In a summer of panic and death in 1878, more than half the population of Memphis, Tenn., fled the raging yellow fever epidemic, which finally waned when cooler weather set in. The disease had been transmitted by the
Aedes aegypti mosquito, which came in swarms on ships from the Caribbean or West Africa. This account has a narrower scope than James Dickerson's recent
Yellow Fever, focusing on the Memphis tragedy, but journalist Crosby offers a forceful narrative of a disease's ravages and the quest to find its cause and cure. Crosby is particularly good at evoking the horrific conditions in Memphis, "a city of corpses" and rife with illness characterized by high fever, black vomit and hemorrhaging, treated by primitive methods. Crosby also relates arresting tales of heroism, such as how two nuns returned to the quarantined city from a vacation to nurse the victims. The author profiles scientists, some of whom died in their fight to identify the cause of this deadly disease. She also describes more recent outbreaks in Africa: yellow fever is making a frightening comeback despite the existence of a vaccine. Photos.
Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers selection. (Nov. 7) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
This is the first book by a young author from Memphis, Tennessee, and while not without shortcomings, it's a better start than most. Crosby describes some key moments in our fight against this nasty disease, starting with a general overview, moving to the ghastly epidemic that devastated Memphis, then to the scene of the critical triumph in Cuba, and finally to the contemporary world and the potential that yellow fever has for a breakout. Along the way she conveys a good sense of what her home town was like in the 1870s, as well as the hardships faced by the medical staff and volunteers in Cuba. The book is as much a peek into life in some highly stressed places as a medical story.
Crosby's random jumping from scene to scene, however, creates a sense of disjointedness that detracts from the book's interest. One gets the impression that what she really wanted to write was a book about "Memphis," not one about yellow fever. This is entirely fine, and choosing to focus on Memphis as plague city certainly establishes a niche for her product. But how does it connect to the scene in Cuba where the seeds of the fever's defeat are first sown? There have been far more comprehensive treatments of Walter Reed's operation there, and Crosby contributes nothing new and notable, nor does she tie Reed's work strongly back to the subject that is obviously her passion. Quite possibly she felt obliged to include this material simply to make the text long enough to interest a publisher; it's not hard to imagine that her researches had pretty thoroughly mined out the information available on Memphis during the plague years, and it wasn't enough for a stand-alone book. However, continuity would have been better if, for example, she had done just a bit more work on the other epidemics that occurred between the Memphis catastrophe and the triumph in Cuba.
The above criticism sounds harsher than it is intended to be. This is by no means a bad book; rather, it's quite a good one that is worth reading for those with an interest in either the disease or the city, and it has its definite moments of drama and eloquence. Crosby should be congratulated for taking on this subject, and we can reasonably expect that she'll learn from her mistakes here and produce works on comparably interesting subjects as she grows as an author.
