The Summer of the Pestilence: A History of the Ravages of the Yellow Fever in Norfolk Virginia, A.D. 1855

ARMSTRONG, George D. The Summer of the Pestilence: A History of the Ravages of the Yellow Fever in Norfolk Virginia, A.D. 1855. Phila: B• Lippincott & Co. 1856. 1st ed. 192pp. Recounting the vellow fever epidemic that devastated the population in 1855, killing as much as a third of the citizens by some accounts.

(From Miner): A narrative of the yellow fever epidemic at Norfolk in 1855 based upon the author's own experiences. A Presbyterian clergyman, Armstrong composed this work in the form of a series of letters seeming to chronicle the epidemic's progress-though they were actually written later in the year. The letters are addressed to William Maxwell, who encouraged Armstrong to undertake this history of the epidemic which cost Armstrong his wife and child. During the epidemic Armstrong "ministered to the afflicted tirelessly and without regard for his own welfare" (Dict. Am. biog., 1:352).

From Catalog I

The Rush-Currie controversy of the 1790s was still alive, in attenuated form, in 1855. Physicians were still arguing about importation versus domestic origin, still without the vector biology that would explain everything. Armstrong's book is the epidemic's human cost as personal testimony -- the format that Rush's letters and Cresson's meditations had established for the 1793 crisis, now applied to 1855. It would not be resolved until Walter Reed's Cuba experiments in 1900 demonstrated mosquito transmission.