Sixty-seven yellow summers thrived in New Orleans between the years 1796 and 1905. This was the period of time that yellow fever, also known as the Saffron Scourge, Yellow Jack, Black Vomit, and the strangely descriptive Bronze John on his Saffron Steed, plagued the city and haunted its citizens. At the time no one knew how the disease spread, and many fled the city for the Mississippi Gulf Coast or Grande Isle. Others who succumbed to the illness were burned or buried. Fifty thousand people reportedly died, and their bodies were stacked one upon another in the cemeteries. The stench of death permeated the streets. At one point, people were dying faster than graves could be dug, giving rise to the popular saying, “pretty soon people would be digging their own graves.” Even without the deaths caused by disease, however, the streets of New Orleans were frequently reported to be unsanitary and littered with trash, dead animals, rats, and cockroaches. Raw sewerage was dumped into the Mississippi River, which was the city’s source of drinking water. It’s not hard to imagine how a plethora of illnesses and diseases spread, given the utter lack of sanitary conditions.
Indeed, New Orleans saw more than her share of diseases. In addition to yellow fever, other diseases such as cholera, smallpox, bronchitis, Bright’s disease, typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis were present. The city’s close proximity to bayous, swamps, and lakes made it ripe for mosquito infestations. One of the confounding things about the Saffron Scourge, though, was that it did not kill everyone. It seemed that many of the locals developed a resistance and were largely unaffected by it—or at least, they did not die from it. Thus, the disease became known as the Stranger’s Disease. Treatments for the illness included wearing camphor around the neck, carrying garlic, doing full-body soaks in vinegar, chewing quinquinia, and burning tar at night to “purify the air.” Physicians’ treatments at the time tended to hasten death rather than prevent it. Their treatments consisted of bloodletting, leeching, purging, and mercury consumption, which had disastrous consequences. Sadly, mercury treatments caused the fatalities of multitudes of military men in 1812. There were so many deaths that the St. Anthony of Padua Chapel, known today as Our Lady of Guadalupe, was built in front of the St. Louis Cemeteries in 1826 specifically to handle funerals. The church soon earned another name: the Mortuary Chapel.
Marie Laveau is well known for her compassionate care for nursing the sick during these public health crises. Her healing methods would have likely consisted of the folk variety—energy-giving methods, as opposed to the energy-draining methods of the physicians. Herbal teas, blancmange, and nourishing soups, along with baths, massage, and prayer, were the mainstay of Afro-Creole nurses at the time. One remedy used the main herb for the Hoodoo formula Louisiana Van Van—vervain, or verbena. This herb was grown for medicinal purposes and folk magic uses in the courtyard of the New Orleans Pharmacy:
 A remedy for yellow fever has been discovered at Angostura, Venezuela. The remedy is the plant vervain or verbena, which grows abundantly in that region. The expressed juice of the leaves given in small doses three times a day, with an enema of the same every two hours, is stated to be a perfect cure for the yellow fever and black vomit, even in their most threatening stages. All the physicians of Angostura have adopted this treatment of the disease, and they state that hardly any deaths occur under its influence . . .  (“Remedy for Yellow Fever” 1853).
Marie Laveau’s skill as a healer in herbal medicine was renowned. When cholera wreaked havoc in New Orleans, she was credited with saving hundreds of lives. The cramps associated with cholera had to be broken within ten minutes or the afflicted would die, and her remedy reportedly did the trick. She is said to have “made a ‘charm’ of brimstone, tar, and feathers, and lighted it under the noses of those persons who were sick, and it would ‘immediately and perceptibly abate the cramp’” (Dillard Project 1942, 46). But she was not alone in this knowledge. Many Creole women had exceptional curative abilities. In fact, the success rate of these women was nothing short of magickal for those suffering from any number of the horrible illnesses prevalent at the time. White doctors and outsiders in general were both curious and envious of their knowledge and the power their skill afforded them:
Their herb-decoctions, tisanes, vegetable teas, vegetable sudorifics and aperients, vegetable nerve medicines and vegetable cures for skin diseases are simply wonderful. The skill of the Creole women in natural medicine is extraordinary and of the highest importance. I tried to induce one to give me a recipe. She refused. It was her secret, she said, which she would impart only to her children. Is it wonderful that many of these excellent nurses are suspected of being able to use their knowledge for deadly and secret purposes? (Buel 1883, 535)
The above quote illustrates both the desire to appropriate indigenous knowledge as well as the tendency to cast a shadow over the Creole nurses’ skill as healer. Characterizing their work as “deadly and secretive” reflects the dichotomous nature of the Catholic faith: good versus evil and God versus Satan. Those who were invested in demonizing Marie Laveau attributed her success to unnatural means, held her in constant dread, and highlighted the strange remedies practiced by conjure women. And although Voudou was tolerated by the Church on the surface, there was a clear goal to ultimately shut it down in its entirety:
The great and festering sore of voodooism afflicting the negroes calls for all our zeal, as Catholics, to help the bishops and clergy in the South, and the English society that has entered this field; by prayer, by material aid, by earnest and sustained efforts to preserve the purity of faith among colored Catholics (“St. Francis of Assisi” 1877, 11).
Protestants in the South espoused similar rhetoric when it came to Voudou. According to one Protestant Episcopal bishop from Kentucky, “Their religion is a superstition, their sacraments are fetishes, their worship a wild frenzy, and their morality a shame” (Oliver 1885, 87). Today, the Catholic and Protestant churches are slightly more flexible with regards to accepting traditional African and indigenous religions, whereas the Pentecostals are not. Pentecostals call for a complete rebuke of traditional religion and spirituality and demand the complete embrace of a colonial Christian God.

Some of the remedies used by Creole women in nursing common maladies such as colds, fever, flu, and headaches were informed by years of practicing folk medicine. Many of the formulas were learned by local Native Americans and others were adapted to the new environment by Africans. A common fallacy is that Africans were unfamiliar with the local flora and fauna and had to learn everything from scratch. This is not true. They brought much knowledge with them, as well as the seeds for certain plants. Creole remedies represent the best of a healing collaboration between Africans, Native Americans and local Cajun traiteurs (treaters). Many of the remedies relied on the healing properties of a single herbal ingredient while others were multibotanical compounds. In addition, Louisiana Creole folk healing exists on a continuum of herbal curatives to healing through prayer. Most of the time, remedies consisted of a combination of the two.

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APA 6th
Alvarado, D. (2019). Nursing the Saffron Scourge. Retrieved from https://www.marie-laveaux.com/saffron-scourge-1.html.
Chicago 16th
Alvarado, Denise. “Nursing the Saffron Scourge,” 2019. https://www.marie-laveaux.com/saffron-scourge-1.html.
MLA 8th
Alvarado, Denise. Nursing the Saffron Scourge. 2019, https://www.marie-laveaux.com/saffron-scourge-1.html.

The Magic of Marie Laveau

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