With fifty sharp nails sticking out of its head, the hand-held wooden beater could be mistaken for an instrument of torture. It isn鈥檛. Spiked wooden paddles were standard equipment for mail clerks working on the American railways in the late 19th century. They weren鈥檛 designed to repel would-be train robbers but to stop a worse danger-yellow fever, the scourge of the southern states.
Until 1900, people thought infectious diseases such as yellow fever, cholera and smallpox were spread by contact with the sick or the things they had touched. And that included their letters. Mail from fever zones was fumigated-but first it was pricked full of holes so the fumes could infiltrate the sealed envelopes. This paddle from Montgomery in Alabama, on display at the National Postal Museum in Washington DC, was used during an outbreak of yellow fever in 1899, a year before mosquitoes-and not the mail-were shown to carry the sickness.
YELLOW FEVER, or 鈥測ellowjack鈥�, was the sickness people feared most. It came in the night and crept unseen from house to house, wiping out whole streets. For most of the victims death was swift and horrible. First there was the raging fever and the 鈥渂lack vomit鈥� as they brought up blackened blood. Then, as the virus destroyed the liver, their skin and eyes turned yellow. Doctors didn鈥檛 know what caused yellow fever or how it was spread. There was almost nothing they could do about it except plant a warning flag-the yellow jack-outside an infected house.
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Between 1817 and 1900, America鈥檚 towns and cities were devastated by yellow fever. Outbreaks struck like clockwork almost every summer. In the warm, damp southern states, people dropped like flies. Memphis suffered such a high death toll during the 1870s it was stripped of its city status. New Orleans suffered regular epidemics: in 1853, 9000 people died there, and in 1867 the fever claimed another 3000 victims. Nine years later, 13,000 people died in the lower Mississippi valley.
Although yellow fever ravaged the south, the north did not escape its unwelcome attentions. In the second half of the 19th century, Philadelphia, New York and even Boston suffered repeated outbreaks.
The disease baffled medical researchers. They couldn鈥檛 identify the agent that caused it-later found to be a virus-nor could they see how it passed from one person to another. The most popular view was that infection spread by direct contact with the sick or their belongings-clothes, bedlinen and other articles they had touched. No one looked forward to a letter from the south during July or August.
The speed and efficiency of the US mail service only increased people鈥檚 fears. After the first mail train in 1832, the nation鈥檚 post was increasingly sent by rail. By the 1860s so much was moved in this way that the mail service employed clerks to sort letters and packages aboard the trains as they sped across the country. If the mail was contaminated, the disease could end up almost anywhere-or so people thought.
At the first sign of yellow fever, towns were quarantined. Nothing was allowed to move in or out, including the mail. Even inbound mail stopped, held back at post offices outside the fever zone until the disease had died out. The mail trains halted a safe distance outside the infected area.
In 1888, Florida and parts of neighbouring states were hit hard by yellow fever. Conscious of the huge economic losses caused by sealing off such a large part of the country, the government introduced new quarantine regulations. People who needed to travel were kept in quarantine camps until proved clear of infection. All mail from infected areas was to be made safe by fumigation with sulphur.
The job of fumigating the mail fell to the railway mail clerks. They fitted out freight cars with shelves of open-meshed chicken wire that allowed the noxious fumes to circulate freely. The clerks untied bundles of newspapers and scattered them around the carriage. Letters posed more of a problem: the contagion might be trapped inside the envelope, out of reach of the disinfecting vapours. The solution was to puncture the envelopes with paddles studded with sharp nails before spreading them around on the wire shelves. That done, the clerks lit a stove, threw on some sulphur and shut the doors.
To begin with, the mail service only fumigated letters and papers from fever areas. But within a few years, mail clerks were pricking and fumigating all letters leaving the south during the summer-mainly to reassure the public, who were suspicious of anything from the sickly south.
By this time, some medical researchers had begun to doubt the idea that yellow fever was spread by direct contact. In 1881, a Cuban doctor called Carlos Finlay began to suspect that mosquitoes might carry and transmit the disease. He spent years trying to prove his theory, but failed. It took a war and the deaths of thousands of American troops to discover the truth.
During the Spanish-American war of 1898, 6000 US soldiers died, 968 in combat and the rest from disease, especially yellow fever. The Army鈥檚 commanders were shocked and commissioned new research into the disease. With troops on their way to occupy Cuba, there was an urgent need to find out how to stop the sickness. Cuba was notoriously unhealthy and yellow fever was rife. 鈥淚f we are to be kept here it will in all human possibility mean an appalling disaster, for the surgeons here estimate that over half the army, if kept here during the sickly season, will die,鈥� wrote Theodore Roosevelt, then a lieutenant colonel, to the Secretary of War.
Yellow fever struck the garrison almost immediately and two thousand men fell ill. The Army dispatched a commission to investigate, headed by Walter Reed, a pathologist in the US Army Medical Corps. Reed disproved the idea that clothes or bedlinen could spread the infection by shutting volunteers in a hut full of pillows and blankets from yellow fever patients. Three weeks later, not a single man had fallen ill.
Mosquitoes now seemed a more likely culprit. In 1900, two of Reed鈥檚 team allowed themselves to be bitten by mosquitoes that had sucked blood from fever patients. One fell ill. The other died. Further tests on volunteers showed without doubt that the Aedes aegypti mosquito transmitted the disease.
The Army immediately set to work on eradicating mosquitoes from Havana, and practically eliminated the disease from the city. Cities around the US followed suit, and within five years yellow jack began to disappear. The last US epidemic was in New Orleans in 1905.
Despite the good intentions of the mail service, beating letters with spiky paddles was never going to prevent the spread of yellow fever. But it did help to keep the mail moving.