ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a disease known as “yellow fever” (abbreviated as YF) because of its proclivity to cause severe jaundice in the aficted was one of the most feared diseases in the United States, particularly in port cities along the Atlantic Coast and Gulf Coast. Epidemics struck with extreme ferocity and indiscriminately of age, gender, race, or wealth. Doctors were uncertain of the cause and incapable of treating or even alleviating the suffering of the victims. During this period, the YF death toll in the United States was in the hundreds of thousands, with major epidemics occurring in the southeastern states and as far north as New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia (Patterson, 1992). It is now believed that YF was imported into the Americas and Europe from Africa as a consequence of the slave trade and intercontinental shipping (Barrett and Monath, 2003); one of the earliest examples of intercontinental travelers spreading disease. Retrospective analyses have revealed that the rst recorded epidemic of YF-like disease in the Western Hemisphere occurred in 1648 on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico (Staples and Monath, 2008).
