Nineteenth-Century America Research Articles

Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine by Jim Downs

Reviewed by: Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine by Jim Downs Sean Morey Smith (bio) Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. By Jim Downs. ( Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Cloth, $29.95.) In 1854, John Snow mapped cases of cholera in the Soho neighborhood of London. His map revealed that the cases were clustered around a single water pump. This led Snow to believe that the pump's water was the source [End Page 109] of cholera, so he removed its handle, preventing Soho residents from using it. Cases of cholera quickly disappeared, Snow's theory was proved, and modern epidemiology was born. Or so the canonical origin story goes. In Maladies of Empire, Jim Downs rebuts this hagiographic narrative by arguing that earlier investigations of health and disease in places outside the British metropole led to the development of epidemiology. In particular, Downs stresses the role that a variety of forgotten informers—including soldiers, sailors, enslaved people, and Hajj pilgrims—played in revealing patterns of disease. He further argues that the data collection from these forgotten sources was enabled by colonialism, wars, and slavery. Moreover, U.S. and Confederate medical practices during the Civil War were informed by British imperial practices. Maladies of Empire is most interested in recovering the lost informants that supplied the data that allowed physicians to develop epidemiology. The book's chapters deftly narrate how various people—from British soldiers imprisoned in the Black Hole of Calcutta, to Africans enslaved in the Middle Passage, to washerwomen on Malta and Boa Vista, Cape Verde—provided testimony of their conditions and the spread of disease to physicians and surgeons who reported it in publications. As those observations were iteratively remade into theory, the identities of the informers were stripped from the medical record. Downs's revelations follow other recent efforts to name forgotten medical subjects, such as Deirdre Cooper Owens's Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017), which details the forgotten subjects of James Marion Sims's gynecological surgery experiments. These efforts remind us that medical knowledge has always been made from the experience of individuals, most of them stigmatized by their illness, race, or social standing. Furthermore, as Downs points out, the forced movement of enslaved people, soldiers, and other colonial subjects precipitated many of the disease events that would spur physicians to become medical investigators and eventually develop modern epidemiology. Maladies of Empire positions medical practices of the U.S. Civil War as nationally unique versions of emerging practices adopted from Britain and Europe. The first five chapters focus on early cases of mostly British medical investigations that prefigured epidemiology, while the sixth and seventh shift to the U.S. Civil War. The final chapter then explores the 1865–66 cholera outbreak using both British and U.S. sources. Methodologically, this approach challenges historians of health and medicine in the nineteenth-century United States to break out of a national framework and contextualize their subject in terms of global European colonialism. For instance, while Charles E. Rosenberg, in The Cholera Years: The United [End Page 110] States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (1962), explains the largely successful U.S. response to this cholera outbreak as the result of changing political, religious, and social norms, Downs traces parallel efforts by British and U.S. Army officials to track the outbreak geographically and construct narratives of its spread; this renders the response as more bureaucratic and based on colonial and military experience than in Rosenberg's telling. While Americans followed British examples in their epidemiological investigations, they also transformed the practice. Downs argues that "US doctors, unlike their British counterparts, formally classified racial difference as a key hallmark in examining the spread of infectious disease" (114). Downs allows that British physicians and surgeons collected racialized data related to diseases, but they "did not use these categories in an explanatory way" (122–23). He indicts the U.S. Sanitary Commission for injecting racial difference into a discourse that had focused on external, environmental causes of infectious disease. This conclusion is especially striking given the historiography of race and disease...

