52 TEQUESTA


a patient received chloral hydrate (today known as Noctec). If the
patient was threatened with circulatory collapse, he or she received
an enema of turpentine and whiskey. R. D. Murray, the yellow fever
specialist, customarily started treatment with sixty grains of quinine
because he felt that yellow fever was commonly associated with
malaria and a "little" quinine would not hurt.47
 Laymen, who sometimes treated patients, did not have such an
elaborate therapy. Dom described the treatment he and others ad-
ministered to Oscar Nicholson:


 There was a fellow with us... a big strapping man. Suddenly he
 had a terrible chill. We immediatelyrushed him to his room, got
 a bucket of boiling water in which we placed his feet, put him to
 bed with several blankets over him, a mustard plaster on his
 stomach and cracked ice around his throat and at the top of his
 head. In a few minutes he was delirious. It took six of us to hold
 him in bed. He would yell... you could hear him in Cuba. The
 six of us held him in bed for five hours until he finally dozed off
 from weakness. The next morning he was convalescent. He was
 fed mostly on liquids and especially a tea made from roasted
 watermelon seeds which we thought in those days was a cure
 for yellow fever.48

 By late November to early December, the epidemic began winding
down with fewer new cases appearing. At this time, the editor of the
Metropolis commented, "The infection has now spread to the colored
section [today's Overtown] where the greater portion of the new
cases are coming from."49 Blacks were generally thought to be rela-
tively resistant to yellow fever.
 In anticipation of the lifting of the quarantine, scheduled for
about December 15, the Metropolis published a Proclamation by
Mayor John B. Reilly exhorting all citizens to clean up their premises.
All bedding and bedroom furnishings must be sterilized at the state
disinfecting plant on board the steamer Santa Lucia, which "had
been brought up to the stone pier for that purpose."50 The fumigation
plant exposed the bedding and clothing to superheated steam and
formaldehyde gas. Captain Ridley Curtis Pinder recalled that his suit
came apart from this and was ruined. All single-story dwellings must
be fumigated and "several cheap ones" burned.51