Copy of Copy of Yellow Death 8 (6/23/2025)

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The Monster & the Mosquito

Excerpt from Chapter 8 in The Secret of the Yellow Death by Suzanne Jurmain

2 The young man didn’t feel well. First, there was the chill: an icy, bone-freezing chill in the middle of a warm summer evening. Then there was the terrible crushing headache. His back hurt. His stomach twisted with pain. And then he was hot, boiling hot, with a fever that hovered around 104 degrees. His skin turned yellow. The whites of his eyes looked like lemons. Nauseated, he gagged and threw up again and again, spewing streams of vomit black with digested clots of blood across the pillow. Sometimes he cried out or babbled in delirium. Violent spasms jolted his body. It took two grown men to hold him in his bed as a nurse wiped away the drops of blood that trickled from his nose and mouth. Nights and mornings passed. Then, five days after that first freezing chill, the young man died: another victim of a terrible disease called yellow fever.

Read along as you listen to the description of a patient with yellow fever from Chapter 1.

Then reread the scientists’ thinking about being human volunteers in their own experiments:
“...if mosquitoes did carry the disease germs—a human volunteer bitten by an infected bug could get yellow fever and die of the disease. That was the risk. But all three doctors were prepared to face it. To fight the illness they were ready to take what Dr. Carroll later called ‘a soldier’s chances.’” (6, 21)

Reread the scientists’ thinking about being human volunteers in their own experiments in this passage from Chapter 6: “...if mosquitoes did carry the disease germs—a human volunteer bitten by an infected bug could get yellow fever and die of the disease. That was the risk. But all three doctors were prepared to face it. To fight the illness they were ready to take what Dr. Carroll later called ‘a soldier’s chances.’” (21)

Why were the doctors "ready to take what Dr. Carroll later called ‘a soldier’s chances’”?

Motivation