That cracks me up. Um, that was an npr science friday best science book of 2017. Her adult historical fiction includes the bestselling novels of beautiful person the impossible girl. Opium and absent and the forthcoming the halflife of ruby fielding which will come out in may. Her adult young adult novels the code control catalyst toxic and the november girl, which was a 2019 Nebraska Book award winner. Let me tell you about nate. Nate pattersons notified nonfiction has appeared in a wide variety of magazines newspapers including the guardian the believer and the mental floss. He is a blogger and a regular contributor for fine books and collections magazine. He also edited several lovecraftian horror and an apologies including the story Wisdom Library sisterhood and the dragon collection nate is a graduate of the university of wisconsin madison and works as a manager of the archival and Reference Team at Georgia Historical Center right here in savannah. Is a savannah resident. Any lectures on topics all over the war country. So what i would like you to give now a real big warm, welcome to Lydia Peterson and nate penn. No lydia kang and they better say is this on it is thank you guys so much for such a warm welcome. This is my first time in savannah and it has been just a beautiful beautiful introduction to a really amazing city. Were actually hoping to weave a little bit of some of the things weve been learning about savannah and to our discussion today, but nate and i are hoping just to kind of keep this casual have a conversation about the book. We will be doing some questions and answers later if we have time. But i thought we could start with a question that we get almost every time we do a talk, which is where did the idea for this . Book come about and then the second question which is why are we writing this together . Like, wheres the origin story there . So nate you want to start . Sure. Well as you heard perhaps in the introduction the very warm and lovely introduction. Thank you for that. We cowrote a book called quackery that came out a few years ago in 2017 from the same publisher from workman and we were looking for a similar topic to visit as we looked to collaborate again on a followup book to quackery. And the idea of trying to trace down the origin stories the very human stories at the start of a lot of these major infectious contagious diseases throughout history became a point of interest for both of us and we talked about doing a whole book around that subject with our publisher and and were going to go ahead but the timing of all that is where the story takes a turn for the more interesting. So this all happened at the almost the exact same time that the coronavirus first made its appearance and wuhan china so we sold the book concurrent with the start of this pandemic that were all still living through to this day and had the very surreal experience of writing it and composing it researching it whilst living through a pandemic as well. Yeah, so interestingly. I think we were putting the book together and there is an email at some point. Im with me telling nate like, you know, wed already had like the chapters ready to go and um and i said, hey, i think theres theres a theres an outbreak of something in china, and i wonder if its going to end up in the book and we were like nah. Cant imagine thats gonna happen. And so theres an entire chapter on covid in here. Thats that i wrote fun fact nate wrote half the chapters. I wrote half the chapters and so i wrote the covid chapter in the fall of 2020 when unfortunately my husband was sick with covid. We were all quarantining at home. My patients were all getting sick with covid. They were constantly sending me messages about should i get this test should i take this medication . What about hydroxychloroquine and i was on deadline to write the chapter on covid. So it was incredibly surreal and i think some of i think some of that like, you know that sort of energy of this pandemic being kind of out of control is in that chapter, but that was a very strange thanksgiving of 22. 2020 excuse me. Yeah, absolutely, you know a question we get a lot that lydia touched on is how we collaborate together. And is she just mentioned we split the chapters up so we come up with sort of a table of contents subjects of interest to us both that we both sort of sign off on and then we get to each pick the stuff for most interested in writing about im not sure if you would have picked covid, but you got assigned covid. Maybe thats the way to put that and and then we go. Reading a lot of Research Material on those diseases in this case or on various quack cures and our previous book and putting together the draft of a chapter that the other person then takes a look at signs off on approved improves upon contributes to tone unites. You know, i think thats something that we i think we do a good job of its complimenting each others tone and thats how a book like this is produced. Also how a book like quackery was was produced so we each got to write a lot of about subjects that we were drawn to in some way books or topics that interested us. Right, so speaking of some of those topics the first chapter that i ever wrote was on the plague and your first chapter was on typhus, texas. Do you want to explain what typhus is for people raise your hand if you know what typhus is. Oh my gosh, thats not bad. Thats not bad. We will be intermittently pulling you guys. So be on your toes this is being recorded on cspan. So if you dont get the answers, right you guys are going to be in trouble. Just kidding