Yellow Fever

The start of the year foreshadowed difficulties. Yellow fever  cases were prevalent throughout the Caribbean, particularly in Cuba, in the spring. After the end of an independence struggle with Spain, thousands of refugees left the island, and many people arrived in New Orleans. On April 26, 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes passed into law the Quarantine Act of 1878, entrusting the Marine Hospital Service with the mission of preventing sickness from reaching shore by seamen from ships 
In May, the Emily B. Souder landed in New Orleans and was sterilized before docking. One sick sailor was taken off the ship after being diagnosed with malaria. Another boat, the Charles B. Woods, arrived after the Souder left to return to Havana. Every captain's and engineer's family was ill with fever.
Yellow fever attacked New Orleans again in August 1918, killing 118 people and forcing out one-fifth of the city's population. On August 10, the state health board declared an epidemic with 431 recorded cases and 118 deaths. In July, a towboat dumped two crew members with yellow fever in Vicksburg, Mississippi; 100 cases were registered in Grenada, Mississippi.
After 431 cases and 118 deaths, the Mississippi State Board of Health proclaimed an epidemic. Grenada, Mississippi, roughly 100 miles south of Memphis, has recorded 100 cases of yellow fever. "Only our mosquitoes keep the buzz of the industry going," the New Orleans Picayune said.
The trauma in Memphis In response to the increasing pandemic, the mayor declared a quarantine on July 28, closing train links. Local businesspeople threatened to sue if the city would not release a train of goods from New Orleans. The cargoes were permitted into the city by city officials. In early August, a riverboat crew member who had escaped the quarantine died in a Memphis hospital. A local citizen who had a food kiosk along the waterfront died of yellow fever on August 13. Like those in New Orleans, Memphis inhabitants left as they heard the news, with an estimated 25,000 to 27,000 of the 47,000 fleeing to rural regions or north and east away from the river. While some localities accepted them, others erected "shotgun barriers," with armed personnel ensuring that no one could enter.
The Price for those who stayed in Memphis depended on religious group volunteers to care for the ill. Annie Cook, the madam of a local brothel, assisted by transforming her establishment into a hospital, where she tended the sick. In September, she died of the condition. According to the New Orleans Health Department, "not less than 4,600" people were killed. More than 5,000 people had been verified deceased by the end of the year. There were 120,000 cases of yellow fever in the Mississippi Valley, with 20,000 deaths.
The Result afterward was that the city's Medical and Surgical Association advocated for improved drainage and sanitary measures to prevent future yellow fever epidemics in New Orleans. Although such measurements were conducted to destroy germs, they aided in removing mosquito breeding places, and New Orleans never again faced the magnitude of the 1878 epidemic. The city of Memphis went bankrupt due to the $15 million in damages caused by the pandemic. In 1879, the federal government formed the National Board of Health after convening a committee investigating the outbreak. The Marine Hospital Service surgeon general, John Woodworth, stressed the problem's urgency in a report to Congress soon before the national agency was established: "Yellow fever should be treated as a threat that endangers lives and cripples trade and industry. Yellow fever is as deadly to no other big nation on the planet as it is to the United States of America."