TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 101
envisioned by those who established empire and tried to control"
(Shepherd53).
The second example in this narrative takes us to a time when the
U.S.geopoliticalandeconomichegemonywasfirmlyinplace:in1878,
yellow fever visited another port city, this time Memphis, TN. This
incident (less firmly placed in the collective memory of the nation) had
severeeffectsthatwentwellbeyondwhathadhappenedinthenotorious
Philadelphia case. About two thirds of the city's population were lost
andthismakestheMemphisepidemiconeof"theworsturbandisasters
to befall the country.. ." (M. Crosby 87).^53 Here again, the city had
been a confirmed disease ecology; people did or at least could have
known of many previous incidents of the fever in the city. Its long
history of mass infections occupied a premier place in public memory.
As in Philadelphia a hundred years earlier, the presence of dangerous
biotic material proved to be the "dangerous supplement" to other
accepted, even desired, lived connections of Americans with other
places across the Americas. At that time, Memphis (like New Orleans,
where the fever had arrived a bit earlier) was what Philadelphia had
been a hundred years earlier: the hub of well-established hemispheric
connectivities, an intense network of trade—including the slave trade—
which linkedthe city and the whole MississippiRivervalley to ports in
the Caribbean and Latin America (M. Crosby 14; Nuwer 7, 23). This
had made the Bluff City one of the most prosperous places along the
river,anodalpointinthebuddingU.S.-Americancommercialempire.
UnlikeinPhiladelphia1793,theoriginofthediseaseisclear,atleast
in retrospect. The infection was brought into the city on board a
Mississippi towboat, theJohn D. Porter, from New Orleans. There, it
had taken on cargo right next to a ship whose crew had been infected
with yellow fever in Havana, where the epidemic was already raging at
that time. A few days after theJohnD.Porter, another steamer brought
in more people infected by "Yellow Jack," as the fever was popularly
called. Even though Memphis had a long history as a disease ecology,
(^53) The population had been roughly 50,000 before about 30,000 fled at the start
oftheepidemiconAug.5,1878.Ofthe19,000whostayedinMemphis,17,000
camedownwithyellowfever,and5,150died(Bloom110;M.Crosby88).