just kidding. So yeah, do you want to tell them a little bit about what typhuses sure so typhus well, i think you should talk a little bit about the science of typhus sure and then i can talk a little bit about the history. Sure sure. So typhus is oftentimes confused with typhoid as in typhoid mary, which theres a whole chapter on that too, but they are two separate things but typhus is this disease that is spread by the body louse. And this is where you guys start getting itchy. So not really a problem today but back when people would wear the same clothes for a year at a time or when march, you know, when armies were marching across continents wearing layers upon layers upon layers, you know, these body lice would find a place to live they would suck on your blood and they would spread disease that way and so typhus is one of those diseases it causes fever and rashes and itchy and its a pretty terrible thing. Its quite devastating as we have learned from history. Exactly, right, so if you think back to the princess bride, right, whats one of the famous pieces of advice that vinceni offers never get involved in a land war in asia, right and one of the reasons theres many reasons not to get involved in a land war in asia. One of the reasons is typhus is as was experienced by napoleon and his attempted invasion of russia this sort of grand scheme to take down the russian empire and the french army went into russia with winter coming on which was also not the best selection in terms of your time of year to launch a mass scale invasion. But on top of that so in this era kind of going back to what lydia was saying when you have a lot of people that are really living closely together, theyre sleeping right next to each other. Theyre wearing the same clothes every day day in and day out and they dont have much access to fresh water for cleaning themselves or for cleaning their clothing. Its a perfect environment for the body louse to thrive and body allows thrives. It really thrives it. Can i forget the exact science on it, but it can you can quickly triple its population like in a day or two right like if its in the right conditions, so the result is that if you have an army in close confined quarters with winter setting in on the march, its a its a perfect opportunity for a typhus outbreak and thats what happened amongst other things when when napoleon attempted to invade russia. There was a massive typhus outbreak amongst the french troops and huge numbers of them died and then winter said in properly and then even more people died and it was one of the worst military invasions of all time partially thanks to the small body louse, which was one of many times in history. Actually the body laos has sort of changed the course of human events. Yeah, i remember when nate was writing this book and i said oh you have to mention this is one of the things where the exchange between us is so much fun. Like i read all quiet on the western front in high school. We did a huge thing on world war one and high school. So read lots of poetry and i remember very distinctly in that book where they set up this thing where its like a pan over a flame and they would pick the lice off of themselves and throw it in the pan. It would go crack and explode and i said nate lets put that in the book so we did. And one of my favorite books of all time jane eyre by charlotte bronte, you know early on in the book the Lowell School that shes at they suffer through typhus and one of the things that they blame it on this big typhus outbreak at this this school for you know poor young girls is they blame it on miasma or basically the pestilent air thats this fogborn sort of dirty air from the school being in this very sort of wet boggy site so that ended up becoming part of our germ theory chapter, which is you know, how we realize that viruses and parasites and bacteria are actually the reasons for why we have a lot of the diseases in this book. Um, but going, you know going back to also our early chapters. So my first chapter was on the plague, which i thought was apt because i think the plague the word itself is pretty much synonymous with pandemic and writing that chapter was a real revelation for me because i was unaware i always thought of the plague as being middle ages. It didnt know about all these huge pandemics that it happened throughout time, but what was really fascinating for me was finding out that the first time the bubonic plague actually landed on the shores of this country was 1899 1900 and it it happened, you know, basically theres a rat and theyre fleas and the fleas have the plague bacillus in them and when they sort of kill off that rat the fleas jumpship and they look for something else. Thats tasty to bite and oftentimes. Its a person and that person gets the plague. So i mean thats there are many ways for you to get the plague. Thats one of the most common ones. Thats how the bubonic plague is spread and thats how it entered San Francisco and chinatown and there was one man who was a chineseamerican man who lived in chinatown died from the plague and then immediately everybody was blaming this as a chinese disease so you can imagine for me writing this it was really strange to see some of the xenophobia from what was going on with covid happening at the turn of the last century. So many these similar things like keep california white. It was really unbelievable to read that and then also coming across these really weird tidbits like finding out when the most recent plague cases have been so i mean, i think you guys all imagine plague is kind