E40: From Rats to Revelation: Uncovering Virginia’s Forgotten Plague

A leaking steamship. A silent mosquito. And a summer that rewrote the map of fear along the Elizabeth River. We sit down with author and veteran journalist Lon Wagner to uncover the 1855 yellow fever outbreak that ravaged Portsmouth and Norfolk—and somehow faded from local memory. What begins with a “rat lady” explaining vector control becomes a gripping true story of a captain’s denials, a health system built on miasma theory, and a minister’s meticulous letters that tracked the spread long before germ theory took hold.Lon takes us aboard the Benjamin Franklin, a ship detouring from St. Thomas with sickness in its wake, and into the crowded Irish tenements of Barry’s Row where proximity and poverty turned risk into catastrophe. We explore the misguided remedies—tar barrels, lime-dusted streets, towering wooden walls—and the human calculus of who fled, who stayed, and who served as the city’s nerves frayed. Along the way, we draw clear lines to our present: Aedes aegypti still thrives; dengue, Zika, and West Nile still surface; and the tension between public health and commerce is as old as the docks themselves.This is a story about vectors and victims, but also about memory and readiness. Lon’s book, The Fever, restores names, places, and decisions to a crisis that once commanded national headlines. If you care about how cities actually work in a crisis—movement, communication, trust, and the physics of spread—you’ll find hard-won lessons here, told with empathy and detail. Press play, then tell a friend, and if the conversation hits home, subscribe, leave a review, and share your biggest takeaway so more people can find this story before the next one arrives. Support the show