Yellow fever In 1873, Shreveport, Louisiana lost 759 citizens in an 80-day period to a Yellow fever epidemic, with over 400 additional victims eventually succumbing. The total death toll from August through November was approximately 1,200, In 1878, about 20,000 people died in a widespread epidemic in the Mississippi River Valley. That year, Memphis had an unusually large amount of rain, which led to an increase in the mosquito population. The result was a huge epidemic of yellow fever. The steamship "John D. Porter" took people fleeing Memphis northward in hopes of escaping the disease, but passengers were not allowed to disembark
Yellow fever due to concerns of spreading yellow fever. The ship roamed the Mississippi River for the next two months before unloading her passengers. The last major U.S. outbreak was in 1905 in New Orleans. Ezekiel Stone Wiggins, known as the Ottawa Prophet, proposed that the cause of a yellow fever epidemic in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1888, was astronomical. The planets were in the same line as the sun and earth and this produced, besides Cyclones, Earthquakes, etc., a denser atmosphere holding more carbon and creating microbes. Mars had an uncommonly dense atmosphere, but its inhabitants were probably protected from the fever