Because people did not know that yellow fever was caused by the bite of an infected mosquito, they assumed incorrectly that people could catch the disease through touch. To help control the disease, letters were cleaned with vinegar before being sent. This did not work, because it was a false cause-and-effect relationship.
I believe that the genre that excerpt from section I fits in is would be real fiction or historical fiction. This means that it is a believable story that could have happened in real life but did not
