Yellow Fever
2 of the 7 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Yellow Fever. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
an infectious continued fever, us ushered in with languor, chilliness, and and more or less severe lumbar pains and frontal headache, headache, countenance flushed, eyes at first humid, then suffused, and ultimately ferretty, skin imparting a tingling heat to the touch, and, as the second stage advances, gradually acquiring a lemon or greenishyellow tinge, mind usually disturbed with hallucinations, or more or less violent delirium, restless watchfulness, or, possibly, drowsiness even to extreme coma, epigastric uneasiness, spontaneous vomiting without effort, first of a clear glairy fluid, but subsequently with coffee-ground flocculi, or blood itself, often, toward the close, with irrepressible hiccough, and wild shrieking or melancholy wailing, tendency fatal, but the disease generally confers an immunity from subsequent attacks. The first recorded outbreak of yellow fever occurred in the West Indies in 1647, and since that time it has been recurring at regular intervals in an epidemic form, and gradually extending its range; but it is endemic in certain localities, and notably so in the islands of St. Thomas and Santo Domingo. Regarding its altitudinal and horizontal ranges Dr. Macdonald says: "It may be very well to assign an altitudinal limit of the spread of yellow fever, and, roughly speaking, this may be estimated at between 2,000 and 3,000 feet above the level of the sea, but the local conditions of every country seem to determine a range peculiar to itself. Thus the disease has been known at Newcastle, Jamaica, at an elevation of 4,000 feet, while in the valley of the Mississippi its highest recorded range is about 600 feet of Gallipolis to be (admitting the fever of the genuine type). Humboldt alludes to the farm of Encero, in Mexico, at an elevation of 3,243 feet, as the altitudinal limit of the black vomit. At Santo Domingo the encampments of the French in 1792 and of the English in 1796 enjoyed an immunity ity from the disease, while it was spread far and wide among the troops in the low country. Though the West Indian Islands, and the neighboring coasts of North and South America, may be looked on as the focal area of yellow fever, yet, taking the outlying points at which its occurrence in the epidemic form has been recorded, its geographical range must be regarded as very considerable indeed, i. e., between lon. 97° W. and 2° E., and between lat. 48° N. and 35° S. At least for the space of a century and a half, up to the year 1850, the Amazon river, dividing the Brazils from Guiana, limited the extension of yellow fever S. of the line; and while the disease was raging at Rio and Bahia, at the close of that epoch, the Montevideans flattered themselves that they were without the geographical limits of the pestilence, till it fell to their turn to sustain its visitation several years later, when the illusion was dispelled. Similar facts may be adduced regarding the extension of the disease along the shores of the Pacific; so that, however its preswell we may be acquainted with ent range, making all due allowance for temperature, we cannot tell what the future may bring forth. In this connection it may be mentioned that a temperature of at least 72° is assumed to be essential to the development of yellow fever, though cases exceptional to this rule may now and then happen. Yellow fever is communicated from one person to another only by a species of house mosquito (Stegomyia fasciata). As a result of this knowledge it was entirely eliminated from the Panama Canal zone, and from other tropical areas, including Havana. In December, 1878, a board of experts, consisting of twelve medical men and a sanitary engineer, with Surgeon-General Woodworth as president, was appointed by the Health Committees of the Senate and House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States to investigate the yellow fever epidemic, and they : (1) came to the following conclusions fever is a specific disease, due to Yellow a specific poison which has not been chemically or microscopically demonstrated, nor in any way made evident to the human senses; it is material and particulate, and endowed with the vital properties of growth and reproduction; disease is malarial, influences do not contribute toward its dissemination or mortality to any greater epidemic diseases; extent than to other a concurrence of local conditions seems to be necessary to the evolution of the disease, but what these are we have no positive knowledge. (2) Yellow fever is attachments, a disease of singular local often prevailing in a very small section indifference of a city, with remarkable to topographical and social surroundings; while atmospheric air is the usual conveyed, it has medium by which it is been in no instance established that the any considerdisease has been carried to able distance by atmospheric currents, or by any modes or vehicles of conveyance those connected with human other than of incubatraffic and travel; the period tion varies from two to five days; the white fever is unknown in Asia; the race is most susceptible to its inratio fluence, and furnishes the highest of deaths. YELLOW SEA (Chinese, Whang Hai), an arm of the Pacific Ocean; on length about the N. E. coast of China; about 400 620 miles; greatest breadth, and obtains miles. It is very shallow, yellow color of its name from the lemoncaused by mud its water near the land, the inflow suspended in the water from -kiang of the Hoang-ho and Yangtse rivers.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an infectious disease peculiar to low, warm countries. It is a bacterial disease. The germs which were once thought to float in the air, it is now known are conveyed from the blood of one person to that of another through the agency of the yellow fever mosquito which breeds in low lands partly under water. After the mosquito has drawn blood from a fever patient it requires about twelve days for the germs to develop in the mosquito's body so as to be transferred by a mosquito bite to another person. Scientists go so far as to say that the fever can be transmitted in no other way. People who live in such countries become more or less hardened or immune, that is to say, the germs of the fever are not so likely to thrive in their blood as in that of strangers. An investigation of yellow fever epidemics at New Orleans , where it is at times prevalent, shows that the mortality among fever patients varies from four out of 1,000 for native white people, that is to say, creoles, to 329 per 1,000 for strangers. The mortality of negroes is less than that of creoles. The entire list runs negroes, creoles, strangers from the West Indies , from the Southern States, from Spain and Italy, the Middle States, New York , New England , Western States, France, British America , Great Britain , Germany, Scandinavia, Austria and Switzerland, and the Netherlands. As in the case of smallpox and other infectious diseases, attempts have been made to inoculate against yellow fever, but without success. As a means of preventing the spread of the disease, yellow fever patients are surrounded by mosquito bars to keep the mosquitoes away. Most infectious diseases, as typhoid or cholera, spread more rapidly in unsanitary conditions, but filthy surroundings seem to have no effect on yellow fever, except as they further the breeding of mosquitoes. The entire problem seems to be one of exterminating or controlling this insect. The geographical range of yellow fever is chiefly American, extending along the seacoast from Boston to Rio Janeiro, including the cities of the West Indies and Central America. It also extends up the Mississippi Valley as far as Memphis or St. Louis. It is believed that climatic conditions in other parts of the world would be favorable, if the mosquito and the germs were once established. Great pains are taken, therefore, to quarantine all ships and travelers from regions in which yellow fever is raging. The original home of yellow fever is believed to be the west coast of Africa, whence it was imported by the slave trade. The West Indies are the American center of the pestilence, whence it has been carried to the seaports of Spain and Portugal. An epidemic of yellow fever visited Philadelphia in 1793. Between August and the middle of September one person out of ten of the entire population died of the disease. Another serious invasion of the fever in the United States occurred in 1878 when over 15,000 deaths occurred in the lower Mississippi Valley. Since the Spanish-American War in Cuba in 1898 the danger of infection from Cuba has been considerably lessened owing to the thorough cleaning of the chief cities of the island by the Americans and their improved sanitary condition since. A frost hard enough to do up the mosquito never fails to stay the spread of yellow fever. See Mosquito 2026 Editor's Note: This page uses language about race that was commonplace when the book was published and is offensive by today's standards. The text has been left exactly as it was printed, rather than cut or softened, so that the historical record — including how ordinary such language once was — is preserved. (Ed: BR 2026-07-22) 2026 Editor's Note: This entry stands at the victory: Walter Reed's board had just proven the mosquito vector, and Gorgas's campaigns made the Panama Canal possible. The vaccine came in 1937; see yellow fever . (Ed: BR 2026-06-12)