EPIDEMICS
“We found that out during and after the
yellow fever epidemic. Those who
had the means to flee town, did so, of course. There must have
been thirty or
forty thousand of them, wouldn’t you say, Mama?”
“Sì.”
Eleonora could still see them fighting to board the trains in the first days before the station was closed. There were wagons with the dead constantly going by in the street, and the bodies that they didn’t manage to bury during the day, they did so at night, by the light of the bonfires of the victims’ clothes. The yellow fever had entered Memphis from the river; the George C. Wolf and the Bee, two supply ships from New Orleans, had arrived with two passengers sick with yellow fever and had been moored in quarantine for three weeks before Kate Bionda, a girl who worked at a riverfront stand, suddenly died, and the town knew that some sailor or passenger must have broken the quarantine to visit her and in doing so brought death to their doors. And after the flight of those thirty or forty thousand fortunate souls, a terrible calm and silence had settled over Memphis. No church bells. No mail. No news, because the telegrapher had been able to flee. There was only silence and the grief of those who had lost a loved one or their entire family. And then there were the noises of those retching their black vomit before death.
“There were only the poor or unlucky left in Memphis. We had to work together, we had to accept our different origins and beliefs, we had to get through the crisis. We finally created a sewage system. We finally have decent drinking water thanks to new wells.”
“Sì.”
Eleonora could still see them fighting to board the trains in the first days before the station was closed. There were wagons with the dead constantly going by in the street, and the bodies that they didn’t manage to bury during the day, they did so at night, by the light of the bonfires of the victims’ clothes. The yellow fever had entered Memphis from the river; the George C. Wolf and the Bee, two supply ships from New Orleans, had arrived with two passengers sick with yellow fever and had been moored in quarantine for three weeks before Kate Bionda, a girl who worked at a riverfront stand, suddenly died, and the town knew that some sailor or passenger must have broken the quarantine to visit her and in doing so brought death to their doors. And after the flight of those thirty or forty thousand fortunate souls, a terrible calm and silence had settled over Memphis. No church bells. No mail. No news, because the telegrapher had been able to flee. There was only silence and the grief of those who had lost a loved one or their entire family. And then there were the noises of those retching their black vomit before death.
“There were only the poor or unlucky left in Memphis. We had to work together, we had to accept our different origins and beliefs, we had to get through the crisis. We finally created a sewage system. We finally have decent drinking water thanks to new wells.”
| yellow_fever_memphis.pdf |
Until the 1800s, epidemics
were the
equivalent of what today would be a nuclear war. An immense part
of the
population disappeared in record time and entire towns went to
ruin. Often we
don’t appreciate just to what degree these epidemics have
influenced human
history all over the world. This photo shows a page from the
cemetery records of the city of
Alessandria, Italy, listing the number of bodies buried in 1867.
Almost twenty
percent had died from cholera. To think that the epidemic of
that year was not
a particularly severe one.
But the boys had gone
off anyway, and not only did they find commanders who were rigid
and harsh to
the level of madness, not only did they fight against an enemy
they weren’t
expecting...., but the cholera outbreak had killed far more of
them
than bullets, and now the old people blamed him in their contorted
way.
