SMUGGLING TIMELINE

Mosquitoes are now known to be responsible for the spread of yellow fever, but in the mid to late 1800s an American physician believed otherwise — Dr. Luke Pryor Blackburn was convinced the disease was spread via infected bed sheets.

Blackburn, who would later become the governor of Kentucky, was a registered physician active in the containment and treatment of yellow fever in the United States. But his desire to destroy the federal government during the American Civil War led him to do something grotesque.

In 1864, Blackburn went to Bermuda to help yellow fever victims pro bono and secretly collected his patients’ blood-, feces- and vomit-stained blankets, dressings and clothing with the intent to create “an infallible plan directed against the masses of Northern people solely to create death.” He packed the dressings in trunks and had them sent to Halifax so they could later be smuggled across the U.S. border. After sending the trunks, he moved to Canada.

Blackburn believed that opening the trunks would “cause widespread infection” and he planned on delivering them to targeted locations and people, including President Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C. However, his plot was revealed by a trunk smuggler he hadn’t paid and Blackburn faced murder and conspiracy charges following the Civil War.

He stood trial in Toronto for breaking Canada’s neutrality act and remained there after his acquittal. He headed south to his homeland again on the heels of another yellow fever outbreak and was greeted there with open arms, despite his intent to sicken his fellow Americans years earlier.

In 1879, Blackburn became the governor of Kentucky and continued practising medicine until his death in 1887.

-Jessica Bell

(Photo: www.wtv-zone.com)