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Fever Season: The Story of a Terrifying Epidemic and the People Who Saved a City

Amazon.com Price:  $17.27 (as of 03/05/2019 00:08 PST- Details)

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Description

While the American South had grown to expect a yellow fever breakout almost yearly, the 1878 epidemic used to be without question the worst ever. Moving up the Mississippi River in the late summer, in the span of only some months the fever killed more than eighteen thousand people. The city of Memphis, Tennessee, used to be particularly hard hit: Of the approximately twenty thousand who didn’t flee the city, seventeen thousand contracted the fever, and more than five thousand died-the equivalent of a million New Yorkers dying in a pandemic today.

Fever Season chronicles the drama in Memphis from the outbreak in August until the disease ran its course in late October. The story that Jeanette Keith uncovered is a profound-and never more relevant-account of how a catastrophe inspired reactions both heroic and cowardly. Some ministers, politicians, and police fled their constituents, at the same time as prostitutes and the poor risked their lives to nurse the sick. The use of the vivid, anguished accounts and diaries of those who chose to stay and people who were left at the back of, Fever Season depicts the events of that summer and fall. In its pages we meet people of great courage and compassion, many of whom died for having those virtues. We also learn the way a disaster can shape the way forward for a city.

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