Lost perspectives

From The Boys of '98 by Dale L. Walker. One of the continuing concerns of the Army command during the campaign in Cuba was the risk of disease, so virulent in the tropics, cholera, yellow fever, malaria, etc. For all that these were more prevalent in the tropics, they were not unknown in the US. It is hard to maintain a sense of proportion when dealing with the past. What we are concerned about, they were not and what they were concerned about, we have forgotten.

Yellow fever is an example.

There was ample reason to fear it. The yellow fever mortality rate was a minimum of one-in-five and as high as fifty percent in some areas of Cuba in the hurricane season. The disease had horrendous complications - fever, jaundice, internal bleeding, liver and kidney failure, a vomiting of blood - el vomito negro was the Spanish term for it. It was well known in the port cities of the southern and eastern United States, coming in the spring and summer months, dying out with the frost, and there had been numerous periodic yellow fever epidemics, one of which, in 1878, had killed more than twenty thousand people in the Mississippi Valley between Memphis and the Gulf of Mexico. Clara Barton had witnessed it and nursed its victims in Florida in 1887.

In 1878, there were probably at most five million people in the Mississippi Valley between Memphis and New Orleans and 20,000 of them died. And who remembers that today?

Just for perspective, the world attention focused on the year-long Ebola outbreak in a region of West Africa with roughly 200 million people has claimed some 8,000 lives. That is not to discount the gravity of the Ebola outbreak but is a testament to how far we have come in containing contagious diseases.

I recall my mother talking about how much fun summers were in her youth except for the fear of polio.