The public health movement in the South began in the wake of a yellow fever epidemic that devastated the lower Mississippi Valley in 1878-a disaster that caused 20, 000 deaths and financial losses of nearly $200 million. The full scale of the epidemic and the tentative, troubled southern response to it are for the first time fully examined by John Ellis in this new book. At the national level, southern congressional leaders fought to establish a strong federal health agency, but they were defeated by the young American Public Health Association, which defended states' rights. Local responses and results were mixed. In New Orleans, business and professional men, reacting to the denunciation of the city as the nation's pesthole, organized in 1879 to improve drainage, garbage disposal, and water supplies through voluntary subscription. Their achievements were of necessity modest. In Memphis-the city hardest hit by the epidemic-a new municipal government in 1879 helped form the first regional health organization and during the 1880s led the nation in sanitary improv | Yellow Fever And Public Health In The New South by John H. Ellis, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters