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"Our Exposure to the Swill Milk Trade." Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper 22 May 1858, 385. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-121642.
Source publication
This article addresses a number of evocative nineteenth-century pictorial representations of yellow fever epidemics, including illustrations from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly between the 1860s and the 1880s as well as photographs taken during and after America's so-called 'splendid little war' in Cuba in 1898. These pict...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... milk. Cows were fed on distillery waste, which stimulated milk production almost up until the poisoned cow's death. The cows developed sores and their tails rotted off. It was exactly those images of "diseased, stump-tailed, dying cows" (Mott 456) that Leslie's artists created that proved to be more effective than the sharp editorial comments (fig. 3). It took almost three years until the sale of milk from distillery-waste-fed cows was forbidden. About fifteen years later, Frank Leslie's again applied the by now successful sensationalist formula with regard to threat- ening health issues. The paper's yellow fever illustrations and reports informed its readers about the epidemic, ...
Context 2
... (the major location of yellow fever epidemics): and the readers reacted to it. 10 In 1878 a double-page spread series of dramatic yellow fever illustrations in Frank Leslie's represented graphic depictions of suffering ("Yellow Fever Visita- tion" 56-57). In some of these chaotic scenes, readers beheld sick and dying people 10 See, for example, fig. 33 in Orvell's American Photography, a cover illustration from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper showing the horrible treatment of prisoners at Anderson- ville. The original photographs were translated as engravings. Orvell comments that "the artist inevitably removed the stark texture of reality from the images, leaving them less ...
Context 3
... as Columbia rushes to the rescue was published in Frank Leslie's. The yellow fever demon, with "Yellow Jack" written across his chest, fol- lows the visual language of allegorical representations of disease. Given the skull- like features of the beast, one is also reminded of the British print of "The torrid zone, or, blessings of Jamaica" (fig. 3). The full lips allude to those known from blackface minstrelsy and as such point toward the constructed blackness of the disease (black vomit; presumed black immunity; African/Caribbean source of the disease). Furthermore, the animalistic legs and talons turn Yellow Jack into a hy- brid non-human figure symbolizing evil. The demon ...
