The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History (review)

The untold story of yellow fever? Molly Caldwell Crosby, a journalist, is a gifted writer: her prose is vivid and captivating. Unfortunately, the story that she relates— focused mainly on how yellow fever nearly obliterated Memphis in 1878 and on how Walter Reed later established that mosquitoes transmitted the disease—has in fact been told repeatedly, and many parts of it have been told too often.

Caldwell Crosby has a knack for finding sources of the details that draw in readers; she uses Department of Agriculture records to describe the weather on particular days, for example, and Memphis newspaper advertisements to depict the city’s latest fashions. Many historians would do well to emulate her often-creative approach to finding embellishments such as these to set the stage for their works. For the sweep of events, however, Caldwell Crosby relies heavily on secondary sources. Some of these are careful histories; most are not.

Her uncritical acceptance of these works leads her to repeat stories that, though oft-told, would be better relegated to myth. The destruction of the Maine did not spark the Spanish-American War; the U.S. government had approached the European powers with its intention to declare war on Spain months before the ship sailed for Havana’s harbor. Despite pervasive fears, the U.S. Army in Cuba did not suffer much yellow fever during the war or afterward. It was typhoid that accounted for most of the horrendous wartime losses to disease; malaria, which incapacitated tens of thousands of troops, accounted for much of the rest. And these two examples are drawn from just chapter 9. The book ends up echoing the errors, exaggerations, and self-serving statements of a century’s memoir writers, glamorizers, and amateur historians.

The book also repeats a pernicious theme common to the recent spate of yellow fever books targeting a mass audience. Although acknowledging the factors that lead contemporary public health experts to believe that the likelihood of a major urban epidemic of yellow fever in the United States is quite small—air conditioning, insect repellant, and knowledge of how the disease is transmitted —the book ends on an alarmist note. The Aedes aegypti thrives in large swaths of the United States, and few people are vaccinated; globalization has brought the distant jungle strongholds of the disease nearby, and terrorists just might use yellow fever as a weapon. A massive epidemic could happen at any time. The many very real implications of the history of yellow fever for today, from how a single disaster can dramatically reshape a city to how disease and public health reflect asymmetries in international power, if mentioned at all, are lost in the sensationalism. The American Plague is beautifully written, but by neglecting to problematize the story of yellow fever, it fails to reveal the many complex ways that the disease shaped history.