of long gone. So when do you think the last plague case was in the United States . Give me one hand one brave soul. Yes. Yes last year 2021 was the last play case. Theyre usually somewhere around, you know, 10 to 15 cases of plague around the world. So bubonic plague is still around its endemic in some rodents. And so you will find little articles every once in a while if you google them like theres a play case in arizona. It likes to live in that sort of warm arid environment. So yeah, its still around. Its kind of horrifying to think of these diseases that were like, oh theyre gone. But theyre not theyre not theyre still around. Well that brings up the whole idea of the eradication of disease, which is enormously challenging right . So theres only one really theres only one disease in a way that weve officially eradicated. Does anyone want to guess what that is smallpox . Yes, so which is an enormous accomplishment for humankind because smallpox is a hugely devastating highly contagious disease with an extraordinarily high mortality rate when so that was a disease that has ancient origins somewhere in europe or asia. Its not exactly sure on where it at first sort of revealed itself, but it was strikulating amongst european populations by the time european colonizers first arrived on the american shores starting of course in the 16th century and then continuing on and along with the cornucopia really of other diseases that were introduced at that time period smallpox was by far the most devastating and quickly spread ahead of european colonization via native and Indigenous Trade Networks wiping out massive swaths of the population and no one really knows to this day. Even how many people died from smallpox throughout North Central and south america, but it could have been as high as even 90 plus percentage up percent of the local population, which is an extraordinary death count and to go from that to eradicating the disease or to almost eradicating the disease, which is another story in the book is an enormous accomplishment. We we also talk a little bit in the in the book about the last smallpox case which some folks might remember in Birmingham England in 1978. There was an outbreak before we go into that. Ill turn the mic back over to lady to talk a little bit about more about the eradication of disease in general. Yeah, so i mean i think smallpox is the perfect subject to talk a little bit about vaccines cant be here unless youre vaccinated. So thats kind of awesome love that. I dont know if you guys know that, you know the first vaccine that was ever developed happened because of smallpox. So theres a little bit of history for you. So smallpox. Is it kind of horrible yet interesting disease in that again. Its been around for a really really long time, but it wasnt until maybe the 1700s that two men in england had realized a very interesting observation, which was that women who were count like milkmaids that would milk the cows would often get a sort of cal version of smallpox and it was called calpox. It wasnt as devastating a small pox. They would get a couple of like lesions on their arms, but they for some reason seem to not be susceptible to getting smallpox. Hence the beautiful milkmaid complex. So these two men thought, you know, itd be interesting what happens if you take a little bit of that like, you know calpox fluid on a lesion and scratch it into a person whos never had either smallpox or cowpox what would happen and when they did that and exposed those those kids or those people to smallpox they were immune and so that was actually the first vaccination that happened which is where the word vaccine actually comes from vodka. The origins of the word is cal. So you guys all have some when you say vaccine now you guys can be smart and suggest, you know where that word comes from. Interestingly before that what they did was something called variolation, which is not vaccination. So vaccination by definition is you are giving something to the body. That is not the disease itself, but it resembles it enough to give you immunity so you can fight it off. So in the case of mrna vaccines youre making a little piece of protein that is part of the virus, but its not the whole virus right with very el. And this was something that was developed in the 1500s. You actually gave people a tiny bit of smallpox. So you would take like an old crusty lesion and sniff it up your nose. Or i know as curly grow up. Sorry. Glad im glad its not lunch time right or you would take like a lesion. That was like a fresh blister and just put a little scratch of it into somebody else. Apparently, this would be this had been practice on the continent africa and that was something that was done around the world very elation and it would give you a much lighter form of smallpox. Not nearly devastating with a lower mortality and it protected people for life. So that was done for quite a long time until the vaccine came came through with benjamin jetsey and in the 1700s, and there was a big fight about it because doctors were making a huge amount of money on variolation. And so when the vaccine happened they were like, oh these quacks dont listen to them. This is like a terrible idea. Its new and you know, they were like pelted and insulted and it was a terrible thing, but it turned out to be something that was the only disease that got eradicated because of those those humble origins. Almost eradicated, right . So a controversial topic in science in general is do you after youve officially eradicated a disease . Do you keep it around for the purposes