It started with a common mosquito, the Aedes aegypti.

“It liked clear water near homes. It didn’t like swamps,” said Dr. Ken Embry of Interventional Pain Specialists. “It’s not like the mosquito that carries malaria.”

This mosquito was very different, and it wreaked havoc in Bowling Green in 1878 by causing the viral disease, yellow fever. Symptoms can include high fever, vomiting, dehydration, liver and kidney failure and death. There is no cure or specific treatment.

“If you were lucky to survive, you were immune for life, but usually you died,” said Embry, who has done research on Dr. Joseph Nathaniel McCormack and yellow fever.

People didn’t know mosquitoes spread the virus. Some thought is was transmitted by contaminated clothes or secretions from infected people. Some cities even tried to adopt a strict quarantine to keep out the disease. Bowling Green was not one of them and began to see people from affected Southern cities flooding in. When the first case hit Bowling Green, no one believed McCormack.

“Around the train tracks was a roundhouse,” Embry said. “The land over there was more swampy.”

By the time frost came in October, there had been more than 40 cases in Bowling Green, all handled by McCormack and assistants, some of the Sisters from St. Joseph’s Convent.

McCormack became Kentucky’s first commissioner of health in 1878, was appointed a member of the State Board of Health by the Kentucky Legislature the following year and became secretary of the organization in 1883. For 28 years, he ran it out of his home in Bowling Green before moving it to Louisville when the State Health Board office was moved there. He held the secretary office until his death in 1922.

“It makes you realize how much infectious diseases were a part of life back then,” he said.