The Yellow Fever Years

In the summer of eighteen eighty-two, the waterfront near you was a place that people fled rather than visited. Yellow fever had arrived again, carried by sailors aboard ships from Jamaica and New Orleans that had been cleared through quarantine without adequate inspection. Within weeks, Pensacola was in the grip of one of the worst epidemics in its history.

Yellow fever had struck Pensacola before, repeatedly. The disease came with the ships, and a port city that lived by its harbor could not easily defend itself against what arrived in the bilges. The eighteen seventy-four epidemic had filled the Navy surgeon's official reports. Eighteen eighty-two was worse.

Before the epidemic concluded that fall, the New York Times reported seven hundred eighty-three confirmed cases in Pensacola. Estimates of total deaths ranged between one hundred fifty and two hundred people in the city and surrounding communities. Most of the healthier residents had already fled to the countryside. Those who stayed, whether from poverty, duty, or stubbornness, faced a disease for which medicine had no real treatment and no agreed-upon cause.

Doctors in eighteen eighty-two did not yet know that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquito. The Cuban physician Carlos Finlay had published his mosquito-transmission theory in eighteen eighty-one, but his findings were not widely accepted until Walter Reed confirmed them around the turn of the century. Pensacola's physicians could diagnose the jaundiced skin and internal hemorrhaging that gave yellow fever its name. They could do little else.

The Alabama state government quarantined against Pensacola during the outbreak. When the disease finally burned through its available hosts and retreated with cooler weather, Pensacola counted its dead, buried them quietly, and went back to work at the docks.