Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

One of the worst infectious disease epidemics of the late-nineteenth century United States, the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 had far-reaching implications for public health. Congress authorized experts to investigate and enforce disease prevention in the South, gave one agency new powers of quarantine, and created a commission to study the disease, which would ultimately help clarify the theory of its transmission. But, as the author of this powerful new local study of yellow fever reminds us, this epidemic was part of a global pandemic, and global processes had long influenced yellow fever's epidemiology—and still did into the twentieth century. Willoughby's subject is yellow fever's history in New Orleans from 1796 to 1912, though she traces the disease over a much longer trajectory, from sixteenth-century accounts suggesting its presence in Africa to its “re-emergence” in Africa and South America in the 1980s and 1990s. Over the course of the nineteenth century in the “wet graveyard” of New Orleans, she finds rich terrain for exploring how trade shaped ecology and definitions of race with implications for the spread of disease. Globally, she notes, colonial settlement, migration, and cultivation, and the landscape and water alterations that those processes entailed and the economic changes that they engendered played roles in yellow fever's rise to pandemic status. Locally, in New Orleans, the advent of sugar plantations, the growth of the slave trade, and the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) made the disease endemic, giving the city the grim nicknames that took hold alongside more romantic monikers such as Crescent City or City of Dreams

Agency (philosophy · Archaeology · Biology · Colonialism · Commission · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 · Disease · Economic history · Epidemic disease · Ethnology · Geography · Infectious disease (medical specialty · Pandemic · Political science · Quarantine · Race (biology · Social science · Sociology · Yellow fever · Animal Disease Management and Epidemiology · Ecology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Medicine · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research · Zoonotic diseases and public health

• Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2019

  Francesco Luzzini•Isis•2019

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