Beginning in June 1878, the port cities of the Panama Canal region received an order from the Donghua government to prohibit the entry of ships and personnel from the Memphis and New Orleans areas of the United States.

According to statistics, in 1878, the yellow fever plague in the Mississippi River basin caused more than 2,200 cities and towns in the southern, southwestern, central, and midwestern parts of the United States to report yellow fever outbreaks in their own areas, with more than 150,000 infections, about 20,000 deaths, and direct economic losses of more than 200 million US dollars. The city hardest hit, with the highest infection rate and the highest death toll is Memphis, a large city in Tennessee.

Located in the middle reaches of the Mississippi River, Memphis is the largest city in Tennessee. The Mississippi River, which runs through the city, provides Memphis with a golden waterway, and the flow of people and goods from south to north has injected strong vitality into Memphis's economic development, and Memphis has a thriving commercial trade and a growing population. The abundant water resources of the Mississippi River nourished the vast number of cotton plantations around the city, and a large number of black people toiled in the fields to grow and harvest cotton.

Although the vast hinterland of the American Midwest is geographically separated from Cuba by a thousand mountains and rivers, the United States is only separated from the yellow fever virus by a merchant ship from the perspective of epidemic transmission. The deadly virus originating in the tropical jungles of Cuba has been transmitted by sea, water, and land to the United States by mosquitoes and infected people.

In late June and early July 1878, ships carrying yellow fever infected people and mosquitoes carrying yellow fever virus crossed the ocean to New Orleans, Louisiana, a city in the southern United States.

After the re-establishment of Orleans, yellow fever followed the steamer all the way north, spreading along the major rivers of the Midwest such as the Mississippi River, the Tennessee River, and the Ohio River, and finally stopping in the central cities of St. Louis and Cincinnati.

In July 1878, Chinatown ordered that ships from Cuba, Mexico, and the East Coast cities of the United States should not enter the country.

From coastal to inland, from cities to villages, from factories to rural areas, from densely populated transportation hubs to unknown remote towns, people migrating along rivers, railways, highways, and country roads have spread yellow fever over a vast area along swarms of mosquitoes, and the ferocious epidemic is unstoppable.

The calm before the storm didn't last long, and two weeks later, on August 13, local newspapers reported that the Memphis Board of Health had officially confirmed the first case of death from yellow fever, and Jack Huang arrived as scheduled. In the days that followed, the yellow fever outbreak was updated in the newspapers on a daily basis: as of 15 August, there were six deaths;

As of 21 August, there were 56 deaths. The yellow fever epidemic is extremely ferocious, with the number of infected people and the number of deaths increasing exponentially. Since mid-August, the outbreak in Memphis has officially entered a local outbreak period.

On a scorching summer day, the scorching sun is blazing, and the plague hits the city, and the suffering residents of Memphis usher in a long-lost downpour. Lightning and thunder, wind and rain, Memphis was shrouded in a gray mist.

The weather was not beautiful, and the roads were muddy and slippery due to heavy rains for several days, making it difficult to get around, and people who were planning to evacuate Memphis to escape the plague could only sigh in reassurance.

The people trapped in the city by the wind and rain hope that the wind and rain will wash away the muddy water in the city, sweep away the haze that hangs over the city, and the day when the clear and sunny day comes, that is, when the yellow fever plague subsides.

As everyone knows, the actual situation is very different from people's beautiful prayers. Due to the continuous high temperature and lack of rain in the early stage, the mosquito eggs hidden in rivers, lakes, swamps, pools and ditches do not have the conditions to hatch into adult mosquitoes. Three consecutive days of heavy rain provided a favourable and humid environment for mosquitoes to breed and become adults.

Soon after the rain stopped, mosquitoes and flies surged everywhere. Starting from August 24, local post offices will no longer deliver printed materials such as newspapers and periodicals containing information about the epidemic.

Traffic disruptions, information blockages, and rumors are spreading, and people in the epidemic area are even more frightened and panicked.

In August 1878, a month-long campaign for the Patriotic Health Month was held in the East China Colón Islands, Ecuador, western Colombia, and Panama City.

Wear gloves and masks, kill mosquitoes and rats, scatter lime, spray disinfectants, clean sewage ditches, burn garbage, do not drink raw water, wash hands frequently, take a bath and change clothes. The vanguard army dispatched 200,000 men to thoroughly clean the seaside cities.

