Yellow fever in Buenos Aires the mosquito "Aedes aegypti", which was responsible of transmitting Yellow Fever. A witness to the epidemic of 1871, named Mardoqueo Navarro, wrote on April 13 the following description in his diary: Since 1881, thanks to Cuban physician Carlos Finlay, it was known that the transmitting agent of Yellow Fever was mosquito "Aedes aegypti". Before that discovery, doctors attributed the cause of many epidemics to what they called "miasmas" floating in the air. Yellow Fever (or "black vomit", as it was called due to bleeding that occurs in the gastrointestinal) caused an epidemic in Buenos Aires in 1852. However, by a
History of yellow fever word of an epidemic would cause a quarantine to be placed on the city, and their trade would suffer. In such epidemics, steamboats frequently carried passengers and the disease upriver from New Orleans to other cities along the Mississippi River. The epidemic was dramatized and featured in the plot of the 1938 film "Jezebel", starring Bette Davis. Yellow fever was a threat in New Orleans and south Louisiana virtually every year, during the warmest months. Among the more prominent victims were: Spanish colonial Governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos (1799); the first and second wives (d. 1804, 1809) of territorial Governor