"Focusing on the yellow fever ecology of nineteenth-century New Orleans, this dissertation explores how this disease and the perception of unhealthiness inform imaginations of space and place. It examines, in turn, how this imagination influenced immigration, settlement, capital investment, sectionalism, identity formation, racial theory, and a number of other elements of antebellum southern social and political life. It begins by defining three zones of infection in the Americas-endemic, epidemic and ecdemic-based upon their suitability for the virus and its mosquito vector rather the long-running standard of delineating them based on the propensity for devastating outbreaks. This is an important distinction because, as will become clear later, the constant presence of the disease lends itself to herd immunity. This is crucial to demonstrating that New Orleans, as the primary entrepôt between the U.S. and the Caribbean, occupied a unique position among American port cities due to its disease ecology. By yellow fever ecology, I am referring to the sum of biological factors and human actions that made severe outbreaks of the disease more likely. Applying elements of cognitive mapping and environmental psychology, I argue that a confluence of period environmental and medical theory influenced how a myriad of individuals on both sides of the Atlantic came to imagine the relationship between yellow fever, New Orleans, bodies, race, and the Old Southwest. This project broadens our conception of disease ecology to include the thoughts, preconceptions, and biases of human actors. Further, I contend that these perceptions significantly decreased capital investment and immigration, the latter clearly demonstrated by settlement patterns in the region prior to the American Civil War. In addition, this project considers the response of local lay and medical officials to this crisis. In doing so, I reconceive the development of regional theories of medical distinctiveness as an outgrowth of late-enlightenment, transnational developments in natural science. Rather than a declension narrative in nineteenth-century Louisiana public health, I show that the resistance of local officials to northern public health policy was an important step in the early trajectory of what would become tropical medicine. Broadly conceived, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of how perceptions of health and wellness, as well as their inverse, both shape and reveal deeper social and economic conflicts. By using disease as an analytical framework, my work places the U.S. South within global discourses of post-enlightenment science and medical theory, as well as the development of racialized colonial/tropical medicine. When considered alongside more traditional topics in southern studies, the result is a far more complex narrative that demonstrates how the perceptions and reality of this disease environment affected the imagination and development of this city." --from the Abstract.

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Excerpt from History of the Epidemic Yellow Fever, at New Orleans, La., In 1853 But, with deep regret, I must say, in vain have these important facts been laid before a heedless community - facts involving the progress and prosperity of our city, and our pecuniary interests in an eminent degree but above all, involving our own lives and the safety of those scarcely less dear to us than life itself. In vain have the most probable chief causes of this disease been pointed out, as well as the good results that have followed the removal of such causes in various parts of the world. In vain has this community been informed by many of its philanthropic physicians and through successive reports of its Grand Juries, that those causes are to be found in this city from one year's end to another, and perhaps to a greater extent than in any other spot upon the globe. In vain have they been referred to their Hospitals, their Orphan flsylums, and their crowded cemeteries for the indubitable evidences of sick ness and death. With stoic indifference they have viewed these appalling scenes and turned a deaf ear to the advice and entreaties' of their monitors. Engrossed with the exciting occupations and enjoyments of the winter, they cast not a thought upon the evils that may come upon them in summer. When shown by the reports from their cemeteries that the annual mortality of this city, in pro portion to population, more than doubles that of any city either in Europe or America, they either disregard the solemn truth or flatly deny it - saying there must be some mistake, and calling those who bring to light such unwelcome facts, enemies to the city and tra ducers of its fair fame. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Through the innovative perspective of environment and culture, Urmi Engineer Willoughby examines yellow fever in New Orleans from 1796 to 1905. Linking local epidemics to the city’s place in the Atlantic world, Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans analyzes how incidences of and responses to the disease grew out of an environment shaped by sugar production, slavery, and urban development. Willoughby argues that transnational processes—including patterns of migration, industrialization, and imperialism—contributed to ecological changes that enabled yellow fever–carrying Aedes aëgypti mosquitoes to thrive and transmit the disease in New Orleans, challenging presumptions that yellow fever was primarily transported to the Americas on slave ships. She then traces the origin and spread of medical and popular beliefs about yellow fever immunity, from the early nineteenth-century contention that natives of New Orleans were protected, to the gradual emphasis on race as a determinant of immunity, reflecting social tensions over the abolition of slavery around the world. As the nineteenth century unfolded, ideas of biological differences between the races calcified, even as public health infrastructure expanded, and race continued to play a central role in the diagnosis and prevention of the disease. State and federal governments began to create boards and organizations responsible for preventing new outbreaks and providing care during epidemics, though medical authorities ignored evidence of black victims of yellow fever. Willoughby argues that American imperialist ambitions also contributed to yellow fever eradication and the growth of the field of tropical medicine: U.S. commercial interests in the tropical zones that grew crops like sugar cane, bananas, and coffee engendered cooperation between medical professionals and American military forces in Latin America, which in turn enabled public health campaigns to research and eliminate yellow fever in New Orleans. A signal contribution to the field of disease ecology, Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans delineates events that shaped the Crescent City’s epidemiological history, shedding light on the spread and eradication of yellow fever in the Atlantic World.