Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South by John H. Ellis

Abstract

928 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE explained in terms of masterminding construction work on dams and drainage. Plague in India, epidemics and syphilis in eastern and southern Africa, the depopulation of Hawaii as a model for depopulation in colonial America, and AIDS in the United Kingdom are among the diverse topics addressed in this volume. The papers were presented to a conference in 1989, and, with the benefit of expert criticism, most have been carefully crafted and documented and are a delight to read. Audrey B. Davis Dr. Davis is curator of medical sciences at the National Museum of American History. Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South. By John H. Ellis. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. Pp. xii + 233; illus­ trations, tables, notes, index. $28.00. With the publication in 1970 of a two-part article in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine on “Business Men and Public Health in the Urban South,” John Ellis established his place in the forefront of the newer history of public health that has emerged in the last two decades. This new history of public health includes the history, geography, and social construction of diseases, and the relationship of disease and empire in the Third World as major foci of interest. The role of business has generally not been emphasized in these newer studies, making Ellis’s work of even greater importance. In this volume he examines the response to yellow fever in Atlanta, Memphis, and New Orleans in the yearsjust after a major outbreak of the disease in the Mississippi Valley in 1878. In a sense, he takes off from his early articles and expands his discussion of public health in the New South. The three cities that serve as the main focus had different experiences with the epidemic and were of different size and population makeup, so it is not surprising that their responses to the outbreaks of yellow fever differed somewhat. Ellis also focuses on racial differences in health and the role of civic associations that helped to promote sanitary reform. An important concomitant of the threat and actuality of yellow fever was national legislation to form the National Board of Health. Its vitality and longevity were not very great, in part because of local interests, especially on the part of the health officers in New Orleans. The board’s life was a mere four years; in 1883 no further appropriation came from Congress. Although the National Board of Health proved to be ephem­ eral, the powerful force of disease in shaping history continued to play a role in the South as it did in the rest of the nation. Also in the wake of the newer history of public health has come much good work on the health conditions of the southern part of the United States. Generally, in the northern press of the later 19th TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 929 century, and in the hands of historians more recently, the South has been reviled as a bastion of home rule that led to persistence of unsanitary conditions. As this work and other recent books and essays about health and disease in the South have now shown, that area of the country, despite economic stringencies that at times were severe, made some advances in public health of communities both large and small. Though the success of the public health movement in the South was limited, it was not more so than in other sections of the country. The three case studies, and chapters on the National Board of Health and health in the old and the New South that Ellis provides here, will go far toward filling in the picture of the history of the health of the entire country at the end of the 19th century. Gert H. Brieger Dr. Brieger is chairman of the Department of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at Johns Hopkins University and coeditor of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Medicine in America: A Short History. By James H. Cassedy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Pp. xi+187; bibliography, index. $36.00 (cloth); $11.95 (paper). The American experience of health and disease has...