of studying or or the possibility of having something to to use in the preparation for i suppose another variant on a vaccine in the future if the disease reared its ugly head again. So this is a controversial practice. Its up for a lot of debate but in the 1970s in england in a lab in birmingham that had smallpox files around for the purposes of Scientific Study in medical photographer. Unfortunately was exposed in some way thats still up for debate to this day, but was exposed to smallpox and caught it and that caused briefly an enormous world scare because this disease had just a couple years previously been officially declared eradicated which is a huge accomplishment again for human kind and because its so massively contagious. Theres this extraordinary fear that this little outbreak in england might quickly translate into another like kind of like this write a global pandemic. So luckily that was able they were able to contain that smallpox outbreaks and smallpox outbreak and janet parker who was the medical photographer that caught it was the only person that actually died from that though. There was a variety of other tragic events that occurred in the wake of her catching that disease which you can read about in the book, but its it just kind of demonstrates the fear and uncertainty that still exists around even eradicated diseases. Do you want to talk a little bit about why keep them around . You know, its its a big debate. So some people feel like they need to have it on hand in case they need it for research at this point in time. You know the genome of so many of these things are already down. And so we already know if we needed to reconstruct it for whatever reason or use that detailed information on the genome for research. We already have that information, so its still up for debate and unfortunately, you know, we keep finding like vials of frozen smallpox that somebody has forgotten about i think this past 12 months. Theres one maybe two articles about like and this and there was a freezer that they were unplugging and they found a file a smallpox in there and an old cdc laboratory. Oops, so that keeps happening. So even though theyre like only you know, i think its two countries that are like are sanctioned to actually own it like they keep getting found which is a little a little bit scary. But you know, i think that also brings me to just these sort of fun. I want to say fun facts about pandemics the book is you know, these really really great origin stories, but i think along the way nate and i were just discovering so many of these really odd, but also interesting facts about things that had happened in history, but also things, you know in regards to these infectious diseases, so i thought you know before we end we could just sort of talk about some of our favorite things in the book that we really enjoyed so i have a couple do you have something off the top of your head . Sure. I have one of my favorite things that i learned while striding this book was and this feels like a really appropriate setting to talk about this but the the biblical plagues that show up in exodus, right in the Old Testament. So those perhaps have a very scientific origin story. So if you can if you recollect your biblical history the story of exodus begins with the pharaoh declaring that he does not know yahweh and then god declares that they shall know my name egypt shall know my name and and its very Old Testament style that becomes this whole vengeful attack of 10 plagues that he unleashes on the people of egypt and then over the course of those plagues, you know, the people of egypt are devastated right but theres actually some Scientific Evidence and some historical evidence that perhaps these plagues actually did occur. Not necessarily caused by the wrath of of god, but by very real scientific causes which is pretty interesting. I was pretty fascinated by this. So the first plague in which the river nile turns to blood. Has now been attributed perhaps to a red algal bloom. So red algae spreading throughout the nile river and turning it into a reddish murky color, which has the other impact of deoxygenated deoxygenated. I get it the water and thus killing off fish and so in a bunch of fish die what theyre not doing is theyre not eating frogs. So what happens next is suddenly theres an overabundance and overpopulation of frogs who started hopping up out of the water and then invading your town right and then the frogs because their population is too large and theres not enough food for them start to die off in great numbers, too which then in turn causes a plague of flies and you kind of work your way along this sort of ecological disaster scenario that you see in exodus, which i think is a really testing another really interesting story. How about you . Yeah, because i hadnt heard it. That was really fascinating one of the things that completely the blew my mind a little bit was when i was writing that the plague chapter was learning about the origins of the story of the song ring around the rosie. So you guys all play that when you were a kid so fully and i when i cant remember how old i was but at some point in time as a child, somebody told me, you know, thats that ring around the rosies about the plague and that like, you know, the rings are actually like the red like these marks that you get when you get the the black plague and that you know, ashes ashes is like the burning of the corpses and we all fall down is like youre were all dying, basically and so i just sort of took it as fact that it was a cute but very macabre