New Orleans needs her Marie Laveaus right now.
One of the wetter, hotter, buggier places in North America, New Orleans has been a perfect petri dish for diseases since it was first hand-drawn onto a map. Our early gutters almost never worked, and when they did were full of human waste. Water purification was an art form that took us centuries to perfect. (Spoiler Alert: We still haven’t mastered it.) Our aggressive mosquito population could, and did, lay thousands of eggs pretty much anywhere, from cisterns to horse troughs to puddles to spoons left in a wet sink too long. As a result, small outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and other “fevers” frequently plagued colonists in the 1700s.
These small outbreaks, fueled by the growth of the city and our traffic as an international port, eventually snowballed into a half dozen epidemics between 1837 and 1853. The latter was “the big one,” a Yellow Fever nightmare so virulent it killed one out of every ten citizens. Those who survived often claimed to have had a secret weapon—“fever nurses” like our voodoo queen, Marie Laveau, and her many sisters in healing work.
For the record, being a “nurse” of any kind has always been hard and often thankless work, but it was particularly thankless in the years before 1900. “Nursing” didn’t become a profession a person could study until 1861, when Elizabeth Blackwell began offering training for the women who assisted military doctors on battlefields. This was expanded only slightly by 1873, when New York City starting hosting nursing classes for those who were NOT helping in war efforts. And it was 1886 before the Philadelphia Hospital School of Nursing graduated its first class, to the outright derision of some good-ole-boy doctors watching from the Deep South.
1853’s yellow fever epidemic was therefore an especially miiiiserable time to be a nurse of any kind.
Frontline medical doctors responding to “the Saffron Scourge” were paid around $60 a week for their work, which included therapies as problematic as bloodletting and as outright stupid as feeding patients mercury or other poisons. Those who traveled from distant locales to assist were welcomed into the city’s finest hotels and befriended by our rich, given seats of honor at their upper crust dinner parties. Food and transportation was provided for them. They cleaned no bed pans, emptied no buckets of bloody vomit, and spent no time ministering to the emotional needs of the critically ill.
Nurses, by comparison, were paid only $4 a day, less if they were women of color. Those shipped in from out-of-state were denied welcome at nice hotels, forced to bunk in boarding houses or on the floors of acquaintances. They did the essential work of keeping thousands of infected individuals clean, hydrated, nourished, which did more to combat the infection than, say, blood-letting. They comforted the dying and cheered on those capable of recovering. The ones like Marie also gathered herbs and roots to brew medicinal teas that were, for the most part, actually medicinal. (More on that below.)
But the nurses received no places of honor at the dinner tables of the upper crust.
They were shunned instead.
“The social elite placed even local white nurses among society’s dregs,” notes historian Randall Hall in his essay ‘Southern Conservativism at Work.’ Unless, of course, those nurses agreed to do the work for free AND not have sex, in which case they were cool.
“Volunteer [nurses] from the city’s Catholic and Episcopal orders were given much praise and credit because their maternal, unpaid care and their religious example reinforced orthodox southern sentiment,” notes Hall.
But Marie Laveau was not about to work for free or give up sex to earn the validation of assholes who saw her, her daughters, and her friends as subhuman. Instead, she focused on helping as many members of the poor and enslaved community as she could, and made New Orleans’ elite come begging for her help.
Which they did, since their fancy new doctor friends couldn’t do much except jam poison up their anuses.
Eventually Marie Laveau was called by The Howards, a group of civic-minded white men who used their wealth to provide health care to the less fortunate, to work with fever patients. “A committee of gentlemen, appointed at a mass meeting held at Globe Hall, waited on Marie and requested her on behalf of the people to minister to the fever stricken. She went out and fought the pestilence where it was thickest and many alive today owe their salvation to her devotion,” Laveau’s daughter recalled.
She was not the only one. The Howard Association reportedly organized around 3000 women to support communities afflicted by the disease across the south. Laveau, and the female healers like her, used combinations of massage, proper hydration, steaming, good nutrition, and “ptisans”—various strengths of herbal teas--to support the immune and nervous systems of their horrifically weak and ill patients. Journals indicate that with these nurses came real medicine: elderberry bark, vervain, ginseng, rhubarb, snakeroot, acacia, sage, and hemp are just a fraction of the documented plants Laveau and her sisters utilized to bring down fevers, ease vomiting, and clear lungs of fluid.
All of these plants have since proven in clinical studies to be more effective—and significantly less dangerous—than the majority of treatments prescribed by medical doctors of the time.
Fever nurses also changed the bedding of the suffers, properly sanitized rooms, helped enforce quarantine boundaries, taught the undereducated how to maintain their health in the future, and instructed community members on how to prevent illness spread through cleaner living. Multiple newspapers and diary entries from the time document the efficacy of the nurses’ work, even if their own medical peers and society’s “elite” failed to. Days after her death, The Times-Pic wrote of Marie:
“She was very successful as a nurse, wonderful stories being told of her exploits at the sickbed. In yellow fever and cholera epidemics she was always called upon to nurse the sick, and always responded promptly. Her skills and knowledge earned her the friendship and approbation, of those sufficiently cultivated, but the ignorant attributed her success to unnatural means and held her in constant dread.”
Without the significant effort and community education provided by Marie Laveau and fever nurses, there’s no telling how much higher 1853’s already catastrophic death toll could have been.
Here’s to all of New Orleans’ “Marie Laveaus” out there working their magick during COVID-19.
