The Secret of the Yellow Death: A True Story of Medical Sleuthing

By Suzanne Jurmain

“Extremely interesting . . . Young people interested in medicine or scientific discovery will find this book engrossing, as will history students” (School Library Journal).
 
[He had] a fever that hovered around 104 degrees. His skin turned yellow. The whites of his eyes looked like lemons. Nauseated, he gagged and threw up again and again . . .
 
Here is the true story of how four Americans and one Cuban tracked down a killer, one of the word’s most vicious plagues: yellow fever. Journeying to fever-stricken Cuba in the company of Walter Reed and his colleagues, the reader feels the heavy air, smells the stench of disease, hears the whine of mosquitoes biting human volunteers during surreal experiments.
 
Exploring themes of courage, cooperation, and the ethics of human experimentation, this gripping account is ultimately a story of the triumph of science.
 
“[A] powerful exploration of a disease that killed 100,000 U.S. citizens in the 1800s.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
Includes photos

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9780547528359

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 by Suzanne Jurmain

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Photo credits appear on page 98.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Jurmain, Suzanne.

The secret of the yellow death : a true story of medical sleuthing / by Suzanne Jurmain.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-547-74624-1

1. Yellow fever—Diagnosis—Cuba—Juvenile literature. 2. Yellow fever—Juvenile literature. I. Title.

RC212.C9J87 2009

614.5'41097291—dc22

2009022499

eISBN 978-0-547-52835-9

v2.0419

To Dr. Jay Marks, Dr. Charles Burstin, and Dr. Philip Brooks, with honor, gratitude, and deep appreciation.

Acknowledgments

Two of the most important words in all the English language are thank you, and I certainly owe thanks to the many people who made it possible for me to write this book.

As always, I am grateful to my agent, Edward Necarsulmer, for his encouragement and to my editor, Ann Rider, for her good ideas, cheering words, and thought-provoking comments.

Dr. Martha Sonnenberg kindly took time out of her busy schedule to answer my strange questions, and I must also extend my thanks to the librarians at the New York Academy of Medicine and the UCLA Biomedical Library who graciously allowed me to examine the material in their collections.

To Claudia Sueyras, a wonderful researcher at the University of Virginia, I owe a huge debt. She combed the archives, answered questions, sent me photographs, and was always ready to provide more help.

My heartfelt thanks must also go to Paul Song of Superior Galleries for providing photographs and information about the Congressional Gold Medal; to Professor Barbara Becker at the University of California, Irvine, who suggested sources for many of the photos; and to my son, David Jurmain, who came to my rescue with much-needed computer expertise.

Robert Scott moved heaven and earth to find me examples of the postage stamps showing Dr. Finlay; and my brother, David Tripp, provided contacts, source material, and, as always, a shoulder to lean on.

Finally, my greatest thanks must go to my husband, Richard, who took photos, answered questions, provided comfort, and reminded me time and time again through his own personal actions that doctors really can be heroes.

A Note to the Reader

Just over one hundred years ago a band of scientists and volunteers from two countries decided to fight against one of the world’s deadliest diseases. Some members of this group came from Cuba; some, from the United States. Unfortunately, today relatively little is known about the Cubans who took part in this important battle, while libraries contain many rich sources of information about the American team. For this reason, I have concentrated on the extremely well documented American part of the story. But readers should remember that without the great Cuban scientific contribution, there might have been no story to tell.

Summer 1899

The young man didn’t feel well. First, there was the chill: an icy, bone-freezing chill in the middle of a warm summer evening. Then there was the terrible crushing headache. His back hurt. His stomach twisted with pain. And then he was hot, boiling hot, with a fever that hovered around 104 degrees. His skin turned yellow. The whites of his eyes looked like lemons. Nauseated, he gagged and threw up again and again, spewing streams of vomit black with digested clots of blood across the pillow. Sometimes he cried out or babbled in delirium. Violent spasms jolted his body. It took two grown men to hold him in his bed as a nurse wiped away the drops of blood that trickled from his nose and mouth. Nights and mornings passed. Then, five days after that first freezing chill, the young man died: another victim of a terrible disease called yellow fever.

