and the urban environment, Ruffin failed. Millponds may have ultimately
given way to private fishing ponds in the country—little improvement,
unless they were aerated—but cities, especially southern ones, remained
filthy for another generation and more after Ruffin’s time.
tIn the long meantime, the most dreaded of ills regularly stalked the
urban South. Petersburg’s board of health (to which Ruffin referred), like
similar boards in most warm-climate cities, probably existed because of
yellow fever. Other diseases (as the medical historian Margaret Humphreys
observes) claimed more lives than yellow fever. But this tropical horror
killed more rapidly with such horrible suffering, and it shut down cities
utterly, stifling business and trade. In U.S. army doctors Walter Reed
and James Carroll confirmed that yellow fever is an arbovirus transmitted
to humans by the mosquito speciesAedes aegypti. Unlike the malarial vec-
tor,Aedesdoes not prefer marshes, lakes, or ponds for its incubation but
urban cisterns, flowerpots, puddles, and buckets. The mosquitoes fly forth
at maturity in July and die off with the first frost of fall—defining the fear-
ful ‘‘season.’’^16
A mild version of infection resembles influenza. Patients suffer muscle
aches, fever, and chills but recover in a week or so. The classic version
of yellow fever begins with the flulike symptoms but proceeds rapidly to
liver failure; jaundice; hemorrhaging from the gums, nose, and stomach
lining; then a final stage marked by dark-colored vomit. (English-speakers
named the disease after the jaundiced complexions of victims; the Span-
ish, after the projectile eruptions from the victim’s mouth—vomito negro.)
Afro-southern victims may well have been underreported by eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century authorities, but they may also have benefited from
a genetic resistance to the disease. White people seem disproportionately
represented in horrendous tallies of the dead. Mobile, in the outbreaks of
and , lost and , people from populations of only ,
and ,, respectively. The twin cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth, Vir-
ginia, lost more than a tenth of their combined populations in . Mem-
phis was devastated in and when , and then , died.
(Mary Harris—later self-styled Mother Jones, courageous champion of min-
ers and other oppressed workers—lost her husband and all her children in
the Memphis outbreak.) New Orleans, the South’s largest city and per-
haps the dirtiest, too, was regularly and sorely afflicted. In yellow fever
accounted for a third of all the Crescent City’s deaths, and during the early