Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds

Philadelphia experienced a series of devastating yellow fever outbreaks in the 1790s. Outbreaks were far from unknown; British North American newspapers had reported them as early as the 1730s, documenting the ravages of yellow fever first in the West Indies and then in Boston, New York City, and elsewhere along the Atlantic coast. In the last decade of the eighteenth century Philadelphia was the political and cultural capital of the new Republic and also the center of medical education and inquiry. The greatest scientific minds were focused on discovering the cause of these epidemics. As Thomas A. Apel demonstrates with copious historical detail and persuasive analysis, scientific opinion was divided into two opposing camps. Contagionists held that yellow fever was transmitted, perhaps via airborne particles, but certainly brought to North American ports by ships from the West Indies. Localists held that the disease was bred in places such as marshes and filth-ridden docksides and poor neighborhoods, which emitted a miasma—a cloud of harmful vapors produced by decay and fermentation. Both camps offered rational explanations for their positions and denounced their opponents for misunderstanding the evidence, for adherence to false theories, and even for willful deception to benefit commercial interests. Ultimately, the localists won, if only because their arguments seemed intuitively accurate—that is, they appealed to common sense

Deception · Newspaper · Outbreak · Political science · Politics · Yellow fever · History · History of Medicine and Tropical Health · Law · Medicine · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research

• That Noisome and Contagious Receptacle”

  Matthew Wynn Sivils•ANQ A Quarterly Journal of Short…•2022

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