Yellow Fever In Philadelphia

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In Philadelphia, on October 11, 1793, there was a coffin waiting outside of an alleyway for a man sick with Yellow Fever. Waiting for the moment of his death. Immediately after he passed, he was put into the coffin, in effort to keep the disease from spreading. The city was terrified of the disease. It sent Philadelphia, America's largest city and capitol, at the time, into a panic. President Washington and other members of the federal government fled to the country side. It killed an estimated 2,000 people in Philadelphia in the short period of time of a few month's. A Quaker who lived in Philadelphia wrote in his diary that there were "few houses if any, that were free of sickness." There was not a specific cure or medicine at the time but …show more content…
It was in Norfolk, June through October in 1855 2,000 died. The epidemic in Mississippi Valley caused more than half of the 47,000 residents to flee the city. More than 5,000 died that summer, but there was a total of 20,000 deaths from May to October. During the Spanish-American war in Cuba, 1898 hundreds of American Soldiers were killed. More were killed by Yellow Fever than by the enemy. It led to a U.S. Army Yellow Fever Board that was led by Walter Reed. Americas last outbreak was in New Orleans in 1905, May through October. More than 900 died. In total Yellow Fever took more than 41,000 lives in New Orleans from 1817-1905. Proving once again that Yellow Fever is very dangerous. Yellow Fever today still appears in small outbreaks in South America and more serious ones in West and Central Africa.

Yellow Fever was detrimental to various populations it caused so much loss. Hans Zinsser summed it up how deadly Yellow Fever was when he stated, "Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito." He is saying how all of those powerful weapons do not even add up to the power that Yellow Fever had. It was so dangerous that in the 1900's it was a priority of doctors to find a …show more content…
This included Hideyo Noguchi, he was born in Japan. He was born into poverty but worked his way to getting a medical degree and got a position at the Rockefeller Institute. He had previously found the bacteria that was the cause of Weils disease, which is a bacterial infection. He suspected that Weils disease and Yellow Fever were identical or closely related diseases. He found the same bacteria from Weils disease in the livers of a Yellow Fever patients. He then used it to produce a serum and antiserum against Yellow Fever that were both manufactured at the Rockefeller Institute. It was used in the United States, Latin America and French African colonies. Noguchi published successful results on 7,964 vaccinations. In 1926 Max Theiler and Andrew Sellards proved that the bacteria discovered by Noguchi was
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