"BRONZE JOHN" Remembered

"BRONZE JOHN" Remembered

KENNETH E. HALL    AUGUST 15, 2015       HOUSTON

Even though he last visited in the days of our great-grandparents, New Orleanians remember his yearly visits through stories handed down through the generations.

BRONZE was the color of the skin of its victims, caused by liver failure - jaundice. 

JOHN was how English-speaking residents heard the French word JAUNE, meaning yellow.

YELLOW FEVER!!!! 

It killed thousands of residents of the city every year, and for a long time, nobody knew why!
They just died. Wagons would roll through the streets of the city, and a door would open, a couple appeared at the door with a small body wrapped in a bed sheet. They walked to the wagon, placed the package atop many others, then they turned quickly and headed back into their house without saying a word, shutting the door behind them - and the horse moved the wagon onward, down the street.

It was like something out of a Sci-Fi horror movie.

People were often buried in mass-graves, with no obituary, no Mass of Christian burial, and no tombstone. There were just too many to bury.

My grandfather showed me an unknown site alongside a railroad right-of-way where the ground was opened up and countless bodies of men, women, and children were unceremoniously dumped, covered probably with quicklime to accelerate the decomposition process, and then buried in the soggy soil. He heard the stories told by the old folks of the horrors and the sorrow of it all.

New Orleans suffered terribly.

Then, in Cuba, a miraculous discovery was made by a man who is today unknown in the very city he helped to save.

1881 - A doctor from Camagüey, Cuba, Carlos J. Finlay discovers the agent in the transmission of yellow fever. This was a major breakthrough, leading to the prevention and eventual elimination of the disease from the city of New Orleans.

But for the Cubans, the credit to doctor Finlay for having discovered that the mosquito aedes aegipti was the agent in the transmission of yellow fever, was never in doubt. However, internationally, credit for the discovery went to American doctor Walter Reed and the commission American military to which he was attached n Cuba. Hence the importance of the unanimous approval of the motion put forward by the Cuban delegation to the X International Congress of history of medicine, held in September 1935 In Madrid, under the chairmanship of the famous doctor Gregorio Marañón. There he recognized: "That Finlay was the first to establish scientifically the principle of the transmissibility of infectious diseases, by insects in August 14, 1881". In that Congress was established in addition, that Finlay was the first to formulate the principles hygiene for the PREVENTION  of the disease, and cleared the extraordinary role played by its doctrine in the reorganisation of the area of the Panamá Canal during its construction. The Cuban doctor  had First presented his theory in a paper at the Royal Academy of Medical Physical, and Natural Science! In Havana, in 1881. In Paris, a city where yellow fever never made its appearance, there is a street named after Dr. Finlay, but in New Orleans, who felt the horrors of Bronze John so deeply, gives no credit nor remembrance to a man who had such a great and positive effect on the future of the city.

I hope this will change.