Index to Volume 77

Index| March 01 2023 Index to Volume 77 Nineteenth-Century Literature (2023) 77 (4): 270–271. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.77.4.270 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Index to Volume 77. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 March 2023; 77 (4): 270–271. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.77.4.270 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search Pagination of the Volume is as follows: June, pp. 1–91; September-December, pp. 93–193; March, pp. 195–271. ARTICLES Jenkin-Smith, Daniel. A Tale of Two Bureaucracies: The Formal Development of Mid-Nineteenth-Century French and British Office Novels 93 Kinzinger, Stephanie. Embodied Cognition in Edgar Allan Poe: Eureka’s Cosmology, Dupin’s Intuition 124 McKeever, Gerard Lee. Extreme Attachment: Allan Cunningham’s “South Countree” 223 Mendonck, Wanne. “I Sort Rather with Those who Do Not Read”: Edward Carpenter, the Religion of Socialism, and the Prophetic Agitation of Literary Form 56 Redmond, Matthew. Living Too Long: Republican Time in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels 29 Rexroth, Grace. Byron and the Problem with Memory Arts: Writing Don Juan for an Age of “Uncertain Paper” 1 Smith, Thomas Ruys. “The Enchantments of Waverley”: Walter Scott and Children’s Reading in Nineteenth-Century America 145 Stokes, Claudia. Irving’s Literary Historiography 195 BOOK REVIEWS Allen, Emily. See Schaffer, Talia Allison, Mark. See Lesjak, Carolyn Bigelow,... You do not currently have access to this content.

All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland

Reviewed by: All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland William D. Jones All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849. By Jeff Strickland. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 276. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-108-71691-8.) Jeff Strickland has written an excellent account of a little-known slave rebellion that took place in the public workhouse of Charleston, South Carolina, in July 1849. Some twenty enslaved people fought and defeated the guards of the workhouse and engineered the escape of thirty-seven people imprisoned there. The inciting event occurred in the morning, when an enslaved man named Nicholas and some allies defended an unnamed enslaved woman from a slave trader, who had arrived at the workhouse to retrieve her for medical treatment and eventual sale. The jailers and city authorities were slow to respond, providing Nicholas and others with time to organize and arm themselves with tools. Though white militiamen captured most of the escapees within hours of the uprising, and the Charleston Courts of Magistrates and Freeholders tried and executed Nicholas and other accused leaders two days later, the rebellion at the workhouse influenced local politics. Strickland argues that the incident encouraged jail and policing reforms, raised nativist fears, and led enslavers to further question the position of the church in a slave society. He also contends that the city annexed the Charleston Neck because of the rebellion, since the new workhouse in the Neck became the only place [End Page 144] for Charleston enslavers to imprison enslaved people while the old one was under renovation. Strickland weaves together two strands of historical analysis. On the one hand, he contextualizes the 1849 workhouse rebellion, understanding it as a product of the workhouse conditions, urban enslavement, and the revolutionary thought that circulated in the Atlantic world. To understand the rebellion, he contends, the reader must also understand the highly policed nature of urban enslavement and the place of the workhouse in Charleston’s system of racial slavery. Charleston enslavers sent enslaved people to the workhouse to be whipped. Authorities imprisoned fugitive enslaved people there. The work-house was also on the site of the city’s slave market, so slave traders often confined people in it before and after sale. Other elements important to nineteenth-century southern history, including revolutionary rhetoric, slave rebellions, and the domestic slave trade, are likewise important to the story of this uprising. On the other hand, readers must understand who Nicholas was, and Strickland provides the best biography of the rebellion’s leader possible. Born enslaved, Nicholas at a young age fell into the hands of William Kelly, a plasterer, who trained Nicholas in his trade and often hired him out to others. When Nicholas was a young adult in the mid-1840s, Kelly left Charleston for New Orleans and took the people he enslaved to Louisiana with him. There, Kelly allowed Nicholas latitude in his labor arrangements, so much so that when Kelly returned to South Carolina, he left Nicholas behind to continue his lucrative work. After Kelly discovered that Nicholas was withholding the wages he earned in New Orleans, the enslaver transported him back to Charleston against his will. As Kelly tried to sell Nicholas there, the enslaved man resisted a search of his body and assaulted an employee of a slave trader, which landed Nicholas in the workhouse. Strickland’s accessible prose, narrative style, and comprehensive contextualization mix well with his fascinating and enlightening analyses of the workhouse and urban enslavement. All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 will be excellent to teach with. As contemporary public rhetoric emphasizes prison and policing reform, the intertwined histories of the enslavement and the incarceration of Black people that Strickland depicts is as revelatory as it is harrowing. For as much as All for Liberty has to say about the nineteenth-century United States, the story of the 1849 workhouse rebellion may have even more to say about the country today. William D. Jones Rice University Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Carol Faulkner. Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America.