A yellow fever patient in a Cuban hospital around 1900.

Doctors didn’t know what caused it. They couldn’t cure it. But they knew that yellow fever was a killer. For centuries the disease had swept through parts of the Americas and Africa, leaving behind a trail of loss and misery. It turned cities into ghost towns and left the local graveyards filled with corpses. In New Orleans, Dr. Kennedy took sick and collapsed while he was tending patients. In Philadelphia, Dr. Hodge’s little girl caught the fever, turned yellow, and died in two short days. And when the sickness killed the Memphis snack shop woman Kate Bionda, she left behind her husband and two small children. The fever struck the rich. It struck the poor. It killed the humble, and it humbled the important. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America during the U.S. Civil War, lost his son to yellow fever. George Clymer, who’d signed the Declaration of Independence, watched helplessly as the sickness struck his wife and family. And every single year the illness took its toll. In 1793, 4,044 people in Philadelphia died during a plague of yellow fever. New Orleans counted 8,101 yellow fever deaths in 1853. And when the disease hit Memphis, Tennessee, in 1878, 17,000 citizens sickened in a single month. Stores closed. Work stopped. Thousands fled, and those who remained wandered through a nightmare city—where sick children huddled next to dying parents and hungry dogs roamed the silent streets searching for their lost dead masters.

Yellow fever [is] . . . an enemy which imperils life and cripples commerce and industry, Surgeon General John Woodworth told the U.S. Congress in 1879. And he was right. In one single century—between 1800 and 1900—the disease sickened approximately 500,000 U.S. citizens and killed about 100,000.

The question was, what could be done about it?

By the 1890s doctors had found that many illnesses are caused by one-celled microscopic organisms called bacteria. With the help of this new knowledge, they taught the public how to kill these dangerous bacterial germs with things like heat and disinfectant. They also learned how to use dead or weakened germs to make vaccines—special types of medicine that prevent illness by forcing a living body to produce its own disease-fighting substances. Slowly, physicians began to conquer deadly sicknesses like cholera, typhoid, anthrax, and diphtheria. But yellow fever still raged. Researchers studied the disease. Doctors argued about the cause. Scientists peered through their microscopes, looking for the yellow fever germ. But there was no progress. Each year the hot summer weather brought on yellow fever epidemics. Each year desperate people burned clothing, bedding, and even buildings that had housed yellow fever victims in hopes of stopping the disease. Frantic doctors bled the sick, stuck them in mustard baths, dosed them with opium, or gave them drugs that might make them vomit out the germ—but nothing helped. Each year thousands of people caught the disease. Thousands died of it. And then, suddenly, something happened—something that at first didn’t seem to have anything to do with yellow fever or with medical science.

On February 9, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine blew up in the harbor of Havana, Cuba. Two hundred and sixty-eight American servicemen were killed. U.S. officials told a shocked nation that Spanish government agents had deliberately caused the explosion. And by the end of April the United States had decided to go to war with Spain.

U.S. soldiers prepare to board a ship that will take them to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War.

In the next four months American soldiers beat the Spanish army in Cuba. They beat the Spanish navy in the Pacific. And when the Spanish-American War ended in July, the victorious U.S. forces had won the right to govern Cuba and Puerto Rico

Reviews for The Secret of the Yellow Death

[prkcs · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The intriguing and exciting story of US Army Major Walter Reed, MD and his dedicated group of fellow physicians and researchers who set out to uncover the true cause of Yellow Fever, the scourge of tropical and semi tropical areas across the globe.

[rmthoma2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really liked this book. The books talks about the scientist who found the transfer of yellow fever from the mosquito to human. It tells you almost step by step how it was tested and how they had to get human subjects willing to get infected to see what was happening. The book has really nice pictures that enhance what is being talked about in the text. Yellow fever isn’t something we have to deal with now but it is still out there. This book will be a great tool in the classroom because it can be used to address many different scientific issues such as human testing.

