Primary Sources: Plagues, Epidemics, & Pandemics: Yellow Fever

"...is a compilation of several distinct manuscript collections housed in different libraries. This extensive on-line archive comprises correspondence, notes, reports, printed materials, photographs, negatives, and artifacts spanning a period of almost one hundred years. The core of the on-line archive is the Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection, a monumental array of items occupying seventy-two linear feet of shelf space and 147 boxes in the Department of Historical Collections and Services, The Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia. Additional material from The Claude Moore Health Sciences Library includes selected items from the Henry Rose Carter Papers, the William Bennett Bean Papers, and the Wade Hampton Frost Papers. The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library of the University of Virginia houses the important and equally extensive Jefferson Randolph Kean Papers, many of which are included here. A small but significant deposit of Walter Reed's letters are held at the Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia. Finally, the many government documents reproduced here as photostats derive from originals in the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D. C. The Hench Reed on-line archive presents a series of complex and interrelated stories, all linked to the U. S. Army Yellow Fever Commission's demonstration in 1900 that the mosquito Aedes aegypti is the vector for the transmission of yellow fever."

"The film combined footage shot by Telford H. Work in 1954 with diaries that Richard Moreland Taylor wrote during an expedition to the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan. The expedition was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation at Naval Medical Research Unit no. 3 (NAMRU-3) in Cairo, Egypt. Herbert Hurlbutt was also on the expedition. The film begins with a description of yellow fever and a history of its appearance in the Nuba Mountains in 1934 and again in 1940. There was a 20 percent mortality rate during these outbreaks. The expedition develops the premise that the outbreaks originated with Galago primates or Bush Babies, and the tsetse fly was the method by which yellow fever was transmitted. The film shows a flight over the Nubian Desert, as well as eleven villages and the area which would be flooded by the Aswan Dam. Images of Khartoum are included, and of Richard Moreland Taylor taking blood from a villager to check for yellow fever."

"This film stresses the importance of good health for soldiers fighting in different climates during World War II. It profiles jungle diseases, especially yellow fever, and describes laboratory research conducted jointly by U.S. and Colombian researchers to develop a vaccine. The importance of spraying for mosquitoes and vaccinating a population is stressed and demonstrated in Colombia."

"Telford Work made this film during an expedition to the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan in search of evidence of yellow fever, and to evaluate the possible spread of yellow fever northward."