1853 yellow fever epidemic


The 1853 yellow fever epidemic of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean islands resulted in thousands of fatalities. Over 9,000 people died of yellow fever in New Orleans alone, around 8% of the total population. Many of the dead in New Orleans were recent Irish immigrants living in difficult conditions and without any acquired immunity. There was a stark racial disparity in mortality rates: "7.4% of whites who contracted yellow fever died, while only 0.2% of blacks perished from the disease." As historian Kathryn Olivarius observed in Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, "For enslaved blacks, the story was different. Immunity protected them from yellow fever, but as embodied capital, they saw the social and monetary value of their acclimation accrued to their white owners."
The epidemic was an international news story. A newspaper in Cambridge, England, published this evocative description of the scene in the Crescent City:
One of the most popular treatments in New Orleans was by Marie Laveau, whose practice of voodoo and/or the healing arts with yellow fever was so esteemed that "a committee of citizens was appointed to wait upon her, and beg her to lend her aid to the feversmitten, numbers of whom she saved." In addition to death toll in New Orleans:
  • 1,100 people died in the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama. A volunteer public-health service in the Mobile area called the Can't Get Away Club provided healthcare to the afflicted. Josiah C. Nott had predicted a severe outbreak "simply from the fact that I had never known the disease early in the season to attack Vera Cruz, West India Islands and New Orleans" without it being a season of severe disease.
  • Navigating inland, yellow jack came to the town of Natchez, Mississippi in July 1853, killing 5% of the population. In September a local newspaper reported, "Everybody has left town that could, and but very few are left. Business is at a dead standstill. However, two dry goods stores were open on Main St. yesterday; most of the merchants have sought temporary locations in the countryside or neighboring villages. A greater panic never occurred before from a similar cause among any people. Our streets look desolate indeed, you may walk an hour sometimes and not meet a dozen persons." Correspondence indicates that slave trader C.M. Rutherford and trader-turned-planter Rice C. Ballard intended to file an insurance claim on a 23-year-old slave named Charles Craig, who had been killed by yellow fever.
  • Yellow fever killed over 500 in Galveston, Texas, in 1853. It arrived in Pensacola in July on the steamer Vixen and by October had killed 260.
  • There are many 1853 yellow fever victims in the Old Town Key West Cemetery.
  • The fever was at Port Royal, Jamaica in April through June, killing 10 and then vanished; and in September it landed in Bermuda.
Multiple books were written by contemporary doctors and public health officials about the epidemic; the New Orleans city directory of 1854 included a long essay on the series of major epidemics suffered by the city since before the Louisiana Purchase. The fall preceding the 1853 outbreak there were a small number of cases in the Caribbean; the Jamaican cases were documented, in part, in The Lancet by a surgeon of the Royal Navy.