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The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History

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Description

In this account, a journalist traces the course of yellow fever, stopping in 1878 Memphis to “vividly [evoke] the Faulkner-meets-‘Break of day of the Dead’ horrors,”*-and moving on to these days’s strain of the killer virus.

Over the course of history, yellow fever has paralyzed governments, halted commerce, quarantined cities, moved the U.S. capital, and altered the outcome of wars. All over a single summer in Memphis on my own, it cost more lives than the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake, and the Johnstown flood combined.

In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was once spread. There, they launched certainly one of history’s most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign on this country-and in Africa, where even these days it strikes thousands annually. With “arresting tales of heroism,”** this is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it’s about the nature of disease.


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