In the United States, the person who led the fight to reform treatment of the mentally ill and to develop asylums was Dorothea Dix. Often neglected in history, Dix was a nurse.

It was not until summer break that the next episode began. This time, it arrived in the form of a respiratory tic, a compulsive sniffing.

Women, it was believed, simply didn’t have the mind for science or medicine – in spite of the fact that Marie Curie had just become the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice.

One would prefer a physical trouble which would produce outspoken feeblemindedness with its limited range of harmful effects to this encephalitis which may produce an intellectual, tormented and cruel monster out of a gentle girl or boy

One would prefer a physical trouble which would produce outspoken feeblemindedness with its limited range of harmful effects to this encephalitis which may produce an intellectual, tormented and cruel monster out of a gentle girl or boy.

Nature had found the perfect place to hide the yellow fever virus. It seeded itself and grew in the blood, blooming yellow and running red.

In the middle of the cemetery is a grassy plane, strangely vacant. There are no granite tombs or crumbling concrete, just a sun-washed treeless patch of green known as "No Man's Land." Here 1,500 unidentified bodies are buried. At one time, their skin burned with yellow fever; now they lie in a cool, dark place where long ago their arms and legs, hands and feet, were intertwined for eternity.