"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)
Forbes, Amy Wiese (Author)
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Volume: 91
Issue: 3
Pages: 524-552
Publication date: 2017
Language: English
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
Thesis
Engineer, Urmi;
(2010)
Hurricane and the Human Frame: Yellow Fever, Race, and Public Health in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
Book
Robert P. Watson;
(2023)
America's First Plague: The Deadly 1793 Epidemic that Crippled a Young Nation
Book
Sean Morey Smith;
Christopher Willoughby;
(2021)
Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery
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
Thesis
Paul Michael Warden;
(2019)
Yellow Fever in the Imagination and Development of an American New Orleans, 1793-1860
Article
Mariola Espinosa;
(2014)
The Question of Racial Immunity to Yellow Fever in History and Historiography
Article
Kevin McQueeney;
(2018)
Flint Goodridge Hospital and Black Health Care in Twentieth-Century New Orleans
Article
Coelho, Philip R. P.;
McGuire, Robert A.;
(2006)
Racial Differences in Disease Susceptibilities: Intestinal Worm Infections in the Early Twentieth-Century American South
Article
Muneal, Marc;
(2013)
Anatomy of an Afterthought: Charles Kingsley, the “Accursed Slavery Question,” and the Quadroon's Function in Two Years Ago
Article
Johnson, Ryan;
(2010)
“An All-White Institution”: Defending Private Practice and the Formation of the West African Medical Staff
Book
Humphreys, Margaret;
(2001)
Malaria: Poverty, Race and Public Health in the United States
Book
Lang, Philippa;
(2013)
Medicine and Society in Ptolemaic Egypt
Book
Peard, Julyan G.;
(2000)
Race, Place, and Medicine: The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Medicine
Article
Suman Seth;
(2021)
‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine
Thesis
Keller, Kathryn Jean;
(2000)
Racing immunities: How yellow fever gendered a nation
Book
Kathryn Olivarius;
(2022)
Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom
Article
Christopher M. Blakley;
(2022)
Ship fever, confinement, and the racialization of disease
Thesis
Khan, Shalini H. N.;
(2011)
Infectious Entanglements: Literary and Medical Representations of Disease in the Post/Colonial Caribbean
Book
Trask, Benjamin H.;
(2005)
Fearful Ravages: Yellow Fever in New Orleans, 1796--1905
Be the first to comment!