Mail Perforation Paddle used during a Yellow Fever Epidemic L EARN M ORE A BOUT IT Perforation Paddle This unusual looking paddle was used by the Board of Health in Montgomery, Alabama in 1899 to perforate mail in preparation for fumigation as a precaution against yellow fever, an infectious disease actually caused by a virus.
Yellow fever can kill within four to eight days of the onset of the disease.
It is characterized by severe high fever, head and backaches and jaundice, or yellowing of the skin which results from the destruction of liver cells, resulting in the accumulation of yellow bile pigments in the skin. Fears of epidemics that kill thousands in short spans of time has, over centuries, led people to try various ways to contain the spread of a disease. Since then American mail has been quarantined, disinfected, fumigated with formalin gas or sulphur fumes, treated with carbonic acid, sterilized and baked in assorted attempts to thwart epidemics. Uncertain or mistaken about the source of some diseases, citizens, doctors and health officials usually agreed that possible contagions should, at least, be quarantined and inspected. In the United States, mail has been treated in attempts to halt the spread of a number of deadly diseases, including yellow fever, smallpox, plague, typhus, cholera, diphtheria, measles, leprosy, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, influenza and even mumps.