Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms. But it was also the nation’s “necropolis,” with yellow fever routinely killing about 8 percent of its population. With little epidemiological understanding of mosquito-borne viruses—and meager public health infrastructure—a person’s only protection against the scourge was to “get acclimated”: fall sick with, and survive, yellow fever. About half of all people died in the acclimating process. Repeated epidemics generated a hierarchy of immunocapital whereby “acclimated citizens” (survivors) leveraged their immunity for social, economic, and political power and “unacclimated strangers” (poor recent immigrants) languished in social and professional purgatory. For whites, acclimation was the quintessential demonstration of calculated risk-taking: that people had paid their biological dues, were worthy of investment, and could now justifiably pursue economic advancement in slave racial capitalism. For black slaves, who were embodied capital, immunity enhanced the value and safety of that capital for their white owners, strengthening the set of racialized assumptions about the black body bolstering racial slavery. By fusing health with capitalism, this article presents a new model—beyond the toxic fusion of white supremacy with the flows of global capitalism—for how power operated in nineteenth-century Atlantic society.
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Book
Kathryn Olivarius;
(2022)
Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom
(/isis/citation/CBB181588231/)
Thesis
Engineer, Urmi;
(2010)
Hurricane and the Human Frame: Yellow Fever, Race, and Public Health in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
(/isis/citation/CBB001562769/)
Book
Urmi Engineer Willoughby;
(2017)
Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
(/isis/citation/CBB065443274/)
Article
Kim, S.;
(2014)
Control Discourses and Power Relations of Yellow Fever: Philadelphia in 1793
(/isis/citation/CBB001422429/)
Thesis
Paul Michael Warden;
(2019)
Yellow Fever in the Imagination and Development of an American New Orleans, 1793-1860
(/isis/citation/CBB006071963/)
Article
McKiven, Henry M., Jr.;
(2007)
The Political Construction of a Natural Disaster: The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853
(/isis/citation/CBB000850695/)
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
Kenny, Stephen C.;
(2010)
“A Dictate of Both Interest and Mercy”? Slave Hospitals in the Antebellum South
(/isis/citation/CBB000932690/)
Book
Humphreys, Margaret;
(2008)
Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War
(/isis/citation/CBB000774696/)
Article
Alcalá Ferráez, Carlos;
(2012)
De miasmas a mosquitos: el pensamiento médico sobre la fiebre amarilla en Yucatán, 1890--1920
(/isis/citation/CBB001420572/)
Thesis
Espinosa, Mariola;
(2003)
Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever, Public Health, and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878 through the Early Republic
(/isis/citation/CBB001562033/)
Article
Amy Forbes;
(2017)
"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
(/isis/citation/CBB157239641/)
Book
Wendy Gonaver;
(2019)
The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880
(/isis/citation/CBB313122849/)
Article
Rebelo, Fernanda;
(2013)
Entre o Carlo R. e o Orleannais: a saúde pública e a profilaxia marítima no relato de dois casos de navios de imigrantes no porto do Rio de Janeiro, 1893--1907
(/isis/citation/CBB001420664/)
Article
Huffard, R. Scott, Jr.;
(2013)
Infected Rails: Yellow Fever and Southern Railroads
(/isis/citation/CBB001200324/)
Article
Farias, Rosilene Gomes;
(2012)
Pai Manoel, o curandeiro africano, e a medicina no Pernambuco imperial
(/isis/citation/CBB001420628/)
Book
Dickerson, James L.;
(2006)
Yellow Fever: A Deadly Disease Poised to Kill Again
(/isis/citation/CBB000800195/)
Book
Espinosa, Mariola;
(2009)
Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878--1930
(/isis/citation/CBB001020061/)
Book
de Barros, Juanita;
Palmer, Steven Paul;
Wright, David;
(2009)
Health and Medicine in the Circum-Caribbean, 1800--1968
(/isis/citation/CBB001230954/)
Article
Henrique, Márcio Couto;
(2012)
Escravos no purgatório: o leprosário do Tucunduba (Pará, século XIX)
(/isis/citation/CBB001420625/)
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