Book contents
- When Disease Came to This Country
- Global Health Histories
- When Disease Came to This Country
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Place Names
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 When Scarlet Fever Came to This Country
- 3 Colonial Motifs and Medicine
- 4 The Gold Rush and After
- 5 Infrastructures of Extraction, Sanitation, and Care
- 6 Race, Gender, and Control
- 7 Experiences of Influenza
- 8 Colonial Ecologies
- 9 A Smouldering Fire
- 10 Epilogue and Conclusions
- Appendix: Cause of Death Database
- Select Bibliography
- Index
4 - The Gold Rush and After
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2023
Book contents
- When Disease Came to This Country
- Global Health Histories
- When Disease Came to This Country
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Place Names
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 When Scarlet Fever Came to This Country
- 3 Colonial Motifs and Medicine
- 4 The Gold Rush and After
- 5 Infrastructures of Extraction, Sanitation, and Care
- 6 Race, Gender, and Control
- 7 Experiences of Influenza
- 8 Colonial Ecologies
- 9 A Smouldering Fire
- 10 Epilogue and Conclusions
- Appendix: Cause of Death Database
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Klondike gold rush, sparked in August 1896, brought tens of thousands of people from around the globe into the Yukon. Whalers had reached the Mackenzie Delta from the Pacific in the same decade. The demographic wave crested in 1900, the same year as a combined influenza and measles epidemic spread through Alaska into the Yukon, known as the Great Sickness. Oral histories and archival evidence show that it was not the absence of immunity but rather the synergistic effects of multiple pathogens that produced this devastating epidemic and its consequences.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- When Disease Came to This CountryEpidemics and Colonialism in Northern North America, pp. 90 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023