Quotes about Yellow Fever

John James Audubon

On landing at New York I caught the yellow fever. The kind man who commanded the ship that brought me from France took charge of me and placed me under the care of two Quaker ladies. To their skillful and untiring care I may safely say I owe my life.

Seth Berkley

Yellow fever outbreaks are not uncommon. But, as with other infectious diseases, when they occur in urban areas, they can play out very differently - not least in terms of the speed and scale at which they can spread.

Michael J. Mosley

The mosquito has killed more people than anything else in history.

John Gorrie

Nature would terminate the fevers by changing the seasons.

Gorrie’s motivation for conditioning the air was to eliminate the Yellow Fever and other disease which seemed to strike every summer. He found that although he could get a patent and demonstrate the ice-making machine the society at the time thought his invention bordered on blasphemy (see {44386}) and like many new technologies could simply not comprehend its utility. It was a commercial failure. See {601961}

John James Audubon

On landing at New York I caught the yellow fever by walking to the bank at Greenwich to get the money to which my father's letter of credit entitled me. The kind man who commanded the ship that brought me from France, whose name was a common one, John Smith, took particular charge of me, removed me to Morristown, N. J., and placed me under the care of two Quaker ladies who kept a boarding - house. To their skilful and untiring ministrations I may safely say I owe the prolongation of my life.

Thomas Jefferson

In taking a view of the state of our country we in the first place notice the late affliction of two of our cities under the fatal fever which in latter times has occasionally visited our shores. Providence in His goodness gave it an early termination on this occasion and lessened the number of victims which have usually fallen before it. In the course of the several visitations by this disease it has appeared that it is strictly local, incident to cities and on the tide waters only, incommunicable in the country either by persons under the disease or by goods carried from diseased places; that its access is with the autumn and it disappears with the early frosts.

The disease was Malaria. It was the major health killer in the country then. It was spread by mosquitoes although no one knew it at the time. The mosquitoes thrived in the tide waters and the cesspools of cities. However it also struck in rural areas but since people died off a few at a time, no one noticed. Even into the 21st century Malaria was a serious killer in Africa and Asia.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Every man that tried to spread smallpox and yellow fever in the North, as the instrumentalities of civilized war, was a Democrat.

Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.

DeWitt Clinton

Charges so unfounded are beneath the dignity of refutation; and the country which has been called the land of swamps, of yellow fever, and universal suffrage, requires no advocate but truth, and no friend but justice, to place it on the highest elevation of triumphant vindication.

Many people in Europe looked down on America and perceived it as a primitive, uncivilized place that was a huge swamp and that Yellow Fever was rampant. The swamp and Yellow Fever accusations were not exactly untrue. However, there was much more to the Colonies than the critics claimed as history would prove. Note that universal suffrage—allowing all men to vote regardless of wealth—was considered as bad as Yellow Fever and swamps by the aristocratic Europeans of the time. Many Americans had something of an inferiority complex as a result of European attitudes about the United States, but not Clinton.

Yellow Fever Quotes