"A Little Seasoning Would Aid in the Digestion of Our Factums": Wit, Evidence, and the Evolving Form of Medical Debate in New Orleans, 1853–1868 (2017)
This history of the categorization of yellow fever explores the interchange between rhetoric and evidence in understanding the disease. Eighteenth-century models of medicine relied on rhetorical manipulation to convince readers of accuracy, unlike modern medicine, which claims objective evidence as the professional standard. But how did the physician as intellectual give way to the physician as scientist? This article analyzes the transition through a case study: J.-C. Faget, who famously discovered the definitive sign of yellow fever, and Charles Deléry disputed how doctors should attempt to understand the disease in New Orleans, a vital yet understudied medical center dominated by Francophone creole interests. It addresses the use of ideas about immunity to define racial, ethnic, and class differences; the rhetoric of health and medicine; and developing ontological theories of disease. It shows the struggle to employ intellectual realizations to understand this disease that cost the region dearly in lives and income.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Kathryn Olivarius;
(2019)
Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans
(/isis/citation/CBB394438457/)
Thesis
Engineer, Urmi;
(2010)
Hurricane and the Human Frame: Yellow Fever, Race, and Public Health in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
(/isis/citation/CBB001562769/)
Thesis
Paul Michael Warden;
(2019)
Yellow Fever in the Imagination and Development of an American New Orleans, 1793-1860
(/isis/citation/CBB006071963/)
Thesis
Kevin George McQueeney;
(2020)
The City that Care Forgot: Apartheid Health Care, Racial Health Disparity, and Black Health Activism in New Orleans, 1718-2018
(/isis/citation/CBB995254049/)
Article
Mariola Espinosa;
(2014)
The Question of Racial Immunity to Yellow Fever in History and Historiography
(/isis/citation/CBB232506989/)
Article
Coelho, Philip R. P.;
McGuire, Robert A.;
(2006)
Racial Differences in Disease Susceptibilities: Intestinal Worm Infections in the Early Twentieth-Century American South
(/isis/citation/CBB000770630/)
Book
Humphreys, Margaret;
(2001)
Malaria: Poverty, Race and Public Health in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB000101070/)
Book
Lang, Philippa;
(2013)
Medicine and Society in Ptolemaic Egypt
(/isis/citation/CBB001202365/)
Article
Muneal, Marc;
(2013)
Anatomy of an Afterthought: Charles Kingsley, the “Accursed Slavery Question,” and the Quadroon's Function in Two Years Ago
(/isis/citation/CBB001200838/)
Thesis
Khan, Shalini H. N.;
(2011)
Infectious Entanglements: Literary and Medical Representations of Disease in the Post/Colonial Caribbean
(/isis/citation/CBB001567303/)
Book
Peard, Julyan G.;
(2000)
Race, Place, and Medicine: The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB000111796/)
Article
Johnson, Ryan;
(2010)
“An All-White Institution”: Defending Private Practice and the Formation of the West African Medical Staff
(/isis/citation/CBB001230189/)
Article
Kevin McQueeney;
(2018)
Flint Goodridge Hospital and Black Health Care in Twentieth-Century New Orleans
(/isis/citation/CBB564223569/)
Article
Denis, Adrián López;
(2005)
Melancholia, Slavery, and Racial Pathology in Eighteenth-Century Cuba
(/isis/citation/CBB000651657/)
Thesis
Chelsea L. Berry;
(2019)
Poisoned Relations: Medicine, Sorcery, and Poison Trials in the Contested Atlantic, 1680-1850
(/isis/citation/CBB410055828/)
Book
Rana A. Hogarth;
(2017)
Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840
(/isis/citation/CBB687058150/)
Thesis
Apel, Thomas;
(2012)
Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Yellow Fever and Common-Sense Natural Philosophy in the Early American Republic, 1793--1805
(/isis/citation/CBB001561011/)
Book
Kathryn Olivarius;
(2022)
Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom
(/isis/citation/CBB181588231/)
Book
Wray, Matt;
(2006)
Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness
(/isis/citation/CBB001021028/)
Article
Schiebinger, Londa;
(2013)
Medical Experimentation and Race in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
(/isis/citation/CBB001213455/)
Be the first to comment!