Carol Faulkner. <i>Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America</i>.

Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Laura F. Edwards

<i>Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States</i>. By Laura F. Edwards

Robert J. Walker: The History and Archaeology of a U.S. Coast Survey Steamship

Robert J. Walker: The History and Archaeology of a U.S. Coast Survey Steamship

America’s First Interstate: The National Road, 1806–1853

America’s First Interstate: The National Road, 1806–1853

Sectarian Competition and the Market Provision of Human Capital

We study the role of denominational competition in the expansion of higher education in the nineteenth-century United States. We document that nearly all colleges established in this period were affiliated with a Christian denomination. Empirical analysis reveals a robust positive relationship between the denominational fragmentation of the county and the number of colleges established. We take several steps to rule out competing explanations and also highlight the causal channel by utilizing two historical case studies. We conclude by estimating a model of school choice and showing that students exhibited strong preferences to attend same-denominational colleges in terms of willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-travel. Therefore, we argue that religious diversity softened the extent of tuition competition between institutions and precipitated an “excess” entry of schools.

Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes, and: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi

Reviewed by: Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes, and: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi Madeline Zehnder Stokes, Claudia. 2021. Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $79.95 hc. 288 pp. Putzi, Jennifer. 2021. Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $69.95 hc. 320 pp. In a 2016 profile of the poet Eileen Myles, journalist Emily Witt coined the "Theory of the Bad Copy"—a distillation of Myles's belief that copying can be a vehicle for artistic and social change. According to Myles, who has suggested that Black Sparrow Press published them "as a bad copy of Charles Bukowski," people often break with the past by presenting as imitations of established figures (Witt 2016).1 Copying may ease difference, but it also allows new artists to slip through the door and shake things up. The Theory of the Bad Copy suggests that as much as contemporary Western society professes to value originality, it more readily cleaves to the familiar. Latent in the concept of a "bad" copy is the critique that failures of imagination cloud audience ability to recognize what is new or original. At the same time, there's something subversive about a copy characterized by its badness. In a culture that outwardly praises innovation while denigrating imitation, the bad [End Page 146] copy disrupts, slyly reframing the act of copying as creative work. Myles themself has described copying as an essential part of their poetic labor: "[copying] is a form of loving the world. … It is a form of chanting and I do it for religious reasons. I mean it's my default position" (Myles 2020). Practices of imitation also offer social and creative resources for the nineteenth-century Americans whom Claudia Stokes and Jennifer Putzi discuss in their respective monographs. Yet while Myles embraces copying as a mode of introspection and individual renewal, these earlier American authors copy and imitate primarily to forge networks and connections—with the past, with the literary establishment, with each other. Challenging the assumption that originality is a timeless artistic value, Stokes and Putzi explicate unoriginality's appeal for particular nineteenth-century American audiences by pairing close readings of texts with attention to material conditions of textual production, circulation, and use. The nexus of the textual and the material has been a generative site for thinking about the role of copying in the nineteenth-century United States. In recent decades, scholarship including Meredith L. McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003), Lindsay DiCuirci's Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (2018), and the Viral Texts Mapping Project (est. 2012) has positioned reprinting as an important heuristic for understanding early American literary culture. Research on nineteenth-century African American literature, including the essays in Early African American Print Culture (2012), has been crucial to recovering the social and political functions of copying, including how practices such as quotation index nineteenth-century Black American authors' orientation toward the collective. While both Stokes and Putzi engage this scholarship to examine how copying organizes material and social practices, their respective studies help connect the study of material texts with questions and methods drawn from aesthetics and poetics. Together, Old Style and Fair Copy invite scholars to take unoriginal texts seriously as literature—and to ask why the unoriginal has become cause for literary dismissal in the first place. In Old Style, Claudia Stokes charts the rise and fall of unoriginality as a "legitimate aesthetic mode" in the nineteenth-century United States (2021, 2). Revisiting a familiar story of the early national period as an era of print expansion, Stokes shows that even as some authors and publishers deployed novelty to compete for attention [End Page 147] in a crowded market, others advocated for treating the borrowed, familiar, and traditional as markers of literary skill and taste. For many early nineteenth-century Americans, Stokes argues, originality was suspect. Being perceived as literary was less about producing iconoclastic newness than showcasing knowledge of literary...

Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Justine S. Murison (review)

Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Justine S. Murison (review)

Wealth and Child Mortality in the Nineteenth-Century United States: Evidence from Three Panels of American Couples, 1850-1880.

With only a few exceptions, the historical study of individual-level correlates of child mortality in the United States has been limited to the period surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, when children ever born and children surviving data collected by the 1900 and 1910 censuses allow indirect estimation of child mortality. The recent release of linked census data, such as the IPUMS MLP datasets, allows a different type of indirect estimation over a longer period. By following couples across subsequent decennial censuses, it is possible to infer child mortality by measuring whether couples' own children in the first census were still present in the second census. We focus our analysis on children aged 1-3 in the first of two linked censuses, who were less likely to be undercounted by the census than infants, and unlikely to be living apart from their parents in the second census. We estimate child mortality over the intervening decade and use OLS regression to correlate that mortality to the residence location and socioeconomic characteristics of their parents' households. We limit our analysis to three panel datasets for married couples linked between the 1850-60, 1860-70, and 1870-80 censuses, when real estate and personal estate wealth data were collected. Our results indicate a significant negative relationship between wealth and child mortality across all regions of the United States and over the entire period examined.

Justine S. Murison, Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Justine S. Murison, Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel

Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel

Thomas Constantinesco, Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Thomas Constantinesco, Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Thomas Constantinesco, Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Thomas Constantinesco, Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States

“This Slavery Business Is a Horrible Thing”: The Economy of American Slavery in the Lives of the Enslaved

This article examines the business of American slavery from the perspective of enslaved people. It draws from narratives of enslaved fugitivity and interviews with the formerly enslaved to interrogate how they understood the business imperatives of slavery in the antebellum American South. It argues that enslaved peoples’ economic knowledge was cultivated through the violence inherent in the business of slavery, from their ideas about banking to their understanding of entrepreneurialism. Building on the current literature on capitalism and slavery, this article shows that slavery's brutality shaped enslaved peoples’ knowledge of commerce in nineteenth-century America.

The Reed Smoot Hearings: The Investigation of a Mormon Senator and the Transformation of an American Religion

The Reed Smoot Hearings: The Investigation of a Mormon Senator and the Transformation of an American Religion

Are Carcasses Political? German Veterinarians and the Modernization of Rendering Technology, 1864-1940.

The regulations dealing with animal death have undergirded the autarkic aspirations of governments as diverse as revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, and the German Democratic Republic. Three recent works on "fascist," "communist," and "capitalist" pigs reveal parallels between the industrialized slaughter of animals in Germany's twentieth-century authoritarian regimes and the capitalist slaughter system in nineteenth-century America's "red meat republic." In their focus on political ideology, however, these works overlook the politics of professionalization. A late nineteenth-century relationship between state, economy, and national welfare in Germany allowed veterinarians to create a unique "slaughter culture" based on the technological, hygienic disposal of animal carcasses. This article traces the development of that professional culture through one veterinarian, Robert von Ostertag (1864-1940). He and his well-placed protégés weaponized the idea of carcasses as untapped reservoirs of raw materials to impact legislation and veterinary education, making German veterinarians the arbiters of animal remains.

Mormon Studies after Viper on the Hearth

Mormon Studies after <i>Viper on the Hearth</i>

Fear and Loathing in Zarahemla: The Viper on the Hearth and the Book of Mormon as Denominational Attack

Fear and Loathing in Zarahemla: <i>The Viper on the Hearth</i> and the Book of Mormon as Denominational Attack