but child sing song about. The plague and so i looked into it and it turns out its not true at all. It was somewhere around world war one or world war. I think it was around World War Two where that that definite that that origin story started to show up but it hadnt historically ever existed before like the 1940s. So the story is very very old. They think that ring around the rosie rosie was a rose tree and it was like a french origin that the we all fall down might be actually like the curtsy just you know, some things might be kind of more pagan related. The sneezing was sort of like a bless you kind of a thing. So it has nothing to do with the plague, but i didnt know that until i did the research so was really fascinating. Totally and i think were probably about at the spot where were going to open up to questions. But before we do that we should touched briefly on yellow fever because we are here in a southern port city, which would have been hit heavily and frequently by yellow fever throughout the 19th century, which is when at least on an american shores yellow fever was a really big deal. So yellow fever was no joke. Do you want to talk about the symptoms of the disease a little bit . Like that, you know you get jaundice, which means you know liver problems people can be vomiting black stuff. They get a fever obviously and it has a pretty decent mortality rate. Huge swaths of of people will die during outbreaks. Theres the famous philadelphia outbreak. We didnt focus a whole lot on savannah when youre writing the book, but when we, you know, we decided that we would sort of look into it and lo and behold there. You guys are probably more aware of this than than we were you know, as of yesterday about that there have been several yellow fever outbreaks here. So raise your hand if you already knew that, yeah, i think everyone in the audience just pretend you always raise your hand. Were just talking to ourselves now. Yes exactly. But as a southern port city, right that was a major problem because in the summers, thats when things get hot and humid and when the mosquitoes come out and yell a fever is transmitted by mosquito bites and if you were a resident in 19th century savannah, that would be very much on your mind. Every time the weathers sorted to take a turn for the for the warmer part of the year and in fact in Colonial Park cemetery, so just a few blocks away from us. Theres quite a few victims of the first major outbreak of yellow fever in savannah in 1820. Theres a lot of people that died in that that are buried there and of course a lot of wealthy residents of savannah and other port cities in the south but also flee and head to inland head to mountain homes spots that were a little bit cooler away from these yellow fever outbreaks that were pretty much just a homeless. You could set your clock by an almost every single year would come back and and did so many times in savannah as well with the worst one happening in 18. E6 and you know, its funny because it touches we touch it on it on this book a little bit but also in quackery, which is you know at that time one of the major ways to treat yellow fever and this is a big debate was either to you know, drink wine and take some cold baths just actually doesnt sound that bad in the summer and savannah doesnt sound so bad or also the other alternative was bleeding copiously, you know, so you you know get blood a couple of pints which is, you know, not the one not the thing you really want to do when you have a fever but that was the status quo using leeches or other purgatives like mercury containing products, which generally make you have massive amounts of diarrhea and vomiting. That was also called heroic depletion therapy because they were heroically trying to save you but it was, you know, involving massive removing massive amounts of liquids from her body, which you needed when youre sick. So yeah Benjamin Rush philadelphia was having a big fight. This with hamilton over whether or not this is a good idea and it turns out at least in philadelphia. They actually were able to look at some of the records and find that people who underwent hero depletion heroic depletion therapy tended to die more than people who were just left alone. So, you know, thats that we have a whole chapter in here on you sort of quack remedies for a lot of these things and thats one of the old favorites mercury and calamel and bleeding a lot of bleeding and a lot of bleaches which we dont really recommend anymore. So we actually are getting close we have about 10 minutes left. We are happy to talk for 10 more minutes. But also if you have questions, were very happy to to entertain them. Here we go. We got some i think the way weve got it set up is is youd come up to the center part of the aisle here and ask your question there if anyone is up for it. I can also just keep pulling you. For example, one of the things that we were in a mention today when were talking about smallpox was the smallpox vaccine. We already talked about right, but its not really used very much because again, we eradicated smallpox, but i thought it would be kind of interesting show of hands if youve ever actually received the smallpox vaccine. Oh my gosh, thats a lot of you thats a lot of you i got this smallpox vaccine in 1979 when i went to korea with my mom and i still have the scar you guys all have the little round scar on your arms still. Yes. Yeah. I dont its its such a little mark of history and it ages you sorry to say im one i can say that because i have it but it ages you. So i thought that was kind of