![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I hate books about illness. Under normal circumstances I avoid them like, well, the plague, but Jim Murphy's An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 is on my list of Newbery Honor books to read, so I decided that I might as well knock it out of the way now. All of our lives are already steeped in news about illness, so it’s not like reading a book about a past plague is going to significantly up the illness quotient in my brain.
In some ways this book provided a pleasant contrast to coronavirus news, if only by showing that Things Could Be Worse. Yellow fever had a mortality rate around 50%. Moreover, the federal response was even less helpful than the federal government’s response now, mostly because the fever completely paralyzed the government. When the fever struck Philadelphia, which was the capitol at the time, most of the government officials fled town. Then there was a constitutional crisis about whether Congress could convene somewhere else without first convening back in Philadelphia to vote to move Congress - which obviously no one wanted to do, Philadelphia being a hotbed of death and so forth.
(The reluctance of many Congressmen to allow the president to convene Congress elsewhere has its roots in history: English kings had a habit of having sessions of Parliament in inconvenient places so they could ram through laws that Parliament wouldn’t approve if they were there. So you can see why Congress didn’t immediately go “Okay fine, George Washington, I guess we have can Congress at Mount Vernon just this once.”)
Once the federal officials started conglomerating in a small town outside of Philadelphia, I greatly enjoyed reading about how Thomas Jefferson had to sleep in a closet without a bed, while James Madison didn't even have the comfort of a closet, but ended up on a tavern floor. I feel that we should start treating our federal officials with this sort of insouciance once again. It would be good for them! Keep them close to the common people! Or at least it would make them uncomfortable, which I think we can all agree would be an enjoyable spectacle at this moment.
I also laughed ruefully at this passage: “The science of medicine at the end of the eighteen century still relied a great deal on ancient myths and folk remedies. Because of this, people did not automatically reject the opinion of someone simply because that person wasn’t a trained doctor.” Oh, Mr. Murphy, you sweet summer child.
The book wraps up with the less-than-cheery note that no one in the United States manufactures the yellow fever vaccine, so if there was a major outbreak, we'd be screwed for months - especially because we're not really much better at treating the disease than we were in 1793. (Also, because of advances in transportation technology, the outbreak would probably not stay localized to one city as it did in 1793: it would spread rapidly across the country.) Murphy quotes a CDC official, who says that yellow fever is "a modern-day time bomb. We're just sitting here waiting for it to happen."
Thanks, Mr. Murphy! Good to know! I for one am thrilled to have more confirmation that our lives hang by the most gossamer of threads.
In some ways this book provided a pleasant contrast to coronavirus news, if only by showing that Things Could Be Worse. Yellow fever had a mortality rate around 50%. Moreover, the federal response was even less helpful than the federal government’s response now, mostly because the fever completely paralyzed the government. When the fever struck Philadelphia, which was the capitol at the time, most of the government officials fled town. Then there was a constitutional crisis about whether Congress could convene somewhere else without first convening back in Philadelphia to vote to move Congress - which obviously no one wanted to do, Philadelphia being a hotbed of death and so forth.
(The reluctance of many Congressmen to allow the president to convene Congress elsewhere has its roots in history: English kings had a habit of having sessions of Parliament in inconvenient places so they could ram through laws that Parliament wouldn’t approve if they were there. So you can see why Congress didn’t immediately go “Okay fine, George Washington, I guess we have can Congress at Mount Vernon just this once.”)
Once the federal officials started conglomerating in a small town outside of Philadelphia, I greatly enjoyed reading about how Thomas Jefferson had to sleep in a closet without a bed, while James Madison didn't even have the comfort of a closet, but ended up on a tavern floor. I feel that we should start treating our federal officials with this sort of insouciance once again. It would be good for them! Keep them close to the common people! Or at least it would make them uncomfortable, which I think we can all agree would be an enjoyable spectacle at this moment.
I also laughed ruefully at this passage: “The science of medicine at the end of the eighteen century still relied a great deal on ancient myths and folk remedies. Because of this, people did not automatically reject the opinion of someone simply because that person wasn’t a trained doctor.” Oh, Mr. Murphy, you sweet summer child.
The book wraps up with the less-than-cheery note that no one in the United States manufactures the yellow fever vaccine, so if there was a major outbreak, we'd be screwed for months - especially because we're not really much better at treating the disease than we were in 1793. (Also, because of advances in transportation technology, the outbreak would probably not stay localized to one city as it did in 1793: it would spread rapidly across the country.) Murphy quotes a CDC official, who says that yellow fever is "a modern-day time bomb. We're just sitting here waiting for it to happen."
Thanks, Mr. Murphy! Good to know! I for one am thrilled to have more confirmation that our lives hang by the most gossamer of threads.
