Qualla: Yellow Fever in Buenos Aires

Yellow Fever in Buenos Aires: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Juan Manuel Blanes, Public domain. In a painting now hung in Montevideo, a young woman named Ana Bristani lies dead on the floor of a Buenos Aires tenement. Her infant son, only a few months old, crawls toward her body still searching for her breast. The father's corpse rests on the bed behind them. Through the open door step two doctors of the People's Commission - men who would themselves soon die of the same fever they came to fight. Juan Manuel Blanes painted that room from life during the epidemic of 1871, the worst catastrophe ever to strike the city, a season when a single mosquito remade Buenos Aires and killed roughly one in twelve of the people in it.

Image: Juan Manuel Blanes | Public domain

Yellow Fever in Buenos Aires: Three Cases in San Telmo

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. It began quietly. On 27 January 1871, three cases of yellow fever were diagnosed in San Telmo, a dense southern neighborhood packed with tenements. The fever had likely traveled south with Argentine soldiers returning from the Paraguayan War, by way of Corrientes, where some 2,00...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Yellow Fever in Buenos Aires: The Spring of the Dead

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. What followed overwhelmed every system the city had. By early March the dead numbered forty a day, then a hundred; the peak came on 10 April with 583 deaths in a single day, against a normal rate of around twenty. The city owned only forty funeral carriages. Coffins stacked in co...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Yellow Fever in Buenos Aires: The People Who Stayed

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The suffering fell hardest on those with the least. The city's Black residents, crowded into the poorest quarters of the south, died in devastating numbers and were buried in mass graves; the epidemic is counted among the events that hollowed out Buenos Aires' Black community. Im...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Yellow Fever in Buenos Aires: A City Split in Two

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antonio Pozzo (1829-1910), Public domain. By June the fever was gone, and it never returned. But it had redrawn the map. The wealthy who had fled the tenements of San Telmo and Montserrat did not come back; they built their new lives - and their grandest mansions - in the higher, healthier ground to the north, the area t...

Image: Antonio Pozzo (1829-1910) | Public domain