As we near the end of our text correction marathon for People's Voice from April 17, 1880, a news bite caught my eye:
Dr. Minor, health officer at Cincinnati, found on the Louisville mail boat a lot of yellow fever feathers from Memphis. Dr. Minor ordered them reshipped to Louisville. They are the same lot that were recently sent out of Chattanooga.
The brevity of this note implies it was a well-known event. Can we find out the full story of the yellow fever feathers?
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| Detail of "Yellow Jack monster" by Matt Morgan, c. 1873. Courtesy Library of Congress. |
CINCINNATI, April 13-Dr. Minor, Health Officer, to day found on the Louisville mail boat a lot of yellow fever feathers from Memphis, consigned to a dealer here who had not ordered them, and refused to receive them. Dr. Minor ordered them re-shipped to Louisville. They are the same lot that were recently sent out of Chattanooga.
There are a few more details, but still not sufficient backstory to grasp what is happening here. We will have to go outside of the Virginia Chronicle site to look for more details. The first story not a repeat of the above (or some variation) is a jaunty editorial piece in the Morning Journal and Courier from New Haven, CT, April 15, 1880:
It is a decidedly cheerful item of news that a lot of "yellow fever feathers" from Memphis are going about in the South and West seeking a buyer. If it is true somebody ought to be hung.
A lengthier write-up was included in the Lancaster Daily Intelligencer the same day:
A lot of yellow-fever feathers from Memphis appears to be circulating about the country in a very miscellaneous and decidedly hazardous fashion. Some brief while ago they were sent to Chattanooga, and on being turned back from there were forwarded to Cincinnati, consigned to a dealer who declared that he had not ordered them and who refused to receive them. The health officer at Cincinnati has surveyed the infected goods and ordered the boat which carried them to take them back to Louisville, from whence they had been taken to Cincinnati. We presume that they will go to St. Louis or some other well-populated settlement next - that is, if some enterprising health officer or other public-spirited citizen does not take them in charge speedily and drop a lighted match in their midst. There certainly appears to be a necessity for summary dealing with these particular feathers, and be it public official or private citizen who succeeds in having them deprived of power to do harm, neither the censure of public opinion nor the heavy hand of the law will be likely to do him any severe injury.
Unfortunately, the trail of the feathers goes cold here. I was unable to find any mention of the feathers being destroyed, or the true origins of said feathers. While we may not be able to solve this mystery, the link between the spread of yellow fever and feathers has a recurring place in the history books. The earliest written account I found was from the New Hampshire Gazette of April 3, 1799:
A gentleman from Newport informs, that last week a number of sacks of feathers were seized there. They had been bought by Connecticut Feather Dealers at New-York, in beds, shifted, and brought for sale. The beds have been lain upon by persons, who died of the Yellow Fever ; and it is a general opinion that Feathers receive and retain infection. As it is possible some of these fellows, who are so careless of the lives of their Countrymen, may bring feathers procured in the same way to this town, the above is stated as a general caution.
This incident was so disturbing that Vermont passed legislation banning the sale of feathers that could not be proven to come through Canada. A passing reference is made in the novel Keep Cool by John Neal listing feathers as well as a few other items that might harbor yellow fever in 1817. And in 1823, a story of another contaminated feather bed appears to have claimed a life:
At Bergen Point, New-Jersey, near the Quarantine Ground, a Mrs. Vanhorne lately died of yellow fever, caught from a feather bed, which she found floating near that place, and which, without doubt, had been thrown overboard from some vessel at Quarantine. She washed the feathers of this bed on Saturday week, sickened on Sunday, and died last Wednesday, of black vomit.
Memories of contaminated feathers must have lingered long in the public consciousness after these stories circulated in the newspapers, eventually making their way into scientific literature as well. Observations on the Epidemic Yellow Fever of Natchez, and of the South-west by John Wesley Monette, written in 1842, states:
A feather bed of ordinary size contains probably 25 lbs of feathers in a bed-tick having a capacity for 24 cubic feet of air. The air constitutes the great bulk of the feather bed; for if the bed be compressed until the whole air is expelled, the bed will be reduced to a solid form and to a bulk not exceeding two cubic feet at most. Thus we should in an infected feather-bed have about 22 cubic feet of infected air. This can be transported undiluted for any reasonable distance, even 500 miles.
Monette's work was widely cited as the definitive authority on the dangers of feather beds, even though later works like the New Orleans Journal of Medicine in 1844 ran an ahead-of-its-time and caustic account trying to debunk Monette's correlation of heat to virulence, and feather beds as the transmission vector:
The feather bed theory is particularly objectionable. Who ever heard of a feather bed being brought from the West Indies in the warm season? If such a thing has ever occurred, I would ask if it is possible any one could have slept upon it in July or August? If so he must have more of the instincts of a salamander than a human being.
Even so, feather beds retained a stigma of harboring yellow fever. The National Board of Health Bulletin reported a case in January 1880 of a feather bed being "improperly fumigated" by only washing the outer mattress without removing the inner feathers. Fumigation of a house quarantined for yellow fever involved "burning sulphur" and opening all the doors and windows of the house on very cold days (as yellow fever was thought unable to survive cold temperatures but thrive in warm environments).
Is it possible the health bulletin in January put the nation on high alert again to the potential danger of feathers? Maybe so - that could explain the brevity of these notes in the newspapers. While we might never find out what happened with this particular shipment of feathers, the underlying mystery of yellow fever was solved in the early 1900s, with a vaccine developed in 1937. As for the correlation of cold or heat in destroying the virus on feathers? It was conclusively proven by 1960 that yellow fever is "inactivated in 10 minutes by moist heat above 140 F."
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