Yellow Fever and the South (Health & medicine in American society) - Hardcover

In the last half of the nineteenth century, the American South was plagued by yellow fever epidemics. This tropical disease stalked the South's steaming urban areas, killing its victims with overwhelming hepatitis and hemorrhage. Its toll was devastating: in the notorious 1878 epidemic alone, 20,000 people died in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. Margaret Humphreys tells the dramatic story of yellow fever in the urban South, and of the attempt of public health officials to contain it. Humphreys explores the ways in which yellow fever hampered commerce, frustrated the scientific community, and eventually galvanized local and federal authorities into forming public health boards. Discovering that the desire to nurture economic growth lay at the heart of the South's public health strategy, she shows how the disease's impact on trade forced pecunious state government's to spend money on public health. Yellow fever was also central to the growth of the U.S. Public Health Services. Humphreys pays particular attention to the various theories for stopping the disease and to the constant tension between state and federal officials over how public funds should be spent. Humphreys recovers a lost dimension of public health history by treating the specific concerns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century South and broadens our understanding of the evolution of public health services in the United States.

Margaret Humphreys, CBE, OAM (born 1944) is a British social worker and author from Nottingham, England. In 1987, she investigated and brought to public attention the British government programme of Home Children. This involved forcibly relocating poor British children to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the former Rhodesia and other parts of the Commonwealth of Nations, [1] often without their parents' knowledge. Children were often told their parents had died, and parents were told their children had been placed for adoption elsewhere in the UK. According to Humphreys, up to 150,000 children are believed to have been resettled under the scheme, [2] some as young as three, [1] about 7,000 of whom were sent to Australia. Saving money was one of the motives behind this policy. The children were allegedly deported because it was cheaper to care for them overseas. It cost an estimated 5 per day to keep a child on welfare in a British institution, but only 10% of that, ten shillings, in an Australian one.