Yellow Fever
Yellow Fever was a disease that caused thousands of deaths and many people to flee the afflicted areas. It begins with a headache, backache, and fever making the patient extremely sick from the start, and gets its name from the yellow color of the skin, which develops in the third day of the illness. At the end of one week, the afflicted person is either dead or recovering. Yellow Fever is transmitted by mosquitoes, when it bites an infected person it carries several thousand infective doses of the disease making it a carrier for life passing it from human to human.
Yellow Fever made its first appearance in America in 1668, in Philadelphia and New York as well as Boston in 1693 brought over from Barbados. Throughout the Colonial period, there were several epidemics in those cities as well as Texas, New Hampshire, Florida and up the Mississippi river as far as St. Louis, Missouri. During many of these epidemics, the residents who chose to stay in the area avoided others by shutting themselves in their houses away from friends and jobs. Unemployment and businesses coming to a halt was universal. The death rate was so high the people had to work day and night to bury the dead.
Read more about this topic: Disease In Colonial America, Epidemic of Diseases
Famous quotes containing the words yellow and/or fever:
“Tom: All right, boys. C’mon. Why don’t you say I’m a yellow belly and a big mouth at that?
Shep: You yellow? Who thinks you’re yellow? Did you hear what he said? A guy who’s got the nerve to marry? That’s more than Flash Gordon ever did.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Y’know Pete, back where I come from folks call that love stuff “quick poison” or “slow poison.” If it’s quick poison it hurts you all over real bad like a shock of electricity. But if it’s slow poison, well, it’s like a fever that aches in your bones for a thousand years.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)