Thesis ID: CBB001562033

Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever, Public Health, and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878 through the Early Republic (2003)

unapi

Espinosa, Mariola (Author)


University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Pérez, Louis A., Jr.


Publication Date: 2003
Edition Details: Advisor: Perez, Louis A. Jr
Physical Details: 207 pp.
Language: English

Yellow fever, one of the most feared diseases of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, played an important role in shaping the relationship between Cuba and the United States. In the decades after 1878, when yellow fever spread from Havana to New Orleans and throughout the Mississippi Valley, unsanitary conditions in Cuba were a persistent concern of U.S. officials. The U.S. intervention in the Cuban war with Spain was motivated in significant part by the threat posed by yellow fever to the U.S. South. After the war, the U.S. occupation government conducted a massive sanitation campaign directed at a single overriding aim, the eradication of yellow fever, although the disease afflicted few Cubans. During the early years of the Republic, to protect its own southern ports, the United States pressured the Cuban government to keep up expensive sanitary efforts to control yellow fever instead of devoting funds to matters that Cubans deemed to be of greater importance to their wellbeing. After the second U.S. occupation of the island, Cubans realized that keeping the island free of yellow fever was critical to their independence but refused to accept that the U.S. domination that made these efforts so paramount was legitimate. This dissertation makes important contributions to three historiographic currents: the history of medicine, disease, and public health; the history of U.S.-Latin American relations; and post-colonial studies. I reconstruct the massive effort expended by the United States to eradicate yellow fever in Cuba, much of which has been lost to historians of public health due to the destruction of all records of the Department of Sanitation of the U.S. occupation government of Cuba. This work also improves our understanding of interactions between Cuba and the United States by revealing the centrality of issues of public health to their relationship. Finally, using the tools of post-colonial studies, I go beyond the overt manifestations of power in public health policy to demonstrate both the more insidious ways in which the United States sought to establish the legitimacy of U.S. domination of the island and the counterdiscourse that Cubans employed to repudiate these efforts.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 64 (2004): 4171. UMI order no. 3112002.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001562033/

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Authors & Contributors
Kathryn Olivarius
Espinosa, Mariola
Sukumar P. Desai
Willoughby, Urmi Engineer
James K. Mattie
Valera Candel, Manuel
Concepts
Public health
Epidemics
Yellow fever
Epidemiology
Prevention and control of disease
Disease and diseases
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
20th century, early
20th century, late
Places
United States
Cuba
New Orleans (Louisiana, U.S.)
Canada
Mexico
Southern states (U.S.)
Institutions
American Public Health Association
United States. Public Health Service
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