Due to the emergence of yellow fever cases in Memphis, coupled with the fact that mosquitoes are flying in the sky and biting people, animals, cattle and horses, people can neither effectively control the source of infection nor decisively cut off the transmission route, and the epidemic is gradually getting out of control, and the number of infections and deaths has skyrocketed.

Mosquitoes flying around have drunk the blood of yellow fever patients and the dead, and have become miniature fighter jets carrying biological weapons, launching rounds of deadly attacks on the healthy.

In the 1870s, when little was known about the causes and pathogenesis of yellow fever, it was not clear that it was a mosquito-borne disease, and people were surprised to see healthy people who had never been in contact with yellow fever patients to be infected with yellow fever, as if yellow fever patients had some kind of magical power to spread deadly plague in the air. With limited experience and knowledge, the living began to save themselves.

At the time, there was a popular belief that yellow fever was caused by specific terroir and environmental factors, and that the spread of yellow fever was due to direct contact with yellow fever patients and contamination of items contaminated by yellow fever infected people.

Therefore, in order to prevent and control the yellow fever epidemic, people at that time strictly isolated people infected with yellow fever, and people also avoided the family members and close contacts of the patients.

Another convincing argument is that yellow fever is spread through dirty air, where the healthy and the sick live under the same sky, breathe and share the same fate, and that the dirty air becomes the vector of yellow fever transmission.

In order to stop the spread of the disease through the air, people went outside and lit bonfires and torches all over the city.

The city is enveloped by black smoke drifting in the wind, and it is difficult to see people even during the day. Although the smoky anti-epidemic measures have dispersed the mosquitoes carrying the deadly virus to a certain extent, after the smoke clears, swarms of mosquitoes flying in the sky have launched another deadly attack, continuing to repeat yesterday's story.

Just as the Europeans in 1348 were helpless against the Black Death, the Americans in 1878 could not come up with a good solution to the yellow fever epidemic because of the lack of scientific knowledge and correct understanding of the prevention and control of mosquito-borne diseases.

Despite this, there are still people who are unwilling to sit still and stand up to fight the disease to the death.

When the outbreak began in August, local medical staff in Memphis sprang into action to open temporary hospitals outside the city to treat yellow fever patients.

As the epidemic spreads further, local medical staff are overwhelmed by a shortage of staff. Pastors and nuns of the Catholic Church in Memphis, and Protestant clergy volunteered to care for yellow fever patients.

Doctors and nurses across the U.S. braved all odds and risked their lives to travel to the area around Memphis, the hardest hit of the pandemic, to provide the best care they could for local patients.

According to statistics, more than $500,000 was raised across the United States to hire nearly 3,000 medical staff to carry medicines and equipment to help the Memphis epidemic area.

Memphis medical staff provided emergency medical services to 15,000 patients, both local and foreign.

Due to the lack of effective protection, the health care workers in the affected areas unfortunately contracted yellow fever, and according to rough statistics, 700-1,000 health care workers sacrificed their precious lives, accounting for about 15% of the total deaths.

Beginning in September 1878, Americans in the interior of the country were required to wear a yellow card when entering Panama, quarantine for at least 10 days after testing, and were not allowed to enter the interior of Colombia.

In addition to harming people's bodies and taking people's lives, the plague can also cause a series of chain reactions and worsen the situation.

As the plague hit the city, transportation was disrupted, the population was dispersed, and normal production activities and commercial circulation were completely suspended, and the residents of Memphis, who had been ravaged by the plague, had to fight the severe epidemic and find ways to fill their stomachs and survive the difficulties.

Food shortages and shortages caused by the plague have further exacerbated the plight in the affected areas. Crops in the fields outside Memphis are unattended, and supplies outside Memphis have been delayed in reaching the worst areas of the pandemic due to transportation disruptions and fears of the affected areas.

According to the local disaster relief committee, the number of people who died of famine during the plague was not less than the number of people who died of the plague. Memphis, which was greatly injured, was trapped in the city of sorrow, both internally and externally.

First, demographics changed, whites fled and blacks stayed. The yellow fever plague devastated Memphis, and 75 percent of the population left Memphis after the pandemic.

