Twenty-five thousand persons, half the population, left the city and 5,000 more went into camp to escape the city's streets where "trade and traffic were suspended" and "death was everywhere triumphant."
The terror of the time was heightened by the fact that "neither cleanliness nor right living were a shield to stay the hand of the destroyer. He invaded the homes of the most chaste and the den of the vilest. He took innocence and infamy at the same moment and spread terror everywhere. Where sorrow was so general there could be no parade of it. There were no funerals and but little demand for funeral services * * *. Not infrequently bodies were left in the cemetery unburied for a night, so hard pressed were the managers for labor, and so numerous were the demands upon what they had * * *." 3[1]
For every act of depravity or inhumanity there were, doubtless, deeds of devotion and unselfishness, but the overall effect of an epidemic attack of yellow fever — and any outbreak might develop into epidemic proportions— was the utter demoralization of community life. The direat that hung over the cities and villages of the United States was ample warrant for the creation of a special commission to visit the West Indies and study yellow jack in its home haunts.
Such a commission was formed in 1879, with Maj. George M. Sternberg, a future Surgeon General of the Army, as secretary. After 6 months' study in Cuba and Brazil, the Commission reported, on 16 November 1879, that "yellow fever is an epidemic, transmissable disease and the agent capable of transmitting the disease must be in the air." 4[2]
Studies on Transmission
The suggestion of an airborne agency of transmission of the disease found lodgment in the mind of Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay of Havana (fig. 41). Dr. Finlay was Cuban-born, of Scottish and French parentage, educated in France and Germany, a graduate of the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia, fluent in four languages, a student of the classics, and a man of scientific attainments. He was first connected with the study of yellow fever when he was named, by the Spanish Governor General of Cuba, to work with the United States Commission of 1879 on the subject. The most meaningful consequence of the work of that commission, as it turned out, was the idea implanted in the mind of its Cuban collaborator.