interesting. Another thing. I wanted to pull you guys kind of ask about the architecture questions, okay . So i took an a little bike tour with my husband yesterday of savannah and i learned so much about this town and i was really curious about why so many of these Historic Houses have the first the the main doors sort of like above grounds, you know, like you to go up the stairs and then theres your front door and he had said something about well, you know a lot of the people the servants were living on that ground floor and up higher you had the breezes and it was also status thing that youre living sort of like above the ground but he mentions something about yellow fever and if there was any possibility that some of that had to do with the concept that miasmas and sort of that dirty sort of pestilence born air was in the ground and so that you had that elevation to protect the people who lived in the homes up there and so he mentioned that and i was like that true and i googled it i couldnt find the answer but anybody know if the architecture has anything to do with avoidance of epidemics . Basically pressure air. Oh, its pressure air. Okay, and you know what . I bet it does because fresh air was associated with healthiness. We actually talk about that a little bit in the book as well because oftentimes in the 1700s in the 1800s the concept of clean air which makes a lot of sense, you know being in cramp quarters and that sort of thing maybe not so healthy, but that fresh air and clean air was considered a boon to the health. So people who suffered from tuberculosis, for example, were often sent out to the prairie for the prairie cure up in new york city. My husband and i did our residency at nyu and so at that story Bellevue Hospital in new york, if you look you see that they still have these big copper terraces these outside of the building where they would put the tuberculosis patients outside so that they would convales in the open air sometimes in the middle of winter. So my theory is going to be that its not just fresh air. Its also to avoid disease, but i dont actually have any but its a bad. Im gonna just just make that jump there. Why not . Oh, we have a question. Patient zero zero we all heard about patient zero with hiv. They kept trying to track back to who is the very first did you discover any patients zeros and how does that stand up as a concept there . Was it just a cute name for the book or a good question. Thats so funny. I think we danced around everything that patient zero so excellent question. We did talk a lot about patients there. So this book is sort of littered with stories of people who were the first or socalled first person to have a disease and i think that the story of the origins of hiv and aids is a really really important one first of all because we get the the actual term patients here came from the 1980s and came from, you know, trying to discover hiv. So what happened was when the outbreak happened a lot of gay men in the United States, were being stricken with this disease and it seemed to be compromising their immune system. They did what normal epidemiologists do which is that they were tracking the patients and they looked at their contacts and they found that a lot of these contacts were sexual in nature. And when one of the very very first articles that came out actually traced some of the original cases in the california, San Francisco Southern California area, and they found you know, interestingly a lot of them had a link to a Single Person who was not in california was outside of california and that person was gayatan duga who was a Canadian Airline worker and he flew all over the place and he had plenty of sexual partners. So when they wrote the paper they didnt use anybodys name, but they had this sort of diagram of all these Different Cases and they were all linked to this one person that they had had sexual relations with and that person was marked as an oh for patient. Oh not zero the letter o for outside california and what happened was people were passing this paper around and talking about it and then and then the book and the bland played band played on came out and people were kept talking about it as patients zero patient zero because they were mistaking the o for a zero that book kind of painted gayatan duga as this really malignant person who was spreading hiv wantingly all over the country when in fact, you know, he did a lot of very very kind things and that was pretty much forgotten from the book, but that is where the term patient zero comes from. It is from the aids and hiv epidemic that had started in the 1980s that everybody thinks started in the 1980s, but in truth can be traced back in our own country to the 70s and the 60s to many other people who were probably suffering from hiv earlier and if you actually do some of the genetic analysis to some of the very very earliest cases they believe that hiv came from a semian virus that spilled over a zoonotically from a chimpanzee probably to someone who was butchering the meat in generally in the area of congo, but not 100 sure around 1908. So we tend to think of hiv as a sort of 1980s disease. Thats when it all started, but it was really probably quite a bit earlier and even before that it was probably the dancing of two simeon viruses that happened even earlier that the chimp probably ate too and something happened and thats actually how the virus happened. So the story probably is really more like monkey zero. Its not its not a person and its not gay a ton to go. Just curious if you discuss the politics of the