THE DARK SIDE OF DR. LUKE BLACKBURN

Dr. Luke Pryor Blackburn was a Kentucky physician renowned for his compassionate and caring treatment of yellow fever victims during a Bermuda epidemic in 1864 as well as during earlier outbreaks within the United States. Several of his nurses and fellow physicians called him a saint.

No one questioned why Blackburn, during the Bermuda outbreak, would carefully gather up the bed linens and clothes of the yellow fever victims. If they had, they possibly would have realized that he was packing them up in trunks and shipping them to cities in the northern United States, where he expected that the contents of the trunks would be distributed and would cause extensive yellow fever epidemics in the population centers of the Union. He also prepared a valise containing contaminated fine linen shirts which he attempted to have delivered to Abraham Lincoln.

His scheme was discovered around the time of Lincoln’s assassination, and Blackburn fled to Canada, where he was charged with, but acquitted of, violating Canada’s Neutrality Act.

Although he realized that more serious charges could await him in the USA, he nonetheless returned to Kentucky in 1868. He so endeared himself by again saving the sick that he ran as a Democrat for the governorship in 1879 and won. He used his office to make numerous prison reforms, which did not sit well with his political party. 

The 1864 yellow fever terrorist plot turned out to be a bust. Blackburn did not realize (nor did anyone else until 1900) that the disease was spread by mosquitoes and could not be transmitted via contact with contaminated bedding or clothing.