Wikipedia:Today's featured article/November 18, 2012



Luke P. Blackburn (1816–1887) was a physician, philanthropist and politician from Kentucky. Early in his career, he gained national fame for effecting the first successful quarantine against yellow fever in the Mississippi River valley and was regarded as an expert on the disease. During the Civil War, he aided Confederate blockade runners in Canada and traveled to Bermuda to combat a yellow fever outbreak threatening Confederate blockade-running operations. A Confederate double agent accused him of collecting linens and garments used by the yellow fever patients and smuggling them into the North to start a yellow fever epidemic to hamper the Union war effort. (It was not yet known that yellow fever is spread by mosquitos.) He was  acquitted, and historians disagree regarding the evidence against him. In 1868, Blackburn returned to the U.S. and rehabilitated his public image by rendering aid in yellow fever outbreaks in Tennessee, Florida, and Kentucky, propelling him to the governorship of Kentucky in 1879. His signature accomplishments were in penal reform, and he is known as "the father of prison reform in Kentucky". (Full article...)

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