Yellow Jack was more responsible than anything else, except, perhaps, Toussaint, for the defeat of both the Napoleonic and Brit forces to restore San Domingue - Haiti to colonial and slave status.
It wiped out Memphis, U.S.A.
It devastated New Orleans every summer, see B. Hambley's Fever Season -- which then so weakened the populace it was easily prey to other equally lethal epidemics. Malaria was endemic to NO, as it was to all of the Gulf and the lower Atlantic coast as well. It wasn't only the heat that sent those in the Southern states who could afford the annual migration to the mountains and elsewhere every summer.
As we see from other novels published, such as Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 these Yellow Jack epidemics were not confined to the South either.
What frightens me (recall, I've lived in New Orleans and am very familiar with the Gulf from both sides of it, and Tulane was the first facility to seriously research tropical diseases and how to fight them -- see the Sinclair Lewis novel, Arrowsmith) is we're beginning to see the signs of these conditions return in these parts of the world due to the state of the health care racketeers and other criminals who hold this nation hostage. They have no interest in public health, but epidemics don't much pay attention to your rank either.
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Date: 2009-06-12 06:24 pm (UTC)Yellow Jack was more responsible than anything else, except, perhaps, Toussaint, for the defeat of both the Napoleonic and Brit forces to restore San Domingue - Haiti to colonial and slave status.
It wiped out Memphis, U.S.A.
It devastated New Orleans every summer, see B. Hambley's Fever Season -- which then so weakened the populace it was easily prey to other equally lethal epidemics. Malaria was endemic to NO, as it was to all of the Gulf and the lower Atlantic coast as well. It wasn't only the heat that sent those in the Southern states who could afford the annual migration to the mountains and elsewhere every summer.
As we see from other novels published, such as Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 these Yellow Jack epidemics were not confined to the South either.
What frightens me (recall, I've lived in New Orleans and am very familiar with the Gulf from both sides of it, and Tulane was the first facility to seriously research tropical diseases and how to fight them -- see the Sinclair Lewis novel, Arrowsmith) is we're beginning to see the signs of these conditions return in these parts of the world due to the state of the health care racketeers and other criminals who hold this nation hostage. They have no interest in public health, but epidemics don't much pay attention to your rank either.