Scientific research shows that the yellow fever virus originated in the jungle area of Africa, with the opening of new routes for geographical discovery, European colonizers sold a large number of black African slaves to the Americas, and the yellow fever virus followed the slave ship across the ocean to the tropical regions of Central and South America, and the virus gradually adapted to the local climate and human genes.

The first black patients to be infected with yellow fever recovered and developed specific antibodies in their bodies and passed them on to future generations.

Therefore, in general, as a viral tropical mosquito-borne infectious disease, the susceptible population of yellow fever virus is white people with no history of living in the tropics and no history of travel. Compared to white communities, black communities have relatively fewer infections and lower mortality rates.

After the plague of 1878, the Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and German-American whites who came to the South after the Civil War left Memphis, leaving behind blacks and other people of color who made up the majority of Memphis' population, and to this day the Memphis metropolitan area has the highest percentage of African Americans in the South (48% of the total population).

Secondly, the transfer of regional economic centers. In 1876, the Union Army ended its military control and returned to the state, and the reconstruction of the South officially ended. The southern economy, which had just picked up slightly, was hit hard again by the yellow fever plague in 1878, and foreign industrial and commercial investors changed color when they heard about the epidemic, and Memphis, New Orleans and other plague-stricken areas became forbidden places for investors.

Taking Memphis as an example, from 1878 to 1890, Memphis' population growth continued to be negative, the labor supply was insufficient, a large number of fields were uncultivated, and the once-prosperous cotton planting and processing industry collapsed.

In terms of economic aggregate and overall strength, before the plague in 1878, Memphis was the 11th largest city in the United States and ranked among the top three in the southern United States, but after the plague in 1878, due to heavy population losses, long-term economic depression, frequent yellow fever epidemics, Memphis quickly slipped to 37th place.

Atlanta (Georgia), Birmingham (Alabama), Dallas (Texas) and other southern cities in the United States, where the yellow fever epidemic was relatively mild or completely unaffected by the yellow fever epidemic, rose rapidly and seized the development opportunity, riding the wave of American industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and later catching up and replacing Memphis.

On the contrary, the southern cities in the hard-hit areas of the yellow fever plague are economically backward, traffic blockage, and cultural conservative, which seem to be incompatible with the era of rapid reform and innovation in the Gilded Age.

Again, improvements in health administration. The reason why the yellow fever epidemic in the Mississippi River basin in 1878 was so tragic was that in addition to natural factors such as abnormal climate, hot and humid weather, and mosquito breeding, it was also closely related to the important social factors of accelerating industrialization and profound economic and social changes in the United States after the Civil War.

On December 2, 1878, U.S. President Rutherford Hayes delivered a State of the Union address to both Senate and House of Representatives, in which President Hayes stated: "The terrible yellow fever epidemic has aroused public concern for the national health administration, and the establishment of an organization in the federal government to administer public health and health affairs will not only help maintain the smooth flow of interstate trade in the event of an outbreak, but also facilitate the timely and appropriate decision-making of the relevant departments of the U.S. federal government to respond appropriately to the epidemic."

…… In the face of a nationwide pandemic, states are overwhelmed, and the creation of a new federal agency to manage public health and health duties across the country is a mission that states cannot accomplish. ”

In order to intensify efforts to prevent and control the yellow fever epidemic, President Hayes proposed that Congress authorize the federal government to coordinate state and local governments to increase inspection and quarantine efforts to prevent imported cases from Cuba from entering the United States.

In addition, public health experts, microbiologists, pathologists, geographers, zoologists, entomologists and other professionals should be convened to intensify scientific research on yellow fever, thoroughly understand the causes, clinical manifestations and effective treatment options of yellow fever, and find effective methods and means to combat yellow fever.

Finally, the yellow fever plague claimed many lives and caused heavy economic and social losses. Nearly every family in Memphis has a relative who died due to the plague, and rebuilding after the epidemic is not only about healing the disease and physical recovery, but also about healing the psychological trauma of the survivors.

In the aftermath of the plague, the cold and brutal number of infections and deaths is terrifying, and behind every number are fresh lives and shattered families.

December 1878

Donghua won the battle of yellow fever.

However, this year, the United States' impression of the Donghua government has also become worse and worse, and of course, this is a historical inevitability.

There will be no eternal peace between China and the United States.

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