In early July, as the annual influx of mosquitoes swamped the city, one local newspaper described New Orleans as looking and smelling “epidemical”. Some residents responded by fleeing, but many remained calm. Yellow fever, after all, was known as the strangers’ disease. Ever since the earliest city epidemics in the late 1700s, everyone had known foreigners and travellers from other parts of America were much more susceptible than those born in New Orleans.
Accepted medical wisdom ranked newcomers to the city as those most at risk because they had not yet become used to the subtropical climate that was so very different from their own. Locals, on the other hand, were thought to adjust, or 'acclimate', gradually over time.
The idea of ‘acclimating’ (or not) fitted with both official and unofficial records of death rates. A businessman writing about an earlier epidemic that occurred in 1847 attributed nine-tenths of all funerals within a fortnight to Irish victims; six years later, immigrants accounted for 90 per cent of recorded yellow fever deaths, despite making up less than half the city’s population.
In general, Irish and German immigrants appeared most likely to die from the disease. The 1853 death rates for both groups were reported to be 20 times higher than that for native New Orleanians. The ‘stranger’ factor was even recognised by the Mutual Benefit Life and Fire Insurance Company of Louisiana, which charged high premiums to Americans travelling to New Orleans during the summer months on the basis that these visitors were not acclimated to the area.
However, acclimation wasn’t the only factor thought to lead to high death rates in some marginalised groups. Most newspapers, physicians and the public associated the origin and spread of yellow fever with the lowest levels of society and the “miserable, filthy, loathsome manner” in which these communities were thought to live. More judgmentally, the local shipping clerk who penned that phrase also positioned those who appeared most susceptible to the disease as “a set of rumdrinking, fighting people”, clearly something ‘other’ than his own kind.
Medical opinion followed a similar line, with the editor of the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal suggesting that the prevalence of yellow fever could be reduced by raising both the social and moral conditions of the labouring classes. Local physician Dr J S McFarlane felt visitors to the city could exempt themselves from infection by remaining sober and living an “orderly” life, a habit that might be difficult for those immigrants forced to sleep a dozen to a small single room.