18 LOSS THROUGH INSECTS THAI' CABRY DISEASE. 
outbreaks in Philadelphia. Charleston, and Boston as early as 1692, 
and for a hundred years there were occasional outbreaks, culminat- 
ing in the great Philadelphia epidemic of 1793. Northern cities were 
able, by rigid quarantine measures, to prevent great epidemics after 
the early part of the nineteenth century, but from the West Indies 
the disease was occasionally introduced and prevailed from time to 
time epidemically in the Southern States. In 1853 it raged through- 
out this region, Xew Orleans alone having a mortality of 8.000. The 
lasl widespread epidemic occurred in 1878, chiefly in Louisiana, Ala- 
bama, and Mississippi, but spreading up the Mississippi Valley as far 
a- Cairo, 111., and attacking with virulence the city of Memphis. Tenn. 
In this year there were 125.000 cases and 12.000 deaths. In 1882 
there were 192 deaths at Pensacola ; in 1887, 62 deaths in the Southern 
States; in 1893, 52 deaths; in 1897, 484; in 1898, 2,456 cases with 
117 deaths; in 1903, 139 deaths were recorded, mostly at Laredo. 
Tex., and in 1905 there was a serious outbreak at Xew Orleans and 
in neighboring towns, including one locality in Mississippi, in which 
911 deaths were recorded for the whole country. 
The actual loss of life from yellow fever during: all these years. 
when compared with the loss from other diseases, has been compara- 
tively slight, but the death rate is perhaps the most insignificant fea- 
ture of the devastation which yellow fever epidemics have produced, 
and the disease itself has been but a small part of the affliction which 
it has brought to the Southern States. The disease once discovered in 
epidemic form, the whole country has become alarmed; commerce 
in the affected region has come virtually to a standstill; cities have 
been practically deserted ; people have died from exposure in camping 
out in the highlands ; rigid quarantines have been established ; inno- 
cent persons have been shot while trying to pass these quarantine 
lines; all industry for the time has ceased. The commerce of the 
South during the epidemic of 1878, for example, fell off 90 per cent, 
and the hardships of the population can not be estimated in monetary 
terms. With such industrial and commercial conditions existing 
from Texas to South Carolina, many industries at the North have 
suffered, and, in fact, the effect of a yellow fever summer in the South 
has been felt not only all over the United States, but in many other 
j^ortions of the world. 
All these conditions, as bad as they have been, do not sum up the 
total loss to the national prosperity during past years. Cities like 
Galveston, Xew Orleans, Mobile, Memphis, Jacksonville, and Charles- 
ton, subject to occasional epidemic-, as they have been in the past, 
have not prospered as they should have done. Their progress has 
been greatly impeded by this one cause, and thus the industrial 
development of the entire South has been greatly retarded. 
