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Fever Season by Jeanette Keith5/12/2023 ![]() ![]() Some ministers, politicians, and police fled their constituents, while prostitutes and the poor risked their lives to nurse the sick. The story that Jeanette Keith uncovered is a profound-and never more relevant-account of how a catastrophe inspired reactions both heroic and cowardly. ![]() Fever Season chronicles the drama in Memphis from the outbreak in August until the disease ran its course in late October. The city of Memphis, Tennessee, was particularly hard hit: Of the approximately twenty thousand who didn't flee the city, seventeen thousand contracted the fever, and more than five thousand died-the equivalent of a million New Yorkers dying in an epidemic today. Moving up the Mississippi River in the late summer, in the span of just a few months the fever killed more than eighteen thousand people. While the American South had grown to expect a yellow fever breakout almost annually, the 1878 epidemic was without question the worst ever. ![]()
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