day throughout these chapters and how they influence and either of the two books. Yeah, we did. Im going to take that one because thats very covid related. So yeah, the chapter on covid is actually called the politicalization of pandemics. So it was a very uncomfortable chapter to write but i felt we felt like we talked a really a lot about it and we decided you know, we cant we cant avoid the elephant in the room. So we talked very much about the who and their relationship with china the United States and how that all unfolded. So we didnt dodge that and interestingly, you know, we have multiple examples in the book of how the politicalization of pandemics actually happens when we were talking about yellow fever. There was a huge fight between the two Major Political parties in philadelphia about where it came from did it come from philadelphia or did it come from foreigners and how to treat it. Do you need like, you know, are you wealthy and can you afford this like really nice wine and chin kona to to take care of it or can you go to any any, you know regular person and get bled and use purgatories which were easily available the common man kind of thing. So there was this is back in the 1700s. So yes probably went even even farther back so so yeah, we didnt we didnt avoid it it is there still here so welcome to savannah. Im a docent at the Davenport House and we address life here in savannah on the 1820s. So our store here in savannah at that point is there was yellow fever outbreak as you had already mentioned at that time. We were seeing that the enslaved people had immunity to it. Part of my spiel is that the couple that built that home . Had three children none of whom survived to age five then they built the home that you visited as the house museum today. With money comes the affluence that you live above. The streets and all of us who live with mosquitoes here in the grasses and the flowering shrubs and so on know that she can get above that and catch a breeze youre not as susceptible. And with affluence of living above it. You also can afford mosquito nets. So they were talking about the miasma. They didnt know that it came from mosquitoes. They really didnt know anything yet, but they did have some additional protection so id get everybody wound up and how wonderful this family is only to say that im sorry, but Isaiah Davenport died of yellow fever in 1827. He contracted it on hutchison island working out on isle of his contractor. Welcome to savannah. Yeah, welcome to savannah. That is very very interesting. Thank you for for letting us know. Im on a really enjoy this book so we may have to may have to do a second edition and just like put savannah in their wherever we can because its theres so many interesting things. Excellent, okay. Are just if you could talk about polio for a moment. I remember back in the 50s in grammar school. That the whole class lined up. We went down to the nurses office. And we got a sugar cube. Of the polio vaccine. Im sure the older people here probably had the same experience that i did. So if you just talk about that for a moment, i appreciate it. Thank you. Sure, polio is one of the chapters in the book and polio kind of going back to some of the themes that weve been talking about today was and has been a couple times on the verge of eradication and its whats interesting about that in particular of course is a lot of people that are alive today lived through a time when polio was was very much still a part of daily life where you saw people that had been afflicted by polio every day where it was a fear that you might have had yourself or your parents had and but yeah, unfortunately thats one of those diseases to you that keeps on circulating around and we cannot quite get ahead of it enough mostly because of geopolitical issues in the regions of the world. Where polio is still circulating. You want to talk about that a little bit, too . Yeah, sure. Im you know, theyre two different polio vaccines, you know, there is an injectable vaccine and then theres oral polio vaccine, which is what we call an attenuated virus. So its the actual polio virus, but it is weakened or changed in just a way that you get it and you can get become immune, but then you dont actually suffer from the disease but interestingly if it passes through enough people and gets into and gets passed from person to person the virus can change and become pathogenic again, and so weve actually seen this variant of the the facts and the vaccine show up in places and its become endemic in places like afghanistan again, where we know youre dealing with war and not having good healthcare for a lot of vulnerable people. So were not going to give it away, but nate wrote a fantastic chapter on polio and it talks a little bit about why it actually was we were having outbreaks when it seemed like, you know, the country was getting leaner and we had better sanitation and why were the polio outbreaks actually happening in the last century . When actually everything should have been getting better. So were not going to give it away because its a little bit of a story doesnt really interesting story. So thats in there. But thank you for bringing that up. And i think were going to finish up, right . Yeah. Thank you guys so much. And just real quick. I just want to one big. Thank you again to our sponsors for everybody whos attending the festival and supporting the festival. Were just so happy to be here and we very much appreciate you. Thanks so much. Good afternoon, everyone on hope
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