s, for half. Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, and even Holly Springs,
Mississippi, were scenes of epidemics as well. Holly Springs represented a
new, post–Civil War, railroad-era scene in which towns distant from ports
were counted in doleful statistics.
Yellow fever is not contagious, of course; American and European physi-
cians declared this more than a century before Reed’s and Carroll’s dis-
covery of the vector. Yet whenever an outbreak occurred, terrified peopled
fled—or tried to flee—infected cities. Officials—mayors, the police, and by
, boards of health—declared quarantines and barricaded their bound-
aries to contain each epidemic. Naturally, few people willingly entered a
yellow fever town. But why were quarantines declared against an ill not
transmitted person-to-person? According to Humphreys, southern doctors
interested in yellow fever concocted a theory justifying quarantines. Avoid-
ing ‘‘contagious,’’ they invented ‘‘transmissibility’’ to suggest certain en-
vironmental conditions, such as temperatures in ships’ holds and cargo
boxes, that in turn released and spread the disease. Therefore both people
and trade goods in ports must be locked in place, lest they extend an epi-
demic’s geographical scope. Another explanation for quarantines is that
urban officialdom found them easier to impose than the systematic clean-
ing of cities. The Civil War occupation of New Orleans presented an en-
ticing example of what might have been in the antebellum South. General
Benjamin Butler, the occupying commander, ordered huge cadres of work-
ers to scour streets and dispose of garbage, and New Orleans’s public health
was never better. Likewise, the gradual disappearance of yellow fever from
the Atlantic coast north of Georgia, toward the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury (but before the Reed and Carroll findings), correlates well with installa-
tion of urban water and sewer systems. And on the Mississippi, Memphis’s
catastrophic epidemic led directly to the city’s first modern sewer sys-
tem, built –.
Finally, discovery and confirmation of yellow fever’s etiology, a famous
adventure in tropical medicine, both corresponded to and caused a new,
modern urbanism in the South. A Cuban physician, Carlos Finlay, had pro-
posed the mosquito as vector in , but his preliminary research and hy-
pothesis were rejected by North American medicos. When a U.S. researcher,
Dr. Ronald Ross, confirmed in that a certain mosquito bred in still,
fresh water injected the malaria virus, however, the surgeon general of
the United States, George Sternberg (himself a pioneer microbiologist), di-
rected Reed and Carroll toward their experiments. At long last, then, but
too late for so many thousands who had perished in such agony, cities were