In 1855, more than 150 years before COVID-19, a massive epidemic made its way from the West Indies to Virginia port cities via cargo ship.
Over 100 days, yellow fever would kill one of every three residents in Norfolk and Portsmouth, while many fled the region.
Award-winning journalist Lon Wagner first researched the disease's impact on the region for the Virginian-Pilot newspaper. His work is now the subject of his book The Fever: The Most Fatal Plague in American History.
Wagner stumbled across the story about the mosquito-borne illness when covering a civil league meeting in Norfolk. His neighborhood was seeing a surge in the rat population, after a couple of hurricanes that narrowly missed the region.
Wagner asked one resident why she was so concerned about rats and mosquitos.
"She said, 'I'm sure you've heard of the 1855 yellow fever epidemic,' Like a lot of people, I had heard of it, but I only knew a little bit," he explained. "I started looking it up - and just thought, I cannot believe what happened here."
in the summer of that year, a ship called the Benjamin Franklin had made its way from the West Indies, was headed for New York, but stopped in Portsmouth, in need of repairs. Mosquitoes had infected members of the crew on its journey north.
Much of Wagner's work involved researching the writings of Presbyterian minister George Armstrong, who vowed to remain in Norfolk despite the risk to his family, as the illness was responsible for the deaths of city leaders, businessmen, police officers, and journalists.
"He documented much of what he saw that summer, which gave me a nice thread to follow throughout the story," Wagner said. "There was a volunteer nurse in her early 20's (Annie Andrews) who came down from Syracuse, New York, and put herself at risk. A couple years after the epidemic, she was upheld in Harper's Magazine as a heroine, along the level of Florence Nightingale."
Wagner said with limited medical abilities in the 1850's, the scientific thinking behind yellow fever at the time was that all disease was caused by bad air. and residents of both cities repeatedly hoped quarantine would prove effective.
"They were really trying to prevent this in all the wrong ways, by cleaning up things that smelled bad," Wagner said, "But they also knew that they didn't know - and so it's really terrifying when you're being stalked by something, and you don't know what that something is."
But like Armstrong, Wagner said there were efforts elsewhere to try and help the port cities and combat the disease amid thousands of deaths.
"This was certainly one of the last times that the north and the south came together over an issue before the Civil War," he explained. "Doctors and nurses came from the south. Philadelphia sent people, along with Baltimore, and New York. Help came really from all over the country."
Wagner said one lesson from this time period is the response to this type of severe illness is driven by fear.
"As much as science or medicine can take something on, it really comes down to how people are going to act towards each other, and how people are going to treat each other. In this case, there were some good actors, and there were some really bad actors, and I think that's kind of universal throughout time."
Wagner will be signing copies of The Fever on Saturday, September 21 from 1 to 3 p.m. at Book No Further in downtown Roanoke.
