Orate pro nobis.
Late in the summer of AD 1878, yellow fever struck Memphis, Tennessee. The populace all tried to flee, leaving behind those unable to escape, mostly the poor and those already ill. Within 10 days of the first yellow fever death in Memphis, more than half the population fled the city in a panic. They left “by every possible conveyance — by hacks, carriages, buggies, wagons, furniture vans, and street drays,” wrote Keating. “By anything that could float on the river, and by the railroads. The stream of passengers seemed endless, and they seemed to be as mad as they were many.”
Left behind were still some 20,000 men, women, and children, but Memphis faded into a ghost town. Shops and offices were boarded up, houses locked and shuttered. An eerie silence smothered the city, broken only by the occasional booming of cannons (fired to break up the “poisons” in the air), and the steady clop-clop of doctors’ wagons or carts hauling caskets. At night, smoldering fires of burning bedding and clothing — the last belongings of fever victims — lit the yellow-armbanded Howard Association members, who scurried from house to house aiding the sick.
Victims dropped dead in the streets, and bodies were discovered each morning in the city’s parks. Entries in the sister’s journals describe an abandoned town with the bodies of the dead lying where the fell, children in homes with their dead parents…scenes of pure horror. Sister Constance wrote: “Yesterday I found two young girls, who had spent two days in a two-room cottage with the unburied bodies of their parents, their uncle in the utmost suffering and delirium, and no one near them. It was twenty-four hours before I could get those fearful corpses buried, and then I had to send for a police officer … before any undertaker would enter that room.”
The Episcopal Cathedral of St. Mary’s, and its adjacent Church Home, were in the poor part of town, the center of the most infected area, and became shelters for victims. The cathedral staff and nuns of the Sisters of St. Mary, who operated the Church Home, faced enormous burdens in caring for the sick and dying. The Cathedral of St. Mary, then a plain wooden church, stood as a beacon of hope amid the gloom, and two priests there — Fr. Charles Parsons and Fr. Louis Schuyler — also played heroic roles during the epidemic. They joined dozens of other church members throughout the city who, along with the Howard Association, died at their posts during the ordeal.
Some of the sisters were on retreat in Peekskill, New York, when the epidemic broke out, and instead of keeping a safe distance they rushed back to Memphis. When the news of the deaths of the local priests got out, over 30 priests from all over the nation volunteered to come to Memphis. Father W.T. Dickinson Dalzell came from Shreveport, La., since he had already survived the disease and was immune—he was also a trained physician. With his arrival, daily Eucharist resumed and the Sacrament was carried to the dying Sisters.
Sister Constance was the first of the nuns to be stricken. As she died on September 9, her last words were “Alleluia, Hosanna,” simple words of praise remembered and inscribed on the cathedral"s high altar.
Sister Constance’s companions in service to the sick and dying, Sisters Thecla and Ruth, soon followed her to the grave, as did Sister Frances, headmistress of the Church Home. She had nursed some thirty children at one time and had watched twenty-two die. Fr. Louis Schuyler, a chaplain to the Sisters of St. Mary, also died of the fever, as did Fr. Charles Parsons. Fr. Parsons was blessed with a vision of heaven as he lay dying and his last words were, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”
When winter came and the mosquitoes died off, the epidemic ended, 200 towns and cities across the South lay wasted. Yellow fever had infected more than 100,000 people, causing some 20,000 deaths — more than 5,000 in Memphis alone.
5,150 people died in the Memphis Yellow Fever epidemic of 1878, and many of them were formerly healthy people who had stayed to help the sick until succumbing themselves. The city buried 1,500 of its dead in a mass grave on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi -- and pretty much forgot about them until January 3, 1971, when the grave site became Martyrs Park.
On this day we honor those who gladly risked their own lives in the name of Jesus in order to save the lives of many and to assuage the final suffering of others.
Embolden us to work for the healing of all those in need, seeking to love others as you have loved us, Lord Christ.
We give you thanks and praise, O God of compassion, for the heroic witness of Constance and her companions, who, in a time of plague and pestilence, were steadfast in their care for the sick and dying, and loved not their own lives, even unto death; Insipre in us a like love and commitment to those in need, following the example of our Savior Jesus Christ; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
