mines these rich sources to produce an extremely detailed, predictably macabre account. A regular feature of Southern life, yellow fever epidemics began in spring (when mosquitoes became active) and vanished with the first frost. Until scientists discovered the cause in 1900, doctors blamed poisonous emanations from rotting trash, filth and sewage, all of which Memphis possessed in abundance. Taxing hardworking citizens to provide free government services (e.g., sewers, garbage collection, clean water) provoked as much outrage then as today, and Memphis' city government remaining stubbornly opposed. Everyone worried when yellow fever reached New Orleans in early summer and proceeded slowly northward. Despite ineffectual quarantine efforts, the first Memphis case appeared in August. Within weeks, 30,000 of the city's 50,000 citizens fled, most of the rest fell ill, and 5,000 died. Disaster historians work best describing the background and the consequences but struggle to make the events themselves stand out, and Keith is no exception. The middle 150 pages feature the usual relentless parade of gruesome suffering, noble sacrifice and bad behavior (volunteers poured in; most died; Catholic priests remained and died; most Protestant clergy fled). Local heroes organized relief, and the nation responded generously. Keith does not exaggerate its historical significance but delivers an admirable account of a Southern city doing its best to deal with a frightening, incomprehensible epidemic.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.