I’m getting over a stomach bug. I’ll spare you those details.
But when it came to upchuck, Stubbins Ffirth was a doctor who spared not a lick of detail.
Today’s Moment of Science… The yellow fever experiments.
Surviving the late 1700s sounds to have been, by all historical accounts, a bad time. Hygiene was abysmal, only about half the population was literate, and the beginnings of modern germ theory was a good six decades away. If it couldn’t be treated with quinine, leeches, or enemas, better luck next century.
In 1793 yellow fever tore through Philadelphia. It’s estimated that 5,000 people, 10% of the city’s population at the time, died during the outbreak.
After a 3-6 day incubation period, most cases feel like a particularly shitty flu. Symptoms include a headache, fever, fatigue, nausea, and vomiting. If you get lucky, that’s over and done within a week.
But 15% of cases progress to a much more ‘bleeding from every face hole’ stage of disease. Symptoms of severe yellow fever include jaundice from liver damage, kidney failure, intestinal tract bleeding (subsequently, black vomit), abdominal pain, and delirium.
By the time the early 1800s rolled around, when Stubbins Ffirth was studying medicine, we hadn’t sorted out much about the disease. Determined to help prevent the misery of the next inevitable outbreak, Ffirth got to work. His observations led him to doubt that it was contagious, and instead theorize it spread more during the summer months, controlled by the “weather vicissitudes.”
He also thought that if he could prove it wasn’t contagious, people wouldn’t have to suffer their final moments with this awful disease alone.
Ffirth was willing to put his ass– and every other orifice– on the line to prove it wasn’t contagious.
Y’all. Um.
This is hard to write, so if the thought of, uh, simply absurd amounts of work with vomit, bodily fluids, and animals is not what you want to read about? Let’s just say he worked extensively to prove it couldn’t be transmitted via any bodily fluid or any hole, support me on patreon, etc.
So I found the motherfucker’s thesis, and I had to read the first 53 pages until I got to a subheader titled “Experiments On The Black Vomit” (I did warn you, really, you should turn back now).
He fed vomitous bread to a dog. The dog didn’t get yellow fever and preferred it to plain bread. This was the least horrifying animal experiment.
He rubbed fresh black vomit into his own open wounds. He put drops of black vomit into his eyes, noting “it felt a little uneasy for about a minute.” He cooked black vomit on the stove top and inhaled the fumes. He made black vomit extract pills and ate that shit up. He drank half an ounce of black vomit, but let’s not get too crazy, he diluted it with an ounce and a half of water, so (he did admit that this nearly made him hurl). He also injected himself here, there, and everywhere with bits of every other bodily fluid he could extract from the yellow fever patients.
Ffirth didn’t get yellow fever, and was convinced he’d proven it wasn’t contagious.
It would be nearly another eighty years before Cuban epidemiologist Carlos Finlay proposed that yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes. The virus that causes it was first isolated in 1927. For up to five days after symptom onset, patients are viremic enough for a mosquito to grab a nip of infected blood and raise a small ruckus with it.
But by the time a patient gets to the ‘black vomit’ stage? It’s bloody vomit that’s remarkably free of yellow fever. The courageous medical trainee had done all that utterly vile experimentation on vomit during the non-contagious stage of the disease.
Dr. Stubbins Ffirth died on July 4th, 1820, rumor being that he’d moved on to competitive cholera gargling in his later years.
This has been your Moment of Science, sorry for all of this. So sorry. But I read the entire thesis so you wouldn’t have to.
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