[delzey_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A compelling account of how early medical researchers discovered and isolated the causes of yellow fever in the early part of the 20th century.Don't start this book if you have just eaten, and I might make the same recommendation for the following description of the symptoms that open The Secret of the Yellow Death: at onset, an icy chill, followed by a crushing headache, yellowing skin and the whites of eyes the color of lemons, delirium and blood-clotted vomit come next and violent spasms. Within three days a victim could be dead.You would think that something this virulent would have had its heyday during the plague years, hundreds of years ago, but the outbreak that consumed Cuba and eventually lead to the discovery of the yellow fever virus happened barely 100 years ago. That a combined team of scientists from the United States and Cuba solved the mystery through dogged determination despite a general disbelief among other scientists that mosquitoes were the carrier gives the story its tension. After all, if it wasn't mosquitoes, then what was the cause? Heading up the team was Walter Reed, a doctor who was sure that the source of the outbreak that was sweeping across Cuba could be discovered. Even from a distance, when he was called back to the States, Reed kept contact with the team of four other doctors who attempted to actively manufacture ill patients in order to prove their theories. Even as they had successes, managing to grow carrier mosquitoes and getting them to bite willing recruits, some managed to avoid illness. At each turn it is as if the solution is within reach and then comes another setback. But with each trial and set of circumstances they learn a little more until, finally, they isolate the virus and understand the gestation period and the crucial timing necessary to replicate the illness in a controlled setting. But many of the doctors involved died before the final results were discovered and understood by those who carried their efforts forward. It's a compelling mystery because of the variables that must be discovered both through trial and error and because little was known or understood about the simple organisms known as viruses. Jurmain has chosen to get close to the story, to use primary source material to reconstruct the narrative of how the scientists worked to come to a conclusion. She admits early on that she is unable to include source material for the Cuban doctors involved because that material is unavailable. It would be nice to think that some day normalized relations between Cuba and the US might give us the full picture of the story, but as it is written there are few missing gaps of consequence and the story doesn't suffer for the lack.While not profusely illustrated it does contain plenty of photos from the era that remind the reader just how crude the practice of medicine was just 100 years ago. The crude hospital and research facilities, the crude metal syringes, and the handwritten medical charts all add to the overall mood of the story, yellowed with age and looking for all the world like they might still carry the sickness with them. There is an appropriate creepiness to The Secret of the Yellow Death and that will be a huge part of its appeal to readers. Gross when it needs to be, creepy and disgusting in a scientific setting, and the constant question – are they ever going to figure this out? – combine for a compelling read.

[karenball_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Yellow fever was a horrifying disease that killed thousands. Between 1800 and 1900, it killed 100,000 Americans, and the U.S. Surgeon General labeled it "...an enemy which imperils life and cripples commerce and industry." in 1900, Major Walter Reed was ordered to go to Cuba with three other Army doctors to find the cause of this dread disease, and hopefully either a cure or a way to prevent the spread of yellow fever. One of the key players in this drama was Cuban Dr. Carlos Finlay, who had theorized that mosquito bites spread the disease, but he had been unable to clearly prove it. The team of doctors and Army volunteers used the scientific method to work through a number of possible causes -- with some success, some failure, and some inconclusive results. The pressure to succeed and solve the mystery was tremendous, as lives quite literally depended upon the team's work. The layout of this book is excellent, with illustrations and photos on every spread, each one important to the text on that page. There are exceptional source notes, divided by chapter in the back, so it's easy to tell how well researched this is. 7th grade and up!

[jlsbibliomania · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very nicely done summary of the work done by Walter Reed and colleagues both Cuban and American to untangle the method of infection for yellow fever aimed at a middle-school audience, but accessible both to advanced grade-school readers and adults.

[mbklibrary · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A look into how a team of scientists discovered the cause of Yellow Fever. The book is arranged chronologically and contains a number of great and interesting pictures to go along with the information. Contains a great bibliography as well.