Yellow Fever

Abstract

Yellow fever and smallpox are undoubtedly the oldest of the haemorrhagic fevers and with bubonic plague share the doubtful honour of being the most lethal killers among the great epidemic diseases. Just how old yellow fever is cannot be determined with certainty because of the difficulty in interpreting the early descriptions, written mostly by laymen, and because of the relative infrequency of travel, before the mid-fifteenth century, to those tropical regions where the disease was endemic. Scott in his History of Tropical Medicine¹⁷ lists episodes as far back as 1493, but Blake¹⁰ discounts many of these and considers that the earliest epidemic which can be reliably accepted as being what is now known as yellow fever is that of 1646–48 in Barbados, St Kitts and Yucatan, Mexico. Simpson⁴² also accepts this date